Introduction

The author was learning about 'race relations' in another part of New Jersey. His mother's Friends Meeting in the prosperous town of Ridgewood became involved in a small community development project with a group of people known to themselves as 'the Mountain People' and to their Mahwah neighbors, derisively, as the Jackson's Whites. The Mountain People, with mixed colors and physical features, were what historians would call a maroon community. Their ancestors were known to have included waves of Native Americans and African Americans who had withdrawn into the Ramapo Mountains over the centuries. As news of the civil rights struggles in the South splashed across northern newspapers, an Episcopal bishop asked his parishioners in connecticut to meet with mountain people's neighbors to discuss their role in race relations. Word spread, and soon people from the local black communities not only joined Concern, but took over much of its formal and informal leadership.