A conversation with Chigozie Onyema

The New Jersey Globe is continuing its series of legislator Q&As with Chigozie Onyema. Prior installments include Luanne Peterpaul, Dave Bailey Jr., Doug Steinhardt, Al Abdelaziz, Andrew Zwicker, Mike Inganamort, and Cody Miller. 

Assemblyman Chigozie Onyema (D-Newark) is a consultant and won election to the Assembly in 2025, defeating incumbent Garnet Hall in the 28th district primary. 

He was named co-chair of the Newark West Ward Democratic Committee in 2024 and ran for Newark council in 2022. He possesses a law degree from New York University School of Law and was a senior director of PolicyLink. 

Onyema serves on the Commerce & Economic Development, Consumer Affairs, and Transportation & Independent Authorities committees. 

A list of Onyema’s floor and committee votes can be found here.
Click here to view a list of bills that Onyema has sponsored. 

The following phone interview has been edited for clarity and length.

New Jersey Globe: I want to start with a legislative priority that you’ve talked about in the press and publicly a fair bit recently: the Fair Price Protection Act, regarding what you call surveillance pricing. Could you talk about what that bill does and why it’s needed?

Chigozie Onyema: The bill bans surveillance pricing in the grocery industry, which means that companies like Instacart, DoorDash, or other grocery delivery platforms can’t use our personal data to set individual prices for consumers. The bill came about because of a report that More Perfect Union, Consumer Reports, and Groundwork Collaborative did, which included a study of about 400 folks. They studied Instacart specifically and found that those who went grocery shopping using the online platform got different prices for the same products, even though they were shopping from the same store at the same time, and were going into the store to pick up the groceries.

And I believe at first, Instacart and these other platforms denied that they were doing the practice, and then they later accepted that they were, but only using it to test prices. And so what we thought was that it was really important to not just regulate that practice, but ban the use of surveillance pricing, because it’s not something that we should get used to or just regulate. I think it’s just something that does not belong in a marketplace.

And what’s the status of that bill right now? Do you think it’ll eventually be signed into law?

I do think it’ll eventually be signed into law. It’s made its way through the Consumer Affairs Committee in the Assembly and the Commerce Committee in the Senate. [On Thursday, the bill was cleared through the Assembly Commerce & Economic Development Committee and referred to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.]

In the Senate — I’m not sure when — it goes to the Budget Committee next. I’m not as familiar with their process, but my hope is that it gets through Budget and then we get it on the floor, and then we get it to the governor’s desk. And the governor’s already indicated, both in her budget address and in other forms, that it’s something that she supports and would sign.

It’s your first term in the legislature — how are you feeling about it five months into your term? And can you talk through the path of how you got here?

I’m feeling good five months in.

In terms of my path, I first ran for office when I was 18 years old. I ran for the school board in Maplewood-South Orange back then, and a friend of mine and I ran for office because we felt that the tracking system in the school district — which is the way that they do ability grouping — was unjust and meant that Black and brown students were disproportionately placed in the lowest levels.

And so we ran for office with hopes of changing that. We said, “The tracking system doesn’t reflect our values, and it seems fundamentally unfair.” So we ran for office, and a significant piece of our platform was to address that. We came up short. We did get endorsed by the teachers’ union in that race, which is pretty impressive, I think, for some teenagers, but we came up short in that election.

I ran for office again in 2022 for city council, this time in the West Ward of Newark, and I made it to a runoff with the current councilperson. They were supported by the political infrastructure in the city at the time, or the machine, if you might call it that. And we were running a sort of grassroots insurgent campaign. I thought we did pretty well, but unfortunately, we didn’t bring it all the way home.

And after that race, we decided to organize and run a slate of district leader candidates for the West Ward Democratic Committee, because Newark, unlike most towns, has five separate democratic committees. And so in the West Ward committee, we felt like we had enough support throughout the ward to run enough candidates and elect our own chair. And we were successful in that endeavor. We had 55 or so candidates. We won a majority of the seats, and then I got elected chair of the West Ward Democratic Committee.

Thereafter, you know, we began to look at the state legislature. In 2025, the entire Assembly was on the ballot. The line was no longer a thing. Essex County was holding a convention, and so we decided to participate in the convention, put our hat in the race. We ran hard, fortunate to win the primary, then the general, and the rest is history.

What did your work at PolicyLink cover?

I led the Sustainable Cities Program, and the program really worked at the intersection of climate justice and racial justice. And so what we sought to do, once [former President Joe] Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law, was: How do we make sure federal resources get to the communities that need them the most? And we focused on predominantly Black and brown cities in the Midwest and in the South, and we helped them pursue different opportunities through those grants, but we did so in a way that required them to collaborate with their community in the process. So it spoke to the ways I’ve approached governing, which is this collaborative governing approach. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has derailed some of that, but it was an incredible learning experience.

This isn’t your first time working in state government — you were assistant commissioner under former Community Affairs Director Sheila Oliver. Did you get to know her well? 

I got to know her pretty well. She was brilliant. She’s somebody who knew government better than almost anyone, having served in the Assembly, having served as a school board member, and serving as a speaker of the Assembly. It would be wonderful to talk to her now, just to get a sense of how to approach different things, how to move priorities, how to build relationships. I remember her telling me once that when she was speaker, she made sure she went to every single person’s district. And being in the Assembly now, I could see how big of an endeavor that is, especially managing a body of 80 people. Obviously, the caucus is much smaller, but it’s a pretty significant body that can be unwieldy. So I just have the utmost respect for her and her legacy, and hope that when folks look back at my legislative record, we’ve done something to make folks like Sheila proud.

I agree that the Assembly can be unwieldy at times. What are some of your other legislative priorities as you work through your first term?

One of the big things for us is both affordability and wealth inequality. You know, alongside the Fair Price Protection Act, we want to do stuff thinking about rent prices. And so we’ve got a bill that [I’ve co-sponsored] with Assemblywoman Yvonne Lopez, where we look to rein in some of those landlords who are colluding, through rent and through these different tech apps, to artificially increase prices.

We’re going to hopefully drop a bill today that looks at homeowners’ insurance. So right now, in the homeowners’ insurance industry, you can use a person’s credit history to set their insurance premium. And so that’s something that we want to address. The New York Times did an article that talked about how you had two people, two friends, very similar homes, same neighborhood, similar prices, similar mortgages, but their monthly payments were vastly different because of homeowners’ insurance rates, and that was because the credit scores were very different. We felt that might be a way to think about how we reduce costs for folks. We don’t think that folks who have lower credit scores or fair credit scores should be subsidizing any insurance pool of folks who have much higher credit scores and tend to have bigger homes.

I noticed that you are one of several legislators who have been hosting Know Your Rights forums. You’re a lawyer — how does that education help inform your perspective, both as a legislator and during this tense time under President Donald Trump?

Being a lawyer sort of helps demystify things. Oftentimes, I think the law has been a tool to sort of hide things, to obscure things. And somebody who’s gone to law school is not as mystified by what they see when reading a bill or when somebody tells you, “Well, you know, it conflicts with X, Y, or Z.” You just can do the research yourself and say, “Well, actually, that’s not how I read X, Y, or Z.” It’s an additional tool in my toolbox to be more analytical, to be more thoughtful, to be a bit sharper.

In terms of what we see from the Trump administration, it’s been helpful there as well. I think the Know Your Rights trainings have been really important for residents, to help folks understand the difference between the rights you have and the risk tolerance you have. We’re in some uncertain times, and so the more information folks have, the better.

I’ve only got a couple more questions for you. I read that you knew or were a mentee of former Gary, Indiana, Mayor Richard Hatcher. Is that true? 

Yes, Mayor Richard Hatcher is one of my political heroes.

How did you meet him, and what role did he play in helping shape who you are today?

His daughter and I went to law school together, and we were very good friends. And so I met him at the law school graduation, and had an opportunity to spend some time with him there, and then built a relationship where I would go to visit him and talk to him on the phone quite a bit.

What it helped me realize is that there’s a place for me in electoral politics. At that particular point in my life, I was not thinking about electoral politics as a thing I wanted to do, because I felt like the folks that I saw engaging in it didn’t hold my set of values, didn’t show up in the ways that I might show up. But watching him, learning about him and his life, I realized that there’s a precedent for who you want to be in this world.

I think of him as this mayor-statesman. He was involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. He was one of the first Black mayors elected [in a large city]. He was a civil rights mayor. He’s somebody who led litigation in the city of Gary. He was really innovative in terms of thinking about the solutions to urban problems at a time when you just didn’t have a ton of allies, and when industry like U.S. Steel was very antagonistic toward him.

He was very generous with his time with me. And so I got a chance to learn about when he was a part of Jesse Jackson’s ’84 and ’88 campaigns. You think about all the important things that happened from the mid ’60s to the mid ’80s, and he was at the center of it. To be able to sit at his feet and learn from him is an incredible advantage and an incredible honor. And I see myself as a part of a tradition that he helped start.