Kelly: 50 Years After 'Newark Rebellion', Scars and Problems Linger
Mike Kelly , Record Columnist, @MikeKellyColumn
4:29 p.m. ET July 15, 2017
NEWARK — Sometimes James Drake thinks his hometown is really changing for the better.
Billboards proclaim a “renaissance” in Newark. New townhouses dot neighborhoods where tenements once stood. The downtown skyline features several gleaming buildings, highlighted by Newark’s twin showpieces – the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the Prudential Center arena. An upscale Whole Foods supermarket even opened on Broad Street, along with several restaurants.
But that’s just one side of Newark.
When Drake, 57, a truck driver, turns his eyes to his own neighborhood in this city’s Central Ward — the epicenter 50 years ago this week of what is known to some as the “Newark Riots” and to others as the “People’s Rebellion” — he sees a far different portrait of urban reality.
Just blocks from those new townhouses, office buildings and other amenities that are often cited as evidence of Newark’s social and economic resurgence are neighborhoods of run-down buildings and vacant lots where poverty, crime and unemployment not only persist but have worsened significantly since the deadly turmoil of July 1967.
“I really do think there is a renaissance but it’s not complete,” Drake said on a recent afternoon as he recalled Newark’s five days of upheaval a half-century ago. “What needs to happen is more attention should be paid to the voices of people.”
Today, Newark is a tale of two cities. There is, of course, the much-touted "renaissance" downtown, where suburbanites flock to sporting events and concerts — and jobs at the new corporate headquarters of Panasonic and Audible. It’s a positive story, punctuated by a constant chorus of lofty declarations from civic leaders that Newark is on the brink of a massive economic and social transformation that will forever erase the memory of the racial ferment that has defined life in the city for the past 50 years.
But not far from those new buildings, the chronic problems that plagued Newark in 1967 are still on full display in neighborhoods where crime, poor schools, substandard housing and joblessness act as a potent and discouraging malignancy. Nearly a third of the city’s 277,000 residents remain mired in poverty, and another 18 percent are unemployed — a double-digit increase over those levels a half-century ago.
To see both sides of Newark now is to see how far Newark has come — and how far it still has to go. But the defining thread that runs through these dueling portraits of New Jersey’s largest city is the legacy of five days of bloody violence that began on the evening of July 12, 1967.
Can Newark ever find a way to escape the reputation of the riots and move on? Or will it always be handcuffed by that notorious reputation?
“People have been talking about a renaissance for 20 years, but it’s an uneven renaissance,” said Max Herman, who teaches sociology at New Jersey City University and authored the book “Summer of Rage: An Oral History of the 1967 Newark and Detroit Riots.”
As he researched the violence a half-century ago, Herman said he was struck by the degree to which portions of Newark’s Central and South wards never fully recovered. “There are many people whose lives have not changed,” he said. “Some of the fundamental problems that existed in 1967 are still with us today.”
Fifty years ago, The Record’s Road Warrior columnist John Cichowski was deployed to Newark as a member of the National Guard to help quell a rebellion that saw 23 people killed. Columnist Mike Kelly interviews Cichowski about his experience. NorthJersey.com
A physical and emotional toll
In some ways, it’s hardly a surprise that the scars from 1967 still linger in Newark — physically, in the vacant lots and poverty, and emotionally in the memories of victims. The Newark riot-rebellion — the terms are used interchangeably now by political figures, academics and social activists — took a ghastly toll.
But the violence began with an incident that echoes today in many American communities — an allegation of police brutality.
On the evening of July 12, 1967, a rumor spread that the Newark police — a predominantly white force of 1,322 officers that was largely distrusted by African-Americans — had beaten a black cab driver to death at a Central Ward precinct station house on 17th Avenue.
Local residents flocked to the precinct station. Police emerged, wearing helmets and carrying nightsticks. It turned out that the cab driver was not dead. But he had been badly injured. Residents were furious. They threw rocks and bottles at the police. The police responded by clubbing and arresting demonstrators.
From there, protests — along with riots and looting — rippled through the Central Ward and into other areas of Newark.
By the time the rioting ended on June 17, 24 residents had died, including a 10-year-old boy — almost all of them shot by police or National Guard soldiers who were called in to stop the looting. A white police detective and a white fire captain also were killed by what authorities believe to be gunfire from residents trying to fight back against what they saw as a military-style occupation.
Besides the 26 people who perished, more than 700 were injured and 1,500 were arrested.
Dozens of stores and other businesses along Newark’s Springfield Avenue and elsewhere in the Central ward were burned to the ground. The rubble was later bulldozed and some of the lots are still vacant today. Other businesses simply moved elsewhere, leaving Newark to deal with its three most pressing problems — poverty, poor housing and unemployment.
But Newark’s civil turbulence did not erupt in a vacuum.
The civil rights movement, led primarily by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had already led to major changes in America.
Segregation in schools and other public places had been declared illegal. Voting rights for African-Americans and other minorities had also been bolstered. On July 12 — the day the Newark uprising began — the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state laws that banned interracial marriage. And by the end of the summer of 1967, the U.S. Senate would confirm Thurgood Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
But many civil rights leaders — including King — were deeply frustrated. Much work still needed to be done, they said, especially in large cities where blacks and other minorities were often confined to blighted neighborhoods where good-paying jobs were scarce, schools were neglected and police were often viewed as an unfriendly occupying army.
“This is the other side of the 1960s story that’s rarely told,” said Lawrence Hamm, a longtime civil rights activist in Newark. “When people talk about the 1960s, they focus on Dr. King and the civil rights movement whose locus was mainly in the South. But in large cities in the North and other parts of the nation, it was very different.”
In August 1965, 34 people — most of them African-American and Latino — were killed when the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in riots and looting. The following summer, riots convulsed parts of Cleveland.
Then came the summer of 1967, with Newark as the first major city to explode in violence. In the following weeks, violent upheavals took place in Plainfield, Minneapolis, Detroit and Milwaukee — to name just a few of the more than 100 American cities that experienced racial violence that summer.
Lingering problems
Today, Newark — along with Camden and Paterson — ranks among America’s 10 poorest cities. But in Newark’s case, a key factor in its long struggle, experts say, has been its inability to convince the world that the factors that produced its bloodshed have been brought under control and that the once-vibrant economic hub can rebound.
Another problem is Newark’s shrinking population. More than 130,000 white residents — many of them middle class — moved elsewhere in the two decades after the violence. And while some African-American and Latino families also left, the massive white flight left Newark an overwhelmingly minority city. Today, nearly 85 percent of Newark’s residents are black, Latino or another minority — with high concentrations of poor people.
All this points to a troubling sense of whether the so-called renaissance is real or just a marketing campaign to mask deeper problems — a reality that is not lost on U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, who has cast himself as one of Newark's most active boosters.
Booker, a Democrat, was raised by African-American parents in the largely white Bergen County enclave of Harrington Park. But after undergraduate studies at Stanford, graduate school at Oxford and earning a law degree from Yale, he shunned the corporate world and the comfortable suburbs of his youth and moved to Newark’s Central Ward, where he threw himself into politics and eventually was elected mayor.
Today, Booker sees his adopted home as a work in progress — progress that is advancing far too slowly for his liking.
“There’s been a lot of redemption,” Booker said in a recent interview, conceding that “some of the things that people were rebelling against,” such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing, remain part of the city's fabric, especially for African-Americans.
“In some ways this is a time when Newark is working to vindicate itself to show people who we are but still working to address past ills,” Booker said.
To walk through Newark’s Central Ward today is to trek through two worlds.
One block features a large grocery store, two-story townhouses and freshly paved streets lined with new oak and maple saplings. Black and Latino officers now account for 76 percent of the city’s police force, up from less than 15 percent in 1967.
Not far away, however, the scars of 1967 remain — a vacant lot, a boarded-up store, a once-majestic bank that has been converted into a storefront church, and a bodega with bars on its windows.
"The legacy of the rebellion is that we were able to seek change,” said Samellor Russell, 26, a hair stylist, who conceded that she only “sometimes” believes that Newark is in the midst of a renaissance.
Russell said the city should find a way to make sure that the social and economic improvements of Newark’s business district ripple into the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
“A lot of times, we feel like we are separated,” she said.
What is striking about Russell’s sentiments is how they echo some of the most basic complaints of Newark’s African-American residents a half-century ago.
Nearly one-fifth of the city’s 380,000 residents in 1967 lived in poverty and 40,000 of the city’s 130,000 homes and apartments had been deemed substandard by the federal government.
Many blighted buildings have been torn down, along with blocks of high-rise housing projects where thousands of African-American families lived in fear of crime. And while new townhouses have replaced some of those projects, many poor Newark neighborhoods are pockmarked with vacant lots — a reminder that the dilapidated buildings are gone but nothing has replaced them.
Walter Fields, who grew up in Hackensack and became a leading civil rights advocate in New Jersey, said Newark has all of the tools in place for a major economic revival. But he wonders how that will affect poor African-Americans.
“Once Newark gets reconstructed, who is going to live there?” said Fields, who now lives in Maplewood and runs the North Star News, a website that focuses largely on civil rights topics. “Housing being built is not for poor African-Americans. If you have a situation where African-Americans are boxed in and priced out, then the question becomes: Where do they go?”
A personal legacy
On Wednesday afternoon, under a blazing sun, about 100 Newark residents gathered with activists by a memorial on Springfield Avenue to those killed during the five days of turmoil.
One of them was Kimberly Spellman, whose mother, Eloise Spellman, 41, was killed when National Guard soldiers — allegedly responding to reports of a sniper — fired at the Hayes House projects.
Eloise, who lived in a 10th floor apartment with 11 children, died in the hail of bullets along with two women in other apartments. She was two months pregnant at the time.
Kimberly was 4 when her mother died. She was later moved to a foster family in New York City, where she grew up. But she says she often returned as a teenager and in later years to Newark — and the spot where her mother was killed.
“The people rebelled against what was going on,” Kimberly said. “I love the people. I love the streets. I love the smell when I’m coming into Newark.”
Standing by Kimberly’s side at the service was her sister, Pamela, who was just 7 when her mother was killed.
As Kimberly recounted her lost youth, Pamela hugged her and wiped away tears. Afterward, as she walked away, Pamela stopped and tried to put into words how she feels about the city where she was born and whether it will ever revive.
But she could think only of the mother she barely knew. For her, the legacy of Newark is personal.
“I miss my mom every day,” she said.
Email: kellym@northjersey.com
4:29 p.m. ET July 15, 2017
NEWARK — Sometimes James Drake thinks his hometown is really changing for the better.
Billboards proclaim a “renaissance” in Newark. New townhouses dot neighborhoods where tenements once stood. The downtown skyline features several gleaming buildings, highlighted by Newark’s twin showpieces – the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the Prudential Center arena. An upscale Whole Foods supermarket even opened on Broad Street, along with several restaurants.
But that’s just one side of Newark.
When Drake, 57, a truck driver, turns his eyes to his own neighborhood in this city’s Central Ward — the epicenter 50 years ago this week of what is known to some as the “Newark Riots” and to others as the “People’s Rebellion” — he sees a far different portrait of urban reality.
Just blocks from those new townhouses, office buildings and other amenities that are often cited as evidence of Newark’s social and economic resurgence are neighborhoods of run-down buildings and vacant lots where poverty, crime and unemployment not only persist but have worsened significantly since the deadly turmoil of July 1967.
“I really do think there is a renaissance but it’s not complete,” Drake said on a recent afternoon as he recalled Newark’s five days of upheaval a half-century ago. “What needs to happen is more attention should be paid to the voices of people.”
Today, Newark is a tale of two cities. There is, of course, the much-touted "renaissance" downtown, where suburbanites flock to sporting events and concerts — and jobs at the new corporate headquarters of Panasonic and Audible. It’s a positive story, punctuated by a constant chorus of lofty declarations from civic leaders that Newark is on the brink of a massive economic and social transformation that will forever erase the memory of the racial ferment that has defined life in the city for the past 50 years.
But not far from those new buildings, the chronic problems that plagued Newark in 1967 are still on full display in neighborhoods where crime, poor schools, substandard housing and joblessness act as a potent and discouraging malignancy. Nearly a third of the city’s 277,000 residents remain mired in poverty, and another 18 percent are unemployed — a double-digit increase over those levels a half-century ago.
To see both sides of Newark now is to see how far Newark has come — and how far it still has to go. But the defining thread that runs through these dueling portraits of New Jersey’s largest city is the legacy of five days of bloody violence that began on the evening of July 12, 1967.
Can Newark ever find a way to escape the reputation of the riots and move on? Or will it always be handcuffed by that notorious reputation?
“People have been talking about a renaissance for 20 years, but it’s an uneven renaissance,” said Max Herman, who teaches sociology at New Jersey City University and authored the book “Summer of Rage: An Oral History of the 1967 Newark and Detroit Riots.”
As he researched the violence a half-century ago, Herman said he was struck by the degree to which portions of Newark’s Central and South wards never fully recovered. “There are many people whose lives have not changed,” he said. “Some of the fundamental problems that existed in 1967 are still with us today.”
Fifty years ago, The Record’s Road Warrior columnist John Cichowski was deployed to Newark as a member of the National Guard to help quell a rebellion that saw 23 people killed. Columnist Mike Kelly interviews Cichowski about his experience. NorthJersey.com
A physical and emotional toll
In some ways, it’s hardly a surprise that the scars from 1967 still linger in Newark — physically, in the vacant lots and poverty, and emotionally in the memories of victims. The Newark riot-rebellion — the terms are used interchangeably now by political figures, academics and social activists — took a ghastly toll.
But the violence began with an incident that echoes today in many American communities — an allegation of police brutality.
On the evening of July 12, 1967, a rumor spread that the Newark police — a predominantly white force of 1,322 officers that was largely distrusted by African-Americans — had beaten a black cab driver to death at a Central Ward precinct station house on 17th Avenue.
Local residents flocked to the precinct station. Police emerged, wearing helmets and carrying nightsticks. It turned out that the cab driver was not dead. But he had been badly injured. Residents were furious. They threw rocks and bottles at the police. The police responded by clubbing and arresting demonstrators.
From there, protests — along with riots and looting — rippled through the Central Ward and into other areas of Newark.
By the time the rioting ended on June 17, 24 residents had died, including a 10-year-old boy — almost all of them shot by police or National Guard soldiers who were called in to stop the looting. A white police detective and a white fire captain also were killed by what authorities believe to be gunfire from residents trying to fight back against what they saw as a military-style occupation.
Besides the 26 people who perished, more than 700 were injured and 1,500 were arrested.
Dozens of stores and other businesses along Newark’s Springfield Avenue and elsewhere in the Central ward were burned to the ground. The rubble was later bulldozed and some of the lots are still vacant today. Other businesses simply moved elsewhere, leaving Newark to deal with its three most pressing problems — poverty, poor housing and unemployment.
But Newark’s civil turbulence did not erupt in a vacuum.
The civil rights movement, led primarily by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had already led to major changes in America.
Segregation in schools and other public places had been declared illegal. Voting rights for African-Americans and other minorities had also been bolstered. On July 12 — the day the Newark uprising began — the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state laws that banned interracial marriage. And by the end of the summer of 1967, the U.S. Senate would confirm Thurgood Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
But many civil rights leaders — including King — were deeply frustrated. Much work still needed to be done, they said, especially in large cities where blacks and other minorities were often confined to blighted neighborhoods where good-paying jobs were scarce, schools were neglected and police were often viewed as an unfriendly occupying army.
“This is the other side of the 1960s story that’s rarely told,” said Lawrence Hamm, a longtime civil rights activist in Newark. “When people talk about the 1960s, they focus on Dr. King and the civil rights movement whose locus was mainly in the South. But in large cities in the North and other parts of the nation, it was very different.”
In August 1965, 34 people — most of them African-American and Latino — were killed when the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in riots and looting. The following summer, riots convulsed parts of Cleveland.
Then came the summer of 1967, with Newark as the first major city to explode in violence. In the following weeks, violent upheavals took place in Plainfield, Minneapolis, Detroit and Milwaukee — to name just a few of the more than 100 American cities that experienced racial violence that summer.
Lingering problems
Today, Newark — along with Camden and Paterson — ranks among America’s 10 poorest cities. But in Newark’s case, a key factor in its long struggle, experts say, has been its inability to convince the world that the factors that produced its bloodshed have been brought under control and that the once-vibrant economic hub can rebound.
Another problem is Newark’s shrinking population. More than 130,000 white residents — many of them middle class — moved elsewhere in the two decades after the violence. And while some African-American and Latino families also left, the massive white flight left Newark an overwhelmingly minority city. Today, nearly 85 percent of Newark’s residents are black, Latino or another minority — with high concentrations of poor people.
All this points to a troubling sense of whether the so-called renaissance is real or just a marketing campaign to mask deeper problems — a reality that is not lost on U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, who has cast himself as one of Newark's most active boosters.
Booker, a Democrat, was raised by African-American parents in the largely white Bergen County enclave of Harrington Park. But after undergraduate studies at Stanford, graduate school at Oxford and earning a law degree from Yale, he shunned the corporate world and the comfortable suburbs of his youth and moved to Newark’s Central Ward, where he threw himself into politics and eventually was elected mayor.
Today, Booker sees his adopted home as a work in progress — progress that is advancing far too slowly for his liking.
“There’s been a lot of redemption,” Booker said in a recent interview, conceding that “some of the things that people were rebelling against,” such as poverty, unemployment and poor housing, remain part of the city's fabric, especially for African-Americans.
“In some ways this is a time when Newark is working to vindicate itself to show people who we are but still working to address past ills,” Booker said.
To walk through Newark’s Central Ward today is to trek through two worlds.
One block features a large grocery store, two-story townhouses and freshly paved streets lined with new oak and maple saplings. Black and Latino officers now account for 76 percent of the city’s police force, up from less than 15 percent in 1967.
Not far away, however, the scars of 1967 remain — a vacant lot, a boarded-up store, a once-majestic bank that has been converted into a storefront church, and a bodega with bars on its windows.
"The legacy of the rebellion is that we were able to seek change,” said Samellor Russell, 26, a hair stylist, who conceded that she only “sometimes” believes that Newark is in the midst of a renaissance.
Russell said the city should find a way to make sure that the social and economic improvements of Newark’s business district ripple into the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
“A lot of times, we feel like we are separated,” she said.
What is striking about Russell’s sentiments is how they echo some of the most basic complaints of Newark’s African-American residents a half-century ago.
Nearly one-fifth of the city’s 380,000 residents in 1967 lived in poverty and 40,000 of the city’s 130,000 homes and apartments had been deemed substandard by the federal government.
Many blighted buildings have been torn down, along with blocks of high-rise housing projects where thousands of African-American families lived in fear of crime. And while new townhouses have replaced some of those projects, many poor Newark neighborhoods are pockmarked with vacant lots — a reminder that the dilapidated buildings are gone but nothing has replaced them.
Walter Fields, who grew up in Hackensack and became a leading civil rights advocate in New Jersey, said Newark has all of the tools in place for a major economic revival. But he wonders how that will affect poor African-Americans.
“Once Newark gets reconstructed, who is going to live there?” said Fields, who now lives in Maplewood and runs the North Star News, a website that focuses largely on civil rights topics. “Housing being built is not for poor African-Americans. If you have a situation where African-Americans are boxed in and priced out, then the question becomes: Where do they go?”
A personal legacy
On Wednesday afternoon, under a blazing sun, about 100 Newark residents gathered with activists by a memorial on Springfield Avenue to those killed during the five days of turmoil.
One of them was Kimberly Spellman, whose mother, Eloise Spellman, 41, was killed when National Guard soldiers — allegedly responding to reports of a sniper — fired at the Hayes House projects.
Eloise, who lived in a 10th floor apartment with 11 children, died in the hail of bullets along with two women in other apartments. She was two months pregnant at the time.
Kimberly was 4 when her mother died. She was later moved to a foster family in New York City, where she grew up. But she says she often returned as a teenager and in later years to Newark — and the spot where her mother was killed.
“The people rebelled against what was going on,” Kimberly said. “I love the people. I love the streets. I love the smell when I’m coming into Newark.”
Standing by Kimberly’s side at the service was her sister, Pamela, who was just 7 when her mother was killed.
As Kimberly recounted her lost youth, Pamela hugged her and wiped away tears. Afterward, as she walked away, Pamela stopped and tried to put into words how she feels about the city where she was born and whether it will ever revive.
But she could think only of the mother she barely knew. For her, the legacy of Newark is personal.
“I miss my mom every day,” she said.
Email: kellym@northjersey.com
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