My husband and I came from Newark, we were
both born there, and left there when our children were born and
was older and then we moved to Irvington.
The first night that the riots started, I lived on Grove Street
in Irvington. A few blocks from South Orange Ave. My husband and
I had four children, ages from nine to twelve. My oldest Daughter
was staying with her grandma that night, at 711 Grove Street. We
had heard on the radio that there were riots in Newark and we got
concerned for our daughter and my mother, so we got our three children
out of bed and had them get dressed, so we could go and see if our
daughter was ok.
We had taken a baseball bat with us just in case we needed to protect
ourselves. We lived on the third floor and when we went down the
stairs to the first, we found a bloody cloth, but no one was around,
we had thought that someone from the riots had been in our hall,
but we had never seen anyone.
When we got to my mother’s home everything was quiet. So
we left and went back. We could hear shooting from our building.
So we had asked our friend on the first floor, to bring her children
up to our apartment, where it would be safer, and we put all the
kids in the middle of the apartment, so if anyone did shot at the
apartment the kids would not get hurt. My husband had a small appliance
store on the corner of Sixteenth Ave and Ninth Street, in Newark,
he could not go to work till it was all over with, and when he got
back to work it was a mess.
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