While acknowledging-and vividly rendering-the explosive moments in
Newark's history, pioneering historian Kevin Mumford shows that the
quotidian political struggles of everyday folk ultimately turned the
city into one peopled and run by African Americans. Yet the ravages of
de-industrialization, white flight, long-term corruption, and a
draconian tax policy had hollowed out the city, transforming blacks
hard-won prize into a congeries of social, economic, and political
problems. Richly documented and immensely readable, Newark is also a
model of sophistication. In Mumford's hands, concepts like the public
sphere, citizenship, and racial identity take on a gritty reality that
will engage political theorists, historians, and all those who care
about the life and death of American cities. -Sonya Michel, University
of Maryland, College Park Newark's volatile past is infamous. The city
has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis.
Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture
punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of
protest in the black community. Newark charts this important city's
place in the nation, from its founding in 1666 by a dissident Puritan as
a refuge from intolerance, through the days of Jim Crow and World War II
civil rights activism, to the height of postwar integration and the
election of its first black mayor. In this broad and balanced history of
Newark, Kevin Mumford applies the concept of the public sphere to the
problem of race relations, demonstrating how political ideas and print
culture were instrumental in shaping African American consciousness. He
draws on both public and personal archives, interpreting official
documents-such as newspapers, commission testimony, and government
records-alongside interviews, political flyers, meeting minutes, and
rare photos. From the migration out of the south to the rise of public
housing and ethnic conflict, Newark explains the impact of African
Americans on the reconstruction of American cities in the twentieth
century. Kevin Mumford is Associate Professor of History and African
American studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of
Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the
Early Twentieth Century.
