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Toni Caldwell, CEO and executive director of Tri-City Development Corporation, described Booker’s 2006 victory as “a huge opportunity to realign the resources to benefit the community.” Leaders such as Caldwell were also heartened by Booker’s promise to implement revisions to the city’s Land Use Master Plan, which CDC leaders have advocated for years.

But Booker’s star shines much brighter in the national press than it does at home, where he was threatened with a recall campaign in the first year of his administration and has faced accusations of favoring friends for city contracts. Although CDC leaders hesitate to pass definitive judgment on Booker’s performance thus far, some sense that despite his high-profile attempts to promote accountability, he has distanced himself from the neighborhood-based activism that nurtured his early political aspirations, sustained a single-minded emphasis on downtown at the expense of neighborhoods, and sidelined established organizations.

CDCs’ wary stance toward municipal government is deeply entrenched in the city’s turbulent recent history. Newark’s first-generation CDCs emerged between 1966 and 1972, seeking to stem the departure of people and jobs, while securing residents’ voice in local development policies. The history of these organizations—influenced by the civil-rights and black-power movements, as well as the rise of ethnic nationalism—is instructive for understanding what kind of relationship Newark’s community economic development organizations are likely to have with the new administration and what sort of role they will play in the city’s future.

Booker’s 2006 victory and James’s 2008 conviction book-ended the fortieth anniversary of the riot. Sparked by the beating of a black cab driver by two white policemen on July 12, 1967, the six-day conflict ranked among the most deadly and destructive of the 1960s urban uprisings. Twenty-six people died; nearly all were killed by police or National Guardsmen, and nearly all were African-American.

At the time, Newark was in the midst of a demographic shift from a white to a black majority, while protests against racial discrimination in employment, housing, and education gained force across the city. Shortly before the riot, then-mayor Hugh J. Addonizio had announced plans by state and municipal officials to build a teaching and research hospital, New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (now called University of Medicine and Dentistry or UMDNJ), in Newark. Slated to occupy more than 100 acres, this centerpiece of Addonizio’s urban-renewal agenda threatened to displace mostly poor and working-class African-American residents of the Central Ward, who were excluded by price and discrimination from the surrounding communities. After the riot, residents fought the development through a coalition of groups—Committee Against Black and Puerto Rican Removal, SNCC, CORE, and others—and successfully negotiated with state, city, and federal authorities to reduce the building’s acreage, increase relocation aid, and insure that local residents would be hired by the school.

The achievement and enforcement of the medical school agreement rested on the work of a web of connections at different levels of government that offered many points of leverage. It provided a tentative model for ordinary residents’ involvement in development politics and contributed to the pivotal moment when the city’s first generation of CDCs took root.

Early CDCs sought holistic strategies for organizing residents, mitigating the consequences of disinvestment and urban renewal, and overcoming the political marginalization of African-Americans. Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City residents who recognized their cities’ common problems founded Tri-City People’s Union for Economic Progress in 1966. The Newark branch of Tri-City endured, while the others folded. Critical of the wholesale demolition of neighborhoods, Tri-City purchased and rehabilitated three-story wood-frame homes in West Side Park, using the process to train local residents in construction. Their rehabilitation effort—called Amity Village—aimed to preserve housing stock in the former Ukrainian enclave and foster pride and self-determination among newer African-American residents.

Other fledgling CDCs emerged in response to the pattern of redlining and blockbusting that had reconfigured Newark’s neighborhoods. Unified Vailsburg Service Organization (UVSO) started in 1972 when two organizations—one of clergy and another of youth—merged to address the perception that public services had declined in this neighborhood on the city’s western border. Vailsburg was over 90 percent white, and according to UVSO’s executive director, Mike Farley, the group’s founders “knew that change was inevitable and wanted to prepare for rather than fight it.”

UVSO’s position distinguished it from other block associations that opposed the influx of African-Americans into Vailsburg and even considered seceding from Newark. UVSO eventually persuaded white block associations to pursue collaboration rather than confrontation. Ultimately, many white homeowners left the community and, during the 1970s, Vailsburg’s population shifted swiftly to a black majority. But while other parts of the city shrank, Vailsburg remained at a more or less consistent 35,000.