Cumberland COUNTY, NJ — For a lesson in Racism 101, you don’t need to take a college course. You can just take a trip to Cumberland County in southwestern New Jersey.  In the wake of workers’ outrage to the non-indictments for police who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, videos went viral of a police murder last December of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, New Jersey.
Jerame’s family refused to take this murder lying down. In late February, as many as 200 protesters marched to the local Bridgeton courthouse to protest this legalized lynching.  The protest was full of young workers and youth — many from the Bridgeton community and others from nearby cities, including Philadelphia, where family members of other Black youth executed by cops came to show their solidarity.  
County Built on Racism
The political economy of Cumberland County is built around the racist prison industrial complex.  The majority of New Jersey’s prisons are located here.  From across the state, tens of thousands of unemployed Black and Latin youth — from as far away as Newark — are imprisoned in these so-called “correctional” facilities.  Whose job is it to oversee them? The local workers who rely on the prison industry for their livelihood. The main source of employment and business in Cumberland County — where unemployment is rampant—is the prison system.  Most small business owners, many of them Latin, have contracts with the prison industry.
This is not a new story. For over three hundred years, Cumberland County has been home to concentration camps for oppressed workers.  The Lenne Lenape Indians were systematically forced into plantations in Cumberland County after their land was stolen from them elsewhere in New Jersey by Dutch and British colonizers.
The roots of racism are so deep here that even the local Quaker community — defying national Quaker policy — held slaves here into the early 19th century. (New Jersey was the last state in the North to abolish slavery.) The county’s agricultural base led even these supposed humanitarians to stay committed to forced plantation labor for kidnapped Africans.  Cumberland was the perfect New Jersey headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Even today, the Klan remains an open force across Cumberland County. In January, in neighboring Atlantic County, KKK flyers were secretly left on people’s lawns, part of a regional outreach campaign  from Maryland through Pennsylvania to New York.  
Meanwhile, Bridgeton’s cops, local Black elected officials, and the courts are all in bed together to keep the working class divided and repressed.  Indeed, it was a Black cop who killed Jerame Reid.
Workers Ripe for Rebellion
But Bridgeton is not just a site of racist capitalist repression. It’s also a sleeping giant for revolt led by Black workers. Even though police brandished semi-automatics and posted snipers outside the courthouse during the February rally, the youth and elders did not let up.  They testified to the racist system of entrapment, going back their whole lives.  What the cops failed to recognize is that the state’s bullying tactics have created more angry, anti-racist soldiers.
From Newark to Philadelphia, the Progressive Labor Party has been winning youth to the idea that a long-term, multiracial movement must wage class war to obliterate the killer kkkops in communities like Bridgeton, along with their crony officials and judges.  PLP is that movement!
With the leadership of the Reid family, especially Jerame’s wife, PLP will continue to work with others across the region to point out how dead-end reforms will only buy time for the bosses while more youth are slain in yet another city. As workers rise to the occasion to fight back, PLP will be there to take leadership and learn from workers. And as more workers learn about our Party’s vision for a future without capitalism and racist terror, we will accelerate our building of a mass movement for communist revolution!