A Centenarian's Birthday and Racial Discrimination in Asbury

Today in New Jersey history:

July 19, 1884: The Philadelphia Record reported that 2,500 people, including a brass band, “the ubiquitous peanut man” and “the lemonade chap” gathered “in the grove beside the Methodist Church” at Willow Grove in Cumberland County to celebrate the 100th birthday of Michael Potter. Potter, who had been the Church’s sexton for sixty years, claimed that he had voted in every presidential election since “Madison’s time” and intended to vote for Grover Cleveland that coming November.

July 19, 1893: Asbury Park founder James A. Bradley issued a decree banning African-American hotel workers from sitting in his boardwalk band pavilion, which sparked a considerable amount of opposition from the state’s black community, as well as out of state commentators like New York African-American attorney Alfred C. Cowan, who called its constitutionality on both state and federal law into question, and white pharmacist Joseph Francis Smith, who referred to the proclamation as “an outrage.”