Atlantic City, welcoming the National NAACP Convention, looks at its own Black origins

ATLANTIC CITY — Kaleem Shabazz was in high school in 1964, when the Democratic National Convention blew onto the Boardwalk.

As part of Direct Action Youth (DAY), Shabazz found himself on the Boardwalk demonstrating in support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was challenging the Mississippi Democratic Party’s delegation before the credentials committee, during which Fannie Lou Hamer would famously say, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Out on the Boardwalk, Shabazz recalls standing on a box and speaking when he was stopped by a Black police officer. “He said, ‘Get down from that box before I call your father. You get down here and go home.’

“I went down and went in the crowd,” Shabazz said. Of the police officer, he said, “He didn’t want me to be exposed and possibly arrested. He was looking at my future. He knew my parents.”

Now 74, and an Atlantic City councilmember and president of the local NAACP chapter, Shabazz kept up a life of civil rights and political activism, still staying close to home. And this week, Shabazz is living out his dream: welcoming the 113th National Convention of the NAACP, a group dedicated to the civil rights of Black Americans and to building Black power in American political and economic life.

“My parents both came from the same little town in North Carolina called Pinehurst. They came to Atlantic City to escape the entrenched racism in the South.”

It’s a heady moment for Atlantic City, a vacation town built 150 years ago on the labor of Black people, many recently emancipated slaves recruited from the South, and is now a town with a Black mayor, Marty Small Sr., and a Black superintendent of schools, La’Quetta Small.

But the city’s Black story also includes a history of redlining, a hotel industry that historically employed Black people to create the fantasy of an upper-crust Southern hospitality for white tourists, and a once thriving Black Northside neighborhood that had 13 Black doctors and 37 Black-owned liquor licenses, and where now there are none of either.

It is a city of glaring economic, health, housing, and employment disparities that presents a stark picture of the issues facing Black America.

“Every problem that is a national problem we have in Atlantic City,” Shabazz said.

The theme of the convention is #ThisisPower. It opens July 14 and runs through July 20 and is expected to draw 7,000 people from across the country, including appearances by Vice President Kamala Harris, attorney Ben Crump, and South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn.

There will be musical performances, and some 90 events focusing on racial and environmental justice, voting rights, building generational wealth, Black health, fund-raising, and the future of communities “in crisis post-George Floyd.”

On Wednesday, July 20, from noon to 5 p.m., there will be a jazz and history celebration at Chicken Bone Beach at Missouri Avenue, the once-segregated beach in Atlantic City that became a famous gathering spot for Black celebrities and politicians, including Martin Luther King Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., and Joe Louis, and for Black visitors as well as locals.

Shabazz was born in Atlantic City to parents who left the South to find employment and a better life, and his story is not unlike many of Atlantic City’s Black community, which make up about a third of the city’s 38,000 residents.

“My parents both came from the same little town in North Carolina called Pinehurst,” Shabazz recalled. “They came to Atlantic City to escape the entrenched racism in the South. They heard Atlantic City had employment opportunities. My father was a master chef. My mother was a stay-at-home housewife, until she became a licensed practical nurse.”

Shabazz, an activist for decades, sees this moment in time, and the multiple crises emanating from the rise of Donald Trump — a man who once dominated the conversation in Atlantic City — as crucial for the policies and goals of the NAACP, which last held its national convention in Atlantic City in 1955 at Atlantic City High School.

He is looking forward to discussions of economic opportunities, health disparities, reparations, the rise of white supremacy, and the impact of the end of Roe v. Wade. He is also looking forward to a session on policing and the community on Friday, July 15, at St. James AME Church, presented by the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, featuring New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin.

A Next Gen breakfast of 400 young delegates will be held at Kelsey’s, the city’s landmark soul food and supper club destination on Pacific Avenue.

“I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but I think this is one of the most important conventions we’ve had,” Shabazz said. “For what is happening in the country, the pushback on rights, especially for people of color, women, and minorities.”

Maryam Sarhan, 27, an NAACP community organizer who served on the convention committee, has recruited 70 local people between the ages of 14 and 24 to attend the conference.

She also compiled a list of the city’s Black-owned restaurants, including Kelsey’s, Kelsey and Kim’s, Yardy’s, Ahkii’s Soul Meals Ft. Chef Legacy, Di’Oasis & Shugs, Leavander’s 22, Vegans Are Us, Tha Afty, and Chef Sheed’s BBQ Shack.

There were 16 in all, a number she and Shabazz agree could be much higher.

“We’re 48 blocks,” Sarhan said, speaking in front of a new mural on the side of the future Good Dog Bar in the 3400 block of Atlantic Avenue. The mural depicts Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. on Chicken Bone Beach with the Rev. Russell Roberts and Muhammad Ali, as pictured in Atlantic City on a visit to a Nation of Islam school on Madison Avenue.

“We did it in the hopes that we could just keep amplifying economic development and empower people to have their own businesses,” she said. “I think that’s the key to success for our city beyond the casinos.”

Ralph E. Hunter Sr. runs the city’s African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey, and has prepared exhibits on Black churches, on Jet and Ebony publisher John H. Johnson, on Jackie Robinson, and on women’s history that will be displayed at the NAACP Experience exhibition.

Hunter says the city’s original Black population numbered 15,000 and came to Atlantic City “to build the Boardwalk, clean the beaches, build the hotels as well as the railroad.”

They lived in a section of Atlantic City known as the Northside, with a thriving main street of Kentucky Avenue. It became home to Black doctors, lawyers, Black-owned businesses, and the famous entertainment district anchored by Club Harlem. Northside, Hunter says, had its own police and fire departments.

By 1937, political boss Nucky Johnson had organized the Black community to join his Republican Party. “That was his power base,” Hunter said. “There were 13 or 15,000 people in Atlantic City who were there in November when the election time was. All the white people went back to Philadelphia or New York City.”

The neighborhood eventually dispersed as people moved to bedroom communities like Egg Harbor Township, and the younger generations, college-educated on the salaries of their hotel-working parents, moved away.

Hunter notes that the only Black-owned businesses left in the Northside are barber shops and beauty parlors, funeral homes and churches. “We owned all of our own hotels, we owned all of our taxi cabs, we owned all of our own restaurants,” he said. “Our money was not good on the south side. It was only good on the north side.”

Hunter said he hopes exhibits like his own, and one on the 1964 Convention that is now on display at Boardwalk Hall, will “shine the light on the history of Blacks in Atlantic City.”

His own museum, located at the Noyes Arts Garage of Stockton University, 2200 Fairmount Ave., will be receiving a pair of rare artifacts on Monday: a wooden tool chest believed to have belonged to Lucy Harris, the last enslaved person to be freed in South Jersey, according to Census records, and a set of wooden chimes believed to have been used to call enslaved people in from the fields.

It is the same day Vice President Harris is expected to speak, just a few blocks away.