A Post-Racial Change Is Gonna Come

Newark, Cory Booker, and the Transformation of Urban America

J. Wharton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137277725
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Ordnung

This work offers a political and historical analysis of Newark's modern politics since 1950, culminating with Mayor Cory Booker's rise to power and prominence both in the city and in American political consciousness. Newark's recent political history offers an interesting case study in mayoral elections, community development, and coalition building politics. While Newark is the quintessential post-industrial city, Booker has received critical attention for his post-racial politics since he frequently bypasses racial and traditional urban politics. At the same time, relations between the mayor, the municipal council, and Newark's diverse communities were often so fractious that sustainable coalition building proved to be an elusive goal to resolve longstanding crime, education, and other social problems. Based on original interviews with Cory Booker, city council members, and other prominent Newark politicians, A Post Racial Change is Gonna Come is a powerful history of how Newark became the focal point for transformative politics in urban America.

1

Newark’s Sordid Past and Early Community Development Politics

An important aspect of Newark’s modern politics and urban experience began around the mid-twentieth century. Like so many medium and large cities, Newark has gone through a number of contentious and transformational eras. From the Great Migration to residential or de facto segregation to urban riots, Newark experienced challenging times. Essentially, Newark is “the metaphor of America’s urban crisis.”¹ Yet Newarkers weathered unique benchmarks in advancing the city’s local politics. And many of these milestones in turn shaped many residents’ political and social experiences. Not surprisingly then, many Newarkers still remember the time of the 1967 riots, thus shaping their political and racial perspectives.²

During the 1950s, Newark witnessed tremendous growth both inside and around the city. This decade has been regarded as Newark’s heyday when many large businesses prospered, the population was at its peak, and significant opportunities flourished for many Newarkers. However, like most northeastern cities, Newark was a tale of two cities: one that was prosperous with a teeming middle class that was largely white and made up of second-generation European immigrants, and a second city that was significantly poorer with an increasing Black migrant population. The 1950s was a decade associated with the second wave of the Great Migration when tens of thousands of Black southerners relocated to cities in the north, including Newark, to find jobs and the American Dream.³ This period continued the process of ghetto development in the city; only a generation earlier, thousands of Blacks had relocated to Newark’s Black ghetto.⁴

The vast majority of Black southern migrants were poor and undereducated and had little vocational training.⁵ Not only did this population discover the political, social, and economic limitations of a northern city,⁶ they also faced the harsh reality of de facto segregation, or reinforced residential patterns, as well as limited social mobility. Newark’s White population “had not witnessed such an influx since the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans in the late nineteenth century,” observes Newark historian Clement Price. But the key ­difference, he notes is that “since they came in much larger numbers the white response was more unified and hostile” by local residents, city government, and Newark’s business sector. In short, Newark’s response to the Great Migration was a backlash, and both the public and private sectors institutionalized the restrictive covenant approach of limiting Blacks in predominately White areas.⁷ While the media gave much attention to the notorious problems of southern Jim Crow state laws or de jure legalized segregation that many Blacks were trying to escape in the South, Newark’s (and other northern cities’) de facto segregation was largely ignored.⁸ From a shortage of low income housing to being politically marginalized, the majority of Black Newarkers had limited access to basic city services for generations.⁹ Health problems in Newark’s Black communities went largely unnoticed by medical professionals and government social workers.¹⁰ Newark’s “leaders ignored the crass discrimination and deepening poverty,” states New Jersey historian John Cunningham.¹¹

While local politics operated under a commission-led system with no formally elected mayor and council, these leaders largely ignored the growing de facto segregation, housing shortage, and underfunded community resources in expanding Black neighborhoods.¹² Price notes that “in Newark it seems that progressive government only helped to obscure the city’s problems, particularly those which faced the black community.”¹³ Newark’s Commissioners viewed population congestion as a major problem, but the city had insufficient housing for decades and there was no real solution to address the growing issue. From the very inception of the Commission form of government, Newark continued to promote commercial zoning in desired areas, preventing much needed housing construction.¹⁴ All the while, because Blacks were not allowed to live in White communities, Black communities continued to expand in marginalized areas, such as in Jewish communities or the inner city.¹⁵ Outlying neighborhoods were notorious for their violent reactions towards Blacks in largely Italian and Irish neighborhoods.¹⁶ So Black Newarkers, especially those in poverty, were relegated to the central part of the city because of racism, housing shortages, and residential discrimination by the government and commercial sectors.¹⁷

In 1953, Newarkers, hoping to elect publicly accountable officials to address the city’s social problems, voted for a study to consider changing the city charter and incorporate a mayor-council system. Only 40 years earlier, Newark had adopted a commission-led system in the name of reform to ideally end ward bosses and political machines. Machine politicians had gained control of Newark, with commissioners running their departments like bureaucratic and unresponsive empires. Moreover, ethnic politics replaced good intentions, and only a few politically connected European-Americans held power. Since Newark had exclusive urban enclaves, “community development in many areas was parochial, thus giving each community its own stores, taverns, churches,—its own pride and its own way of life.” Newark thus was not one city, as Price observes, “but virtually several ethnic villages tied together in large part by a centralized municipal government and its industrial and commercial life.”¹⁸ For Black Newarkers, he argues, “this meant that problems such as housing, employment, and segregation were disregarded by the city fathers who focused on the larger city environment and not … conditions of a small [but growing] minority.”¹⁹

Worse yet, commissioners were elected at-large in nonpartisan races, and no Blacks ever served on any commission, limiting Newark’s Black politics and reinforcing Black political isolation. This was disconcerting because Newark was undergoing a second wave of the Great Migration, while the city could barely handle the first migration adequately and Black poverty remained a significant problem.²⁰ Ideally, having ward council members would address problems in the city’s various wards, including Newark’s growing Black communities. “The reform effort of 1953 was supposed to mark heightened awareness of minority and social problems,” notes Newark attorney Robert Curvin. However, the political response by elected leaders did not benefit many Black residents and caused more of a backlash as thousands more Black migrants arrived from southern states. Ward council members and the mayors under the new government employed “‘Jim Crow’ strategies, attempts to contain the Black population in their present neighborhoods and schools and continue or ignore the long-standing mistreatment of Blacks by the police, courts and other elements of government.”²¹

A year after the reform measures took shape, Newarkers voted in one of the commissioners, Leo Carlin, as mayor. Councilman Irvine Turner was also elected to represent the Central Ward and served as Newark’s first Black elected official.²² He was widely known for giving City Hall jobs to his constituents and forging relations with White ethnic mayors and their machines. Some, especially the Black middle class, saw Turner as an erratic, unprincipled demagogue who appealed to newly arriving southern Blacks. Not surprisingly, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League did not favor his politics.²³ But Turner’s relations with Carlin were strong in the beginning as the mayor sought government reform, assuring more mayoral power for his office as he lobbied corporations to remain in the city as they considered moving to the suburbs.²⁴

Carlin was equally beholden to Irish interests, and he helped establish a corrupt machine. The mayor appeared cold to many voters because he attended few community events and public gatherings.²⁵ As a result, in 1962, Carlin was defeated by Hugh Addonizio, who later established a political machine of his own, with graft and patronage politics.²⁶ His administration was well-known for crime, corruption, and ties to the mafia.²⁷ Even though Addonizio campaigned to end police brutality and discrimination and hired some Blacks for city jobs, he did little to address wider social issues in Newark’s Black communities. Addonizio reserved political power for himself, his machine, and his faithful Italian-American supporters, similar to Carlin before him.²⁸

Once again, despite the re-chartering of the city government and the new ­mayoral administrations, elected officials did not heed the concerns of Newark’s growing Black communities. Under the city government of both the Carlin and Addonizio administrations, few Black Newarkers had a political voice. The mayoral machines were so successful in fostering power for their offices that they largely aided the Italian, Irish, and Polish communities, while increasingly alienating many Black Newarkers. Public school enrollment was almost two-thirds Black; teaching positions, construction, and City Hall jobs went to few Blacks; and social injustice was blatant. On the surface, this political marginalization was familiar in many northern cities during this era. However, for Newark, it was common practice for local leaders to ignore Black segments of the city and treat them as a subcommunity.²⁹ So with the Irish and Italian political machines operating City Hall, Newark’s Black communities and their issues were considered an afterthought, while the city’s Black population was exploding. In 1950, Blacks made up 17 percent of Newark’s population; in 1960, the black population was nearly 35 percent, and by 1970 it was over 54 percent³⁰ (or between 1940 and 1970, the Black population quadrupled). Therefore, the Central Ward included 90 percent of the Black population by 1950. Despite this surge in numbers, Blacks were not able to attain much political power or social mobility.

Instead of addressing racial concerns and population surges, the Carlin and Addonizio administrations focused on downtown redevelopment because they wanted large corporations to continue to maintain their businesses downtown instead of moving to the suburbs. There was a tremendous building surge at this time, but mainly for white-collar professional businesses. Noted journalist Ronald Porambo argues that downtown construction was “one of the most ambitious rebuilding programs in the nation.”³¹ Trying to retain major corporations like Westinghouse, General Electric, Mutual Benefit and Prudential was the focus of Mayors Carlin and Addonizio—not retaining manufacturing or industrial entities. The result was a massive deindustrialization of the city and unemployment for many Newarkers, particularly Black residents, while Whites and industries relocated outside the central city. Essentially, poor inner-city Newarkers were forced to find employment outside of Newark; however, many professional jobs stayed in the downtown area, which made Newark’s daily population grow more than 100 percent.³² Despite new downtown construction, 250 manufacturers left Newark during the 1950s,³³ and, between 1950 and 1967, the city lost over 20,000 manufacturing jobs (or nearly a quarter of the workfare).³⁴ This missed opportunity for community rebuilding left many Black Newarkers disillusioned; they were no ­longer employed in nearby factories, and, because few poor inner-city residents owned cars, it was difficult for many to travel to a new workplace when companies relocated to the suburbs. In short, after years of attracting cheap Black labor from the south, few job opportunities remained in the once industrial Newark.³⁵

The housing crisis was a concern for many Newarkers, particularly those arriving from outside the city. Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing in the nation during the 1950s. With this housing crunch and crisis, the Newark Housing Authority (NHA) became the lead agency to handle housing issues; all the while, the NHA attained more political power and maintained various forms of racial segregation by forcing Blacks to live in central Newark. NHA’s executive director, Louis Danzig, made the Authority the city’s official redevelopment agency. During the city’s re-chartering period, the agency was allowed to act as an autonomous entity. “The civic leaders settled for a role in renewal politics that excluded a dominant influence over the making of slum clearance policy,” argues historian Harold Kaplan.³⁶ Danzig was essentially an agent for himself and rarely for the mayor. With formalized power, he and the NHA moved swiftly to receive federal monies for redevelopment proposals. “Less than eighteen months intervened between the passage of the 1949 Housing Act and the announcement of Newark’s first slum clearance project. ... By submitting a concrete clearance proposal earlier than most other cities in the United States, Newark was able to secure a prior claim to federal funds,” Kaplan reveals.³⁷ In the short term, attaining more federal support for housing projects pleased many constituents: the poor who wanted to live in these housing projects, the supposed political reformers who applauded slum clearance, and the organized crime bosses who benefited from construction contracts.

So the NHA attempted to redevelop large swaths of the city, often razing neighborhoods for construction of new low-income housing and larger college campuses and public spaces. It was a strategy of slum clearance that was too often associated with race since many poor Black residents were forced to relocate. In the process, Danzig gained the trust of Central ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Newark's Sordid Past and Early Community Development Politics
• 2 The 2002 and 2006 Mayoral Elections
• 3 The Mayors' Identity Politics and Their Political Shortcomings
• 4 Booker's Community Development Initiatives
• 5 The 2010 Election and Booker's Second-Term Honeymoon
• 6 Newark, Booker and Post-Racial Reality
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index