With a foreword by the Honorable Ras J. Baraka, 40th Mayor of Newark,
NJ, The War Is Here is Life magazine photographer Bud Lee's
dramatic, empathetic, and still shocking record of the Newark uprising
of 1967--a pivotal moment in a summer of protest and rage across the
country, whose reverberations we still feel today.
July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver
John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a
tinderbox--became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long
days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were
injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage
caused. The scars on the city remained for decades.
Bud Lee, a 26-year-old novice photographer for Life magazine, was
called upon to cover the civic uprising in Newark as it broke out. Lee
and Life reporter Dale Wittner arrived to find a majority Black
population--already struggling under a corrupt local government and a
vicious, authoritarian police force--trying to persevere in
extraordinary circumstances: stores burned and looted; a city under
siege by trigger-happy city and state police; and the young,
inexperienced, and exhausted National Guardsmen sent to patrol it day
and night.
The War Is Here documents the several days Bud Lee spent in Newark.
These photographs capture life in a city transformed into an urban war
zone. Lee witnessed first-hand two policemen shoot a man named Billy
Furr in the back. Lee's dramatic images of this cold-blooded murder ran
in Life. The same bullets also hit and wounded a 12-year-old boy named
Joey Bass Jr., who had been playing at a nearby intersection. Lee's
stark, emotional image of Bass, lying bleeding and contorted in pain on
dirty concrete, ran on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life, sparking a
national conversation on race and police violence and becoming the
defining image of the "long, hot summer" of '67--a summer of fire and
fury, protest and rage across the country. Over half a century later,
Bud Lee's raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of
Newark, at a turning point in the city's history, continue to resonate:
a testament to their resilience and fortitude.
