Nearly 60 years after Payton Flournoy was appointed the first black police chief in NJ — and possibly the United States — his children celebrate their father’s legacy and the progressive small town that made it possible
It was not until 1991, as what seemed like the entire Palmyra community lined up for their father’s viewing on a frigid January evening, that the children of Payton Flournoy fully realized he was kind of a big deal.
“Good grief, Dad was police chief before Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, before the March on Washington. Before any of that,” Valerie Flournoy, 65, remembers thinking to herself. “I feel like I wasn’t able to appreciate it. I wish there were things I could have asked him or talked to him about.”
Payton Flournoy was a hometown boy who made good, as his son and namesake Payton “Chip” Jr. likes to put it. Ahead of the civil rights movement in a town that — despite its location in what the Civil Rights Project at UCLA says is still one of the most segregated states in the country — was ahead of its time, Payton Flournoy became Chief Flournoy, and so he remained until his retirement in 1976.
What no one in the Flournoy family predicted, or really grasped until later into their adulthoods, was that his appointment as Palmyra’s chief of police in 1959 would earn their father a permanent place in history.
“When I really think about it, because of the way the whole town was, we knew he was chief of police, but we didn’t realize the impact it had,” said Celeste Flournoy, the eldest of the five Flournoy children. “Growing up here in Palmyra was a very unique situation. Everybody got along with everyone, and I just looked at it as, ‘Dad is chief of police,’ but I didn’t know the historical part of it.”
The impact Celeste and her siblings tout proudly is that their father was not only the first black police chief of the tiny, quiet suburb that is Palmyra, but is thought to be the first in the entire United States. And without the unique racial dynamics that continue to define the little-known New Jersey community where Flournoy was once a high school track and football star, it probably couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
“Not too many people can say that the greatest man they’ve ever known is their dad. And I can say that. What he did at the time that he did it, is just awesome,” Chip, claiming an opportunity to speak between the shared memories of his effervescent sisters, said. “When I graduated high school, I didn’t go into law enforcement at first, because going into law enforcement as Payton Jr. was like a guy coming in off the bench in basketball to replace Michael Jordan.”
In an era when legal segregation, housing discrimination, lynchings and other forms of violence were an ever-present reality for black Americans, Flournoy’s small-town leadership of an otherwise all-white police force was anything but small. Ebony Magazine, then the country’s premier publication for the African-American market, visited Palmyra to feature Flournoy in a spread. Then came the Viceroy Cigarettes national ad campaign, in which a demure Flournoy, clad in his uniform, grasps a “thinking man’s filter” between his fingers.
So what is it about Palmyra, where the Flournoy siblings, minus late sister Vanessa, and childhood friend Jean Womble-Wainwright are gathered in the old family home on Arch Street, struggling to recall even one bad memory? Surely in a period when racial prejudice was both socially and legally permissible, even their self-professed idyllic childhood must include some kind of exclusion, harassment, ignorance?
Finally, Valerie finds something in her mental archives.
“I can only remember one time, at Sacred Heart [Grade School], I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade. This one little white boy called me the n-word, and I chased him all the way home, up his steps. But that was the only thing I can remember. It was an exceptional situation, and there were very few,” she said, apparently unfazed by the racial slur once hurled at her.
In fact, none of the Flournoy children took those exceptional situations personally. Growing up in an integrated neighborhood where mostly black and Italian families were happy to live side by side, youngest brother, Tim, who was born just upstairs from where he sits now in his living room, said being the police chief’s children wasn’t the only factor that sheltered them from the pain experienced by so many black Americans across the U.S. Everybody in Palmyra, he said, treated everybody the same.
“I can only define Palmyra as the quintessential small town, where most people know their neighbors and my officers are familiar with a lot of our residents,” current Chief of Police Scott Pearlman said. “I had never met Chief Flournoy. However, his tenure in the department is extremely special, as was his connection with the community.”
In the majority white town, black and white went to school together, danced with one another at parties, played sports and went to Girl Scout and Cub Scout meetings without batting an eye. In hindsight, the Flournoys agree, the whole thing was extraordinarily ordinary.
For Celeste, the power of her family’s story rests in this ordinariness. Even in the trying times Americans currently find themselves in, someone somewhere is unwittingly making a positive mark on history.
“I see more division today than anything else. To have Palmyra do what it did so far back, it’s a testament to what can be done,” she said. “Instead of going backward, let’s go forward. There are a lot of people in this community that are brand new, and this information should be known. The powers that be, at that particular time, saw past [my dad’s] color, realized his worth and appointed him.”
Vanessa, who died in 2013, chimes in from beyond the grave through her twin, Valerie.
“One of the things she wanted in her obituary is that she grew up in the right town, in the right place, at the right time.”
