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Lesser Known Civil Rights Moments That Changed Everything

Khalid Elhassan February 23, 2024 27 min

Volunteers at a Nashville lunch counter sit-in. Mississippi Today

A Black Resistance Leader in New Jersey

Black - Colonel Tye — Colonel Tye, as depicted in a documentary. PBS

Tye returned to New Jersey armed and eager to fight. In his first combat experience, the Battle of Monmouth, June 28^th, 1778, Tye captured a Patriot captain of the Monmouth militia, and returned with his captive to British held New York City. Having grown up in Monmouth County, Tye had intimate knowledge of the local geography. That made him well-suited to the guerrilla warfare that wracked the region. While the Redcoats and the Continental Army fought each other in pitched battles, a nasty civil was simultaneously being fought between Loyalist and Patriot militias and armed bands throughout much of the colonies. Such guerrilla warfare was intense in New Jersey, a border region between the British stronghold in New York, and the Patriot capital in Philadelphia.

In Monmouth County, things got particularly vicious when Patriot vigilantes began to hang Loyalists and confiscate their property. That prompted William Franklin, New Jersey’s Loyalist governor despite being Benjamin Franklin’s son, to sponsor Loyalists in fighting fire with fire. In July, 1779, Tye led a racially integrated Loyalist guerrilla group in a daring raid on Shrewsbury, NJ, in Patriot territory. They captured dozens of cattle, horses, as well as two prominent local Patriots. Tye and his men eventually set up a base that they named Refugeetown in Sandy Hook, at the northern end of the Jersey Shore. From there, they conducted nighttime raids that targeted prominent and wealthy local Patriots, particularly slaveholders.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.