Cover of The Newark Frontier
The Newark Frontier Community Action in the Great Society
by Mark Krasovic
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cloth: 978-0-226-35279-4 | Electronic: 978-0-226-35282-4
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

To many, Newark seems a profound symbol of postwar liberalism’s failings: an impoverished, deeply divided city where commitments to integration and widespread economic security went up in flames during the 1967 riots. While it’s true that these failings shaped Newark’s postwar landscape and economy, as Mark Krasovic shows, that is far from the whole story.

The Newark Frontier shows how, during the Great Society, urban liberalism adapted and grew, defining itself less by centralized programs and ideals than by administrative innovation and the small-scale, personal interactions generated by community action programs, investigative commissions, and police-community relations projects. Paying particular attention to the fine-grained experiences of Newark residents, Krasovic reveals that this liberalism was rooted in an ethic of experimentation and local knowledge. He illustrates this with stories of innovation within government offices, the dynamic encounters between local activists and state agencies, and the unlikely alliances among nominal enemies. Krasovic makes clear that postwar liberalism’s eventual fate had as much to do with the experiments waged in Newark as it did with the violence that rocked the city in the summer of 1967.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Krasovic is assistant professor of history and American studies and associate director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University—Newark.

REVIEWS

“We have lacked a big book on Newark for a long time, and The Newark Frontier fills this major historiographical gap. Krasovic makes a compelling case for considering Newark as a critical benchmark in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and, as such, a touchstone for the fate of postwar liberalism. He situates his study brilliantly, showing how Newark happens not just to be the touchstone of a formative experiment but its logical showcase. The riots in Newark, moreover, prove not just incidental to that experiment but woven into its identity, before and after the fact. Through his expert use of diverse sources, Krasovic manages to tell a complex story in a clear and accessible manner. This is an important book.”
— Howard Gillette, Jr., author of Camden After the Fall

“The Newark Frontier tells an important history of an iconic city during the crucial years of its transition from traditional machine politics of post-World War II through an urban uprising in 1967 to a city led by an African American mayor in 1970. Krasovic uncovers the complicated ways federal programs associated with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society created new avenues to confront ineffective urban policies and political traditions. The book offers a fresh perspective on the Great Society and makes an innovative contribution to the study of urban America. It is clear that Krasovic has done the hard work of research and has thought deeply and creatively about the complicated nature of liberalism.”
— Susan Youngblood Ashmore, author of Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972

“Krasovic tells a riveting story that takes us from the Kennedy/Johnson Great Society to Newark’s streets, documenting how the force of community action transformed American politics and neighborhoods in the 1960s and beyond. The author’s extraordinary research has yielded an indispensable and timely contribution to our understanding of this pivotal decade in the history of U.S. cities. The Newark Frontier deftly balances the efforts of residents, leaders, organizers, law enforcement, and administrators who fought for a better urban future, as they pushed novel levers of federal funding and local power.”
— Alison Isenberg, author of Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

“The real strength of The Newark Frontier is Krasovic’s ability to skillfully weave together various threads—the national and the local, as well as the perspectives of city hall, the police department, and various proponents of community action—to form a nuanced narrative of Newark during this crucial moment of political transformation. . . .By documenting the ways in which local actors tested the limits of the liberal state, Krasovic makes an important contribution to the literature on the Great Society to which future scholars can turn.”
— The Journal of African American History

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0000
[Introduction, book organization, key arguments, Lyndon Johnson, municipal reform]
This introduction begins with President Lyndon Johnson's invocation of the Great Society as an effort to think social problems beyond the limitations of the state. Central to this vision was a set of administrative structures that valued an ethic of "community action" by decentering decision-making and knowledge production. It explains that Newark was primed for such thinking because of its recent experiences with its own municipal administrative reform and a new consciousness of an imminent black majority. The book's main argument--that this context made Newark the frontier of community action and, thereby, the frontier of postwar liberalism--is presented. (pages 1 - 12)

Part I: The Rise of Community Action


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0001
[Community Action Program, War on Poverty, David Hackett, Robert F. Kennedy, Richard Boone, maximum feasible participation]
This chapter provides a history of the development of the Community Action Program within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It complements those histories that have focused on the role of social scientists and academic theory in the development of the program by providing accounts of key program architects' encounters with marginalized Americans, including Native Americans and urban gang members. Out of such encounters grew a critique of the federal bureaucracy that, in turn, produced community action. (pages 15 - 34)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0002
[United Community Corporation, Mayor Hugh Addonizio, Cyril deGrasse Tyson, neighborhood area boards, Tim Still, patronage, Newark city council]
This chapter charts the Community Action Program's arrival and first few years in Newark, which was among the first cities to submit an antipoverty grant proposal to the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Leading the local effort was Newark's independent community action agency, the United Community Corporation (UCC), which was established as independent of City Hall. When the UCC pioneered the use of neighborhood antipoverty boards, it helped foster political dissidence and protest within the city. Much of this chapter concerns the attacks leveled at the UCC by the city council and the administration of Mayor Hugh Addonizio. (pages 35 - 63)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0003
[civil rights movement, CORE, ERAP, Clinton Hill neighbourhood, quality-of-life issues, civilian review board, United Freedom Ticket, medical school relocation]
This chapter explores several political movements and figures with which the Community Action Program intersected in Newark and how they collectively converged on one key issue--the use of urban renewal to relocate the state medical school to a black residential neighborhood in Newark--in the months before the city's July 1967 riots. It covers the development of and the UCC's role in campaigns for a civilian review board to oversee complaints against the Newark Police Department, for an independent black Democratic political ticket, and for various quality-of-life issues raised predominantly by black mothers and the local ERAP project in one neighborhood. The chapter views these various campaigns, culminating in the medical school crisis, as central to the development of black power in Newark and demonstrates the role that federally funded community action played in each. (pages 64 - 90)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0004
[Newark Police Department, police reform, police-community relations, police brutality, police training, Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, Newark Human Rights Commission]
This chapter tells the story of how the Great Society's vision of community action intersected with the Newark Police Department. It provides a historical sketch of the history of police reform in Newark, which, as in many places, produced distance and hostility between the department and, especially, the increasingly black community it served. Several efforts to open the department to the community are covered--including citizen observers and various police-community training efforts, including one funded via President Johnson's pioneering investments in local law enforcement--as is the rearguard action waged by the police department and its largely white supporters, for whom the department was the last administrative redoubt in an increasingly black city. (pages 91 - 114)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0005
[Riots, fourth precinct, John Smith, Esta Williams, Kenneth Melchior]
This interlude section tells the story of the 1967 riot's beginning at the city's fourth precinct police building via the perspectives of two figures, each of which represents one of the two main tracks on which the book's story proceeds: community action and the police. Esta Williams, a local antipoverty and tenant activist, tells of being called to the scene, visiting the man whose arrest and beating had first drawn a crowd to the precinct, and watching as the crowd and police began their fighting. Sergeant Kenneth Melchior was called to the scene to assess the charges and countercharges being made and negotiated with community activists seeking access to the prisoner. The interlude gives the reader crucial information about the riots that will be important in the ensuing chapters. (pages 115 - 124)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part II: The Commission Response to Rioting


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0006
[National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, Otto Kerner, John Lindsay, commission form, administrative thing, epistemology of rioting]
This chapter is the first of three that explore the cultural logic of official efforts to make sense of the riots. It tells the story of the presidentially appointed Kerner Commission and its nearly failed effort to produce a unanimous report out of the melee of data and narrative it collected. It tracks the fraught cultural production of rioting by a federal commission committed, in Great Society style, to the inclusion of community knowledge and desires in its assessment of the violence. It pays particular attention to commission members' field trips to Newark and the tension that developed between the commission and Mayor Addonizio, who came to represent for the commission the sort of recalcitrant local power structure that community action was designed to disrupt. (pages 127 - 152)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0007
[Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder, Governor's Commission, Report for Action, Governor Richard J. Hughes, commission hearings, political conversion, 1968 Trenton riots]
This chapter tells the story of the state riot investigative commission appointed by New Jersey governor Richard Hughes. While the previous chapter approached the Kerner Commission from the inside, this one approaches the Governor's Commission mainly from the perspective of those who, by testifying before it, sought to leverage the commission form's commitment to community action to advance their own narrative of the riots. Ultimately, via a narrative of Governor Hughes's shifting response to the riots, it suggests the conversional potential of such commissions, as well as the limits thereof. (pages 153 - 178)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0008
[New Jersey State Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, antiliberalism, Road to Anarchy, Fred Toto, black sniper, riot suppression, Vietnam War]
This final chapter in the riot commission triptych considers the short history of the riot investigation conducted by the New Jersey Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) in response to the findings of its liberal government counterparts. Calling itself a "commission," but failing to adopt the commission form's commitment to broad-based knowledge gathering, the PBA investigators spoke almost entirely to police department employees and known supporters of the police. Its report blamed a purportedly coddling liberalism for urban rioting. This story furthers one of the book's key themes: the adaptive warping of the community action ethic to conservative ends. (pages 179 - 196)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part III: New Directions for Community Action


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0009
[law and order, police equipment, police activism, vigilantism, neighborhood defense, Anthony Imperiale, North Ward Citizens Committee, Loyal Americans for Law and Order, ACLU]
This chapter is the first of three that examine new directions in the politics of community action. Here, the post-riots rise of law and order politics in Newark is considered as an extension of earlier defenses of the city's police department against the incursion of (black) community action. It examines efforts to roll back and prevent efforts to improve police-community relations, efforts that had always been regarded hostilely by the police department, and several community-based organizations that defended the department and proselytized for a law-enforcement-based response to urban violence. The chapter views these organizations--including the nationally known neighborhood-defense group created in the North Ward by Anthony Imperiale--as a warped version of liberal community action: community-based efforts to seal off the police department from further incursions from the black population and its liberal supporters. (pages 199 - 223)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0010
[Tom Hayden, Nathan Wright Jr., National Conference on Black Power, left radicalism, revolutionary violence, New Right, neoliberalism]
This chapter tracks two national figures' flirtation with and ultimate rejection of the politics of community action. As a pivotal figure in Newark's ERAP project, Tom Hayden had been involved in the local community action program via his local neighborhood antipoverty board. Reverend Nathan Wright Jr. had come to Newark to lead the Episcopal diocese's urban affairs office. After the riots, they both became convinced that the Great Society's community action politics had proven tragically ineffective. The chapter follows both figures as they sought alternatives: Hayden as he (along with many in the New Left) began flirting with the revolutionary potentials of violence and Wright as he embraced market-based urban development and became a darling of the New Right. (pages 224 - 246)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0011
[black power movement, Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, peacekeeping, Model Cities, Amiri Baraka, Newark Black and Puerto Rican Political Conventions]
This chapter follows the post-riots development of black power in Newark as it shifted from a politics based on community participation to one based in community control, a tension central in the history of community action. It tracks the efforts of antipoverty activists to first end the violence, then shape the narrative thereof. Faced with charges that it had played a major role in fomenting the violence and with diminished and redirected federal funding, the UCC proved time and again--most significantly in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination--that it was perhaps the most effective agent of peace in the city. It demonstrates that, when Amiri Baraka and his United Brothers organization took aim at City Hall via a decisive turn to electoral politics, they found a ready reservoir of political experience and activists in those who had for the previous four years pursued community action. (pages 247 - 278)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.003.0012
[1970 Newark municipal election, Kenneth Gibson, hollow prize, dismantling of community action, block grants, legacy of community action, community development corporations]
The book's conclusion considers the legacy of 1960s community action in the decades after the election of the city's first black mayor in 1970, a period in which the city was regarded as a largely hollow prize. Numerous municipal officials during this period--including two mayors--had gained a political education via the city's antipoverty program. But they faced greatly diminished federal investments that came increasingly in the form of block grants that were uninterested in significant community participation. The conclusion follows the depletion and reorganization of the Community Action Program and the broader ethic that had guided it, yet finds their most significant legacy in the various community-based organizations that continue to anchor particular neighborhoods and value the knowledge and desires of their residents. (pages 279 - 292)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Notes

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2016. Page maintained by BiblioVault.