NorthJersey.com’s Alexis Shanes reports

While calls abound for federal and state initiatives to address systemic racism, experts and New Jersey activists are pushing for change community by community, looking to the state’s 565 municipalities for justice-oriented change.

They are fighting to keep the momentum going, sparking unprecedented reckonings about race and pushing for change that they say is long overdue, even as the large-scale protests that gripped the U.S. in June slow to a trickle.

“Black and brown people know this is the reality,” said Liza Chowdhury, a social sciences and criminal justice professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College. “What’s happening now is that all of America is waking up to the reality of Black people in this country.”