Maplewood’s illusion of progressivism

This is an opinion piece produced as part of the 2025 Citizen Journalism class by Sadie Springer titled “Maplewood’s illusion of progressivism.”

Image: A typical lawn sign in Maplewood expressing “community values” and “solidarity”. Photo credit: Sadie Springer for Public Square Amplified.

Maplewood, NJ - I am seven years old, backpack in tow, curly afro adorned with barrettes, and not a care in the world, except for what the cafeteria has for lunch. I ride the bus to a school just a short distance from my house in Maplewood, New Jersey, surrounded by longtime friends who come in all shades of Black and brown.

I’m eight, attending a new school within walking distance of my home. I no longer take the bus, and I’m no longer surrounded by Black and Brown faces. On the first day, I asked, perplexed, “Mommy, where did all the Black people go?” I don’t remember her giving me a satisfying answer, but the reasoning behind this drastic demographic shift, within the same school district, within the same town, would slowly begin to reveal itself as I moved through middle and high school, along with the mirage of the town’s so-called progressivism.

Maplewood and its sister town South Orange are historic towns nestled between Newark and Millburn/Short Hills, filled with quaint 20th-century houses, lush parks, a downtown lined with eclectic mom-and-pop shops, a rainbow pride crosswalk in front of town hall, and a sea of lawn signs declaring, “Hate has no home here.” White Brooklyn hipsters in search of a “diverse” suburb to raise their kids often find it in this town, creating a paradoxical cycle of whitewashing. 

From 2000 to 2010, Maplewood and South Orange together held a steady Black population in the low 30% range, while the White population hovered in the mid-to-high 50s. But around 2010, those numbers began to shift. By 2016, the White population had climbed above 60%, while the Black population had dropped into the mid-20s.

I entered the South Orange Maplewood School District (SOMSD) in 2011, right as the racial makeup of my town was shifting. From kindergarten to third grade, I attended Seth Boyden Elementary, which was 54.93% Black and 34.61% White. Yet, while the town was becoming whiter overall, a 2017 district study showed that Black enrollment at Seth Boyden was actually rising, White enrollment was dropping, and there was a sharp increase in students classified as economically disadvantaged. 

I remember meals being handed out to certain students for the weekend, but I didn’t yet understand why that didn’t happen at Tuscan, the more affluent school I transferred to at age eight. Even then, I could sense a difference between the two schools, though I lacked the language to name what housing policy and zoning had already arranged.

I’d hear kids jokingly divide the town into three: Maplewood (upper-middle-class), Maplegood (comfortable), and Maplehood (working-class, longtime Black and brown blocks). Those playground labels track directly to housing policy. Strict single-family zoning and $800,000-median home prices cluster wealthier white families in “Maplewood,” while cheaper streets, shaped by redlining and disinvestment, house the rest. Because elementary zones follow those lines, each school mirrors its real-estate slice, creating de facto segregation. Students from “Maplehood” rely on free-and-reduced-lunch, while some “Maplewood” parents are genuinely surprised the program exists at all, a disparity hiding in plain sight despite a shared ZIP code.

Since my time in SOMSD elementary schools, in response to years of advocacy and equity audits, SOMSD implemented a Desegregation Busing plan starting in 2020. Under the plan, students were assigned to schools across neighborhood boundaries in an effort to racially and economically balance enrollments. It was a modest, research-backed step toward equity.

I would hear whispers from white moms, sometimes in my own kitchen, expressing dismay over their children having to take a 10-minute bus ride to a different elementary school instead of one in their immediate neighborhood. These were the same people who had “Black Lives Matter” posts splattered across their personal Facebooks. 

It became apparent that this activism, if it could be called that, was blatantly performative. While not all, most of these parents were comfortable expressing their outrage at police brutality and racism happening in other communities, in other states, but were threatened by addressing these issues in their own small town because of the minor inconvenience it presented them.

Even with the busing plan, the achievement gap persisted at Columbia High School. In my AP and honors classes, I was often one of just three Black students, despite the school being nearly 49% students of color. I graduated with only two teachers ever acknowledging that you could walk into a Columbia classroom and immediately identify the level of the class by its racial makeup. 

That silence, around what was so visible, pushed me into activism. I led Students for Justice and the Intersectional Feminism Club, where causes like reproductive rights and gun control were widely accepted and I was celebrated as a youth activist. I also found my way to MAPSO Freedom School, a grassroots program that empowers Black and brown youth through radical education and community organizing.

But when I, along with MAPSO Freedom School, began advocating for Palestinian rights, support vanished. Parents emailed the principal, harassment followed, and bullying cases were filed against me, later dismissed. One local even wrote in an encrypted chat that we wouldn’t want him to drive by our peaceful walkout because he “wasn’t sure what he would do.” The board of education ended up terminating the liaison to MAPSO Freedom School due to its advocacy against the ongoing genocide committed by Israel.

The same community that embraced slogans about justice, so long as they aligned with a comfortable, Western liberal narrative, recoiled when faced with Palestine. Much like the resistance to desegregation busing, it exposed the limits of their so-called progressivism. 

The idea of collective liberation, whether in a classroom or in Gaza, was too unsettling for those who preferred equity in theory but not in practice. I was told simultaneously by an administrator that I was forbidden from making my student council president speech at graduation politics, but also how wonderful it would be for optics to have two POC students speaking at graduation.

Now, over a decade after I first asked where all the Black people went, my little sister has just finished her first year in the same district. The town is whiter than ever, and many wealthier white families, once vocal about equity, have quietly pulled their children from the public schools, retreating to private options and writing off the district as a lost cause. What remains is a public school system still grappling with the unfinished business of America’s so-called post–Jim Crow progress: whether it will choose the discomfort of real justice or continue to hide inequity behind inclusive mission statements and exclusionary outcomes.

The views expressed in this article express those of the writer alone and not necessarily those of Public Square Amplified.