In the fall of 1986, I accepted a position on the faculty at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (Stockton State College at the time). Just before moving to New Jersey, a conversation with Deborah Willis (at the time a curator for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York) made me aware of an African American community known as Whitesboro, New Jersey (Figure 1). During the summer of 1989, I drove to Whitesboro, photographed the town, and returned several times over the next few months. Those photographs, which would become the Small Towns, Black Lives project, began as a modest attempt to depict daily events and activities in a small, historically African American community near the southernmost tip of New Jersey.
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