Our People of the Century Douglas Jones Romero: Reformer Wages Continuing Fight      for Social Justice

It was love at first sight. Douglas Jones Romero, veteran of two stints in Vietnam and the street gangs of New York, fell in love with Vineland the first time he saw it in 1970.

Still, he had some adjustments to make. Honking horns in New York City meant get the &%$# out of the way; honking horns in Vineland meant a neighborly hello.

Romero’s trained reaction was anything but friendly – and several months passed before he smiled and nodded in response.

A paralegal with Camden Regional Legal Services’ Farm Workers Division, Romero’s work brought him to Cumberland County. His sense of social justice motivated him to to work for the rights of migrant and residential workers who fueled South Jersey farms.

“We’d get shot at,” he said of the group that included Frank Tejeras, who tried to bring social services to farm workers. “Our persistence turned around the plantation mentality and wound up in a law, State vs. Shack that won us the right to go into the farm workers’ camps.”

With the Puerto Rican Vietnam Veterans of New Jersey, Romero worked in the early '90s toward elimination of gangs.

Using Marine discipline, the ethics and codes of the officers’ corps marching, karate, and even uniforms, the group helped diffuse a mounting problem within the city, he said. The thesis for Romero’s master’s degree from Lincoln University, Oxford, Pa., was based on the program.

Romero and his wife Carmen Miranda Jones founded and still publishes El Veterano, a twice-monthly Spanish newspaper that Romero says, “accentuates the positive.”

“My greatest achievement? My children, first. Social justice, second,” he said.

“My devotion to social justice is stronger than ever, but it’s more mature. Once I would want something done in a month, now I can wait two years.”