On Friday, August 21^st, the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) and the Friends of Nat Turner Park will observe the 184^th anniversary of the epic Nat Turner Slave Rebellion.

It will be held at Newark’s Nat Turner Park at located at 246 18^th Avenue, near Muhammad Ali Ave. at 5:30pm.

On August 21^st, 1831, slave preacher Nat Turner launched the most famous slave uprising in American history in Southampton, Virginia!

Although the revolt was put down in several days and Turner was ultimately captured and executed, and America’s Antebellum history is laden with slave revolts, this particular revolt unnerved a growing, powerful nation that had gotten rich off of slavery. It is considered the uprising that that ignited the real emergence of the Abolitionist Movement in the United States.

Nat Turner Park is a 400 acre park that was rehabilitated and reopened in 2009 through a federal urban greening project called Parks For People. As a consequence of the Black Power Movement in this area led by the late Amiri Baraka, Newark was the first city to rename city institutions after figures who represented their Black majority population’s history…