By Alexander Rivero

As one of the few African-American students in his elementary school, Isaiah Anderson was surprised to discover that his hometown of Westfield, NJ once had a thriving African-American district known as the Black Professional Zone. The district itself included not only prominent places of business, but homes as well, and was at its peak between the 1940s and the 1970s. 

Currently a junior at Centenary University, Anderson put together a short documentary called Black Professional Zone, which chronicles the Westfield district and some of its most noteworthy members throughout its years. The film itself was awarded a Director’s Choice Award at the 47th New Jersey Young Filmmakers Festival held in Hoboken. Anderson, majoring in communications and minoring in television and film, put together the documentary as a project for a Documentary Indie Films course at Centenary. Brosi Gavrilovic, an assistant professor of communications at the school, encouraged him to enter the competition with his project. 

  Anderson was originally moved to look into African-American history in Westfield by a walking tour last year during the town’s 300th anniversary celebration. He proceeded to begin looking into the sequence of events and people that helped build the zone itself, including some of the first professional offices established there. The original founders of these businesses went on to have a lasting effect on Westfield and its residents, as well as the country itself. The film goes on to focus on several of them. 

Hollis and James Printon, for instance, were brothers who respectively contributed to the zone, Hollis by establishing the Plinton Funeral Home (currently operating under the name Plinton Curry Funeral Home) and working as president of the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association. He was the country’s first black state president affiliated with the National Funeral Directors Association. James, in turn, was an aviator, serving as a flight instructor for the famous Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. After his service, he entered commercial aviation and rose to the level of vice president of TWA and Eastern Airlines. 

Howard M. Broke, MD, another prominent member of the zone, was perhaps even a more central figure in the town, serving as a foundational member of the community for over five decades. He served as the president of the NAACP’s Westfield chapter in the 1930s, as well as a trustee of the Westfield Community Center and an investor in the Shady Rest Golf and Country Club in Scotch Plains, one of the country’s first African-American golf clubs. 

Anderson’s aptitude for visual storytelling is no fluke. As a child with cortical visual impairment, which makes his field of vision appear if though behind broken glass, he turned to comic books as not only a means of entertainment, but as a way to supplement his earliest attempts to learn to read. He recalls feeling enthralled by the colorful storyboards of the Spiderman universe, feeling a drive to create his own stories. “I just wanted to tell my own stories after a certain point,” he recalls when asked to reminisce on how comic books enriched his artistic sensitivities from a young age. He is currently working on a storyline featuring prominent Batman sidekick Nightwing, with the hopes of not only giving the character a central role in a storyline but also to help children with disabilities a chance to fully immerse themselves in a well-written (and drawn) story.