The 17th annual commemoration of the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion will be held Friday, August 21, 2026, 5:00 pm at Nat Turner Park, 171 Muhammad Ali Avenue in Newark, New Jersey.
The program will take place near the entrance of the park at the intersection of Muhammad Ali Avenue and Jeliff Avenue. It is sponsored by People’s Organization for Progress (POP) and Friends of Nat Turner Park.
“We have this observance each year because we believe it is important to remember what Nat Turner and his comrades did. They took up arms and fought back against their enslavers,” Lawrence Hamm, Chairman, People’s Organization For Progress stated.
"The participants in Turner’s Rebellion struck a blow for freedom. They died in battle. Their courage and their sacrifice was a major contribution to black people’s struggle against slavery,” Hamm said.
“The Nat Turner uprising is perhaps the most well known slave rebellion in this country. Friday will mark the 195th anniversary of that event, also known as the Southampton Insurrection which began on August 21,1831 in Southampton County, Virginia,” he said.
Hamm said it was fitting to have the observance in a park named after the slave rebellion leader. Nat Turner Park was officially opened in July of 2009.
Located in the Central Ward, it covers nine acres and is the largest city owned park. It is the only park in the United States named after Nat Turner.
Turner’s uprising was one of the fiercest slave rebellions in the United States. It is said that approximately 60 to 75 enslaved and free black people took part in his revolt. As many as 65 whites may have been killed, and possibly 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the insurrection.
In the aftermath of the uprising Nat Turner was hanged and 56 other slaves were executed for their participation. Some historical accounts say that Turner was also beheaded and that his body was mutilated and dissected.
Turner’s uprising was not the only slave rebellion in the U.S. There were hundreds of slave rebellions in this country.
“Our armed resistance to slavery took place for several hundred years during the period of colonization in the western hemisphere and continued for nearly a century after American independence,” he said.
“Black people fought against slavery in Africa. We rose up against our captors on the slave ships. And we rebelled against it on the plantations, in the towns and cities of the north as well as the south,” Hamm stated.
“Nat Turner’s Rebellion and the hundreds of other slave uprisings inside and outside the United States, including the Haitian Revolution, inspired and gave momentum to the abolitionist movement, led to the Civil War, and helped bring about the end of slavery in this country,” he said.
"Perhaps the greatest slave rebellion of all was the Civil War, when more than 200,000 enslaved black men escaped from bondage and joined the ranks of the Union Army. They took up arms, helped to defeat the Confederacy and destroy the institution of chattel slavery,” he said.
“The story of slave rebellions is a glorious chapter in the ongoing struggle for freedom in America. However, this is a story that those in power want to erase from our history books,” he said.
“The Trump administration and some state governments seek to ban and erase this history from our museums, textbooks, schools and universities, cultural institutions, government agencies, news outlets, social media, and data bases,” he said.
Trump has targeted the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington and has attempted to eliminate exhibits there that are deemed to be “divisive” or “woke.”
“He wants to do away with this history because it doesn’t fit into his racist and white supremacist narrative of American history. He wants to promote a history that downplays the cruelty, injustice and horrors of slavery,” Hamm said.
“The People’s Organization For Progress is diametrically opposed to this effort to whitewash American history. This is censorship and we are absolutely opposed to it.
“We are opposed to what he and others are doing to our museums, with the curriculum at our educational institutions, and similar efforts in other areas,” he declarediv>
d."Erasing a people’s history is a step toward erasing a people. This is what fascists have done in the past. This is what they are doing today. This is a form of cultural genocide,” he said.
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