Earl Faison Remembered 20 Years Later

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April 11 marked the 20th anniversary of a dark day in recent New Jersey history. It was the 20th anniversary of the killing of Earl Faison, an innocent, unarmed Black man in an abusive case of mistaken identity!

The background of the story is just as bad.

Earlier that fateful evening an Orange NJ police officer Joyce Carnegie was shot and killed when she believed she was stopping a suspect in an armed robbery. Sadly, she appears to have been mortally correct.

In the aftermath of her killing, area police forces went on a ‘blue Rampage’ says Newark activist Lawrence Hamm in his forthcoming autobiography.

Within hours of Carnegie’s tragic death, Earl Faison, a 27 year old music aspirant who looked nothing like the bald dark description of Carnegie’s killer, was himself killed, viciously beaten to death in what one judge described as a “stairwell of torture” in police custody.

Essex County prosecutor, Patricia Hurt, the first Black woman to hold that post, refused to even do an investigation into the Faison case at the time!

Protests, however, led by Hamm and his People’s Organization for Progress and a host of other community allies would spark a federal investigation that led to federal charges being brought against five officers involved in beating Faison to death and their ultimate conviction on federal civil rights later.

20 years ago to that day, Faison’s younger sister, Taaj Williams, an aspiring writer who was only a teenager when her brother was killed on that fateful day in 1999, felt that it was time to bring the family and the community back together to honor her brother and the struggle that brought them some semblance of justice.

So the People’s Organization for Progress and Newark Communities for Accountable (NCAP) set out to help Williams do that.

A full house turned out to support the Williams family. Guest speakers included Hamm and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. DeLacy Davis, who also actively supported the family back then with his organization Black Cops Against Police Brutality, would give closing remarks.

Hamm reminded everyone that the officers went to jail on Federal Civil Rights Violations. He asked the family to pursue murder charges 20 years later and to reopen the case with new State Attorney General Gerber Grewal.

“I don’t care if takes another 20 more years.

“I want permission from the family to continue to fight for justice for Earl Faison,” he said pleadingly.

Zayid Muhammad told everyone that Williams also intended to go to Orange City Council to seek an apology and a street renaming after her brother, and that there was a powerful example of this with the Sandra Bland case. The highway where Bland was pulled over, arrested, beaten and ultimately led to her death in police custody, has since been renamed Sandra Bland Highway in Prairie View, Texas, but just as it took a lot of protest efforts to back up those family demands, so is going to take a lot of support to back up these demands, he explained.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was almost the same as age as Faison back then when he headed Black Nia Force, a social justice arm made of young people at the time. Now as Mayor, he explained how he immediately created an independent Civilian Review Board that was passed unanimously into law by the City Council, but is being held up in court by the Fraternal Order of Police who didn’t want to see any genuine Civilian Oversight.

“So now we’re in this fight, and you know what, it’s going to take all of us,” he insisted, alluding to the need to pack the courts as the case moves up the Appeals ladder.

Young poets rounded out the affair. Hamm and Baraka were each given crowns of appreciation by the Faison family which read ‘Above and Beyond on behalf of the Faison family.’

“It is a small token for a big gesture,” said a grateful Taaj Williams.

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