Newark's Underground Railroad

Newark's Black Liberation Heritage

Plane Street Colored Church

Frederick Douglass Field 

“Slavery is the next thing to hell.” 

— Harriet Tubman (1855)

Welcome to this exhibition!

In 1998, United States Congress acknowledged that “The Underground Railroad, which flourished from the end of the 18th century to the end of the Civil War, was one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement during its evolution over more than three centuries.” Those expressions of freedom happened in Newark, too. 

The Plane Street Colored Church was built in 1836 and was located on the current Frederick Douglass Field at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. The church represents the unyielding work of the Newark Black activist community for Black emancipation and as Underground Railroad activists. 

It exemplified the ways in which free northern Black people helped build the UGRR for freedom seekers as stationmasters, activists, lecturers and artists, with a national network of Black activists. The church was also a school, meeting hall and lecture hall. The Colored Anti -Slavery Society of Newark and the Relief Society, a group that assisted freedom seekers with funds and resources was affiliated with it. It was also the direct connection to an UGRR station operated by the treasurer of the Relief Society, Jacob King, and his home/station only a few feet away. Freedom seekers and the formerly enslaved ministered, taught at the school located there, and worshipped at this church. The church’s leadership included many prominent persons connected to the UGRR, including freedom seekers and operatives Samuel Eli Cornish, Junius Morel, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Christopher Rush, and poet Elymas Payson Rogers, writer of the nationally performed "A Poem on the Fugitive Slave Law." 

- Noelle Lorraine Williams, Curator and Researcher, Black Revolutionary Writers Fighting Colonialism: Queen Latifah, Samuel Cornish and Amina & Amiri Baraka