Hinton, Theodore

The Hinton family’s history in Englewood spans more than a century and traces a remarkable arc from enslavement in the antebellum South to legal, civic, and residential leadership in 20th-century New Jersey. At its foundation was Nancy Lee Sears, who was born into slavery on a plantation in Virginia owned by Confederate general Robert E. Lee. She lived the first decades of her life enslaved, married another enslaved person, and remained in the South through emancipation, a period that brought legal freedom but little immediate change in daily life. Not until middle age did she move north, eventually settling in Englewood, where she lived for nearly three decades and died at the age of 102. Her daughter, Elizabeth Sears Hinton, became a central figure in Englewood’s Black religious and social life. A charter member of Shiloh AME Zion Church, she served as a past president of the church’s nurses’ club, anchoring her family within one of the city’s most important African American institutions at a time when churches functioned as critical centers of mutual aid, leadership, and community stability. Elizabeth’s son, Theodore H. Hinton, represented a generational turning point. Raised in Englewood, he graduated from Lincoln University and Rutgers Law School and built a legal career in an era when Black attorneys faced systemic discrimination in hiring, housing, and clientele. After decades of practice in Paterson, he was admitted to argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and, in 1966, became Englewood’s first city prosecutor. He was also a visible civic voice, speaking publicly on juvenile justice, housing inequality, and community responsibility, while mentoring younger African American lawyers and participating in organizations such as the NAACP and the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. That professional standing intersected directly with one of the most consequential moments in the family’s history: housing integration. In 1957, Theodore Hinton and his wife purchased a home at 133 Glenbrook Parkway, becoming the first Black family to move into the Glenbrook Park section of Englewood—a neighborhood shaped earlier in the century by informal segregation and exclusionary real-estate practices common throughout Bergen County. The significance of that purchase is sharpened by the identity of the original developer and seller. The Glenbrook Parkway property had been built and sold decades earlier by Joseph Paterno, one of the most influential apartment-house builders in New York City and a pioneer of luxury cooperative housing on Park Avenue, Sutton Place, and in Riverdale. Paterno was a central figure in shaping early 20th-century urban residential development, and his projects—like many of the era—were embedded in systems that routinely excluded African Americans from ownership and occupancy. That a home developed by Paterno’s firm ultimately became the site of the first Black family’s entry into Glenbrook Park underscores the historical weight of the Hintons’ purchase. Whether or not Paterno himself envisioned such an outcome, the transaction symbolized a broader postwar shift: the slow erosion of residential color lines through professional advancement, persistence, and the refusal of Black families to accept inherited boundaries. The Hintons’ move was not a protest action or a court case, but it was nonetheless a structural change—transforming a space long shaped by exclusion into one of inclusion. Taken together, the Hinton family story reveals a continuous through-line in Englewood’s Black history: from enslavement to migration, from church-centered community building to legal and civic leadership, and from residential exclusion to integration. Across three generations, the family’s trajectory reflects both the constraints imposed by racism and the determined, cumulative efforts to overcome them—leaving a lasting imprint on Englewood’s social, religious, and civic landscape.