Continued...

During the 1970s and 1980s, UVSO provided an expanding array of services to children, teenagers, and seniors, while remaining alert to evidence of redlining in the neighborhood, high rates of turnover among homeowners, and upticks in the number of abandoned homes. UVSO financed its first home rehabilitation in the early 1980s. At that time, Farley recalls, “USVO’s housing program was just a drawer in my desk.” But the organization grew steadily, building or rehabilitating more than 150 units between 1994 and 2004.

Newark’s first-generation CDCs emerged alongside the larger political transition underway in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A diverse group of established African-American leaders and younger activists unified around the goal of electing black candidates. Their support for the Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention enabled new alliances between the two groups and challenged the Addonizio administration, electing Newark’s first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, in 1970.

Race and ethnicity shaped Newark residents’ lives in complicated ways. Racial tension remained raw, as many white residents’ hostility toward increasing African-American and Hispanic political clout played out in ways both explosive and subtle at City Hall, on the streets, and in the schools. But residents were also divided by neighborhood affiliation and class, and bound by fears about their future in a city that the rest of the state—and the federal government—seemed to have abandoned.

Emerging CDCs in the 1970s both reflected and sought to transcend the city’s racial and ethnic politics. Some forged a tradition of multiracial organizing that acknowledged the power of racial or ethnic solidarity, but they also built trans-racial coalitions. For example, organizers at Tri-City People’s Corporation recognized that West Side Park’s African-American and Hispanic residents had to speak with one another before they could solve neighborhood problems. In a renovated Ukranian Church they named the People’s Center, Tri-City activists taught children about African and Puerto Rican history, offered Spanish-language courses, and trained African-American and Puerto Rican women as community health advocates. In a neighborhood with few public-health facilities, women taught other women about nutrition and reproductive health, encouraged neighbors to look out for one another, and emboldened them to ask tough questions of doctors.

Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC) organized its diverse neighborhood through the tri-lingual Ironbound Voices, a monthly newspaper in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Started in 1969, ICC addressed residents’ complaints about housing violations and inaccessible healthcare, while providing recreation programs for children and meals for the elderly. Ironbound was—and remains—the city’s most industrialized ward, and ICC’s mission soon expanded to advance environmental justice, focusing on dioxin contamination at former factory sites, noise pollution, and strict enforcement of environmental testing and clean-up standards.

While Newark’s first-generation CDCs often sought to bridge divisions between neighbors, the New Community Corporation (NCC)—Newark’s best-known CDC—also sought to forge relationships between city and suburban residents. NCC emerged out of urgent discussions about the city among an interracial group of parishioners, priests, and suburban Catholics gathered at Queen of Angels Church in the Central Ward shortly after the riot. In 1968, Queen of Angels members and the fledgling NCC led a “Walk for Understanding.” Planned for Palm Sunday over the reservations of then-mayor Addonizio, the walk turned into a memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. who had been killed the week before. A crowd of 25,000 people marched through the Central Ward, and NCC’s founders attempted to translate this momentum into support for the new organization.

Long before the language of “stakeholders” became commonplace in community economic development parlance, NCC sold symbolic “shares” in the Central Ward to residents of Newark and the surrounding suburbs. At a time when suburbanites recoiled from Newark, this fundraising scheme rested on the idea that thriving cities were both an asset to and a responsibility for all New Jersey residents.

Both the election of a new mayor in 1970 and the formation of early CDCs and other civic groups reflected residents’ determination to save their city and their guarded hopes for the future. But rivalry and tension frequently characterized the relationship between Newark’s CDCs and the municipal government. Kenneth Gibson originally sat on NCC’s board and was elected mayor with a groundswell of support from civic organizations formed in the uprising’s aftermath. In 1978, however, he told a White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Development that “citizen participation” was a “bugaboo” and a distraction from the demands of governance.

Under Sharpe James’s tenure in the 1980s and ‘90s, CDCs’ dependence on municipal approval for zoning, some contracts, and the distribution of CDGB funds was enforced by an administration that cultivated wariness and suspicion. One activist recalled that James vilified his critics by verbally attacking them and grossly mischaracterizing their positions on issues ranging from tax reevaluation to the preservation of a community park (James served simultaneously as mayor and state senator). The City Council also curbed residents’ input with a 1997 ordinance that dramatically limited participation at meetings. “When power to speak was gone,” the ICC’s Zak says, “there was a lack of dialogue and I don’t think we’ve recovered from that.” (Under Booker, speaking rules have been liberalized somewhat.)