Fifty years on: The message for America from Mayor Gibson's Newark

Newark’s storied past as the pulsating heart of New Jersey’s urban soul has been much in the spotlight lately with the television mini-series of Phillip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” This story, a speculative, contra-factual narrative of a gang of pro-Nazi American plutocrats' takeover of the US government in the early 1940s, is meant as a cautionary regarding the fragility of democratic self-governance and freedom — then and now.

Turning the lens on a more recent period of Newark's actual, rather than imagined, annals, comes the recently published A Mayor For All The People: Kenneth Gibson’s Newark. This volume of first-person recollections of the 16-year administration of the first African-American mayor of a large Northeastern city was compiled and edited by two veterans of the Gibson mayoralty: Robert C. Holmes and my own long-time friend and colleague, Richard W. Roper.

Gibson, who died last year at 86, was elected mayor in 1970, while the city still smoldered in the aftermath of 1967’s bitter and bloody civil disorders, pitting the growing black citizenry against the virtually all-white forces of the Newark PD, Essex County Sheriff’s Department and NJ State Police, reinforced by thousands of armed-for-combat NJ National Guard troops. 

In common parlance, this seminal event is known as the Newark riots. Holmes and Roper refer to it in revisionist terms, not a riot, but a rebellion, just as we refer to other uprisings against central authority in America’s past, like Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts or the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, and even the secession of the south, itself.

The terminology is important. Holmes and Roper, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King before them, treat these civil disorders, which left more than two-dozen dead, many hundreds injured and still more under arrest, as the inevitable, if unlawlful, expression of legitimate fury and frustration on the part of a community kept powerless and impoverished by the systemic racism, discrimination, corruption and police brutality that underlay Newark’s governing arrangements.

This context is essential to understanding not only Gibson’s election in 1970, but his leadership during his four-term tenure. The city and inner suburbs of Essex County bristled with racial tension and suspicions on both sides of the race divide. Charismatic and polarizing personalities like state Assemblyman Tony Imperiale and activist poet-playwright Imamu Baraka stoked the emotions, and an eleven-week teachers’ strike lent an air of perpetual, irremediable crisis. 

In this maelstrom, Gibson assumed power. His personality was subdued — often described as bland or opaque — and his governing style was distinctly technocratic, befitting his engineer’s training. But while others railed, Gibson’s laconic approach was just the tonic needed to keep the wounded city from reverting to chaos. 

Moreover, he had an uncanny appreciation for talent, and assembled around him in his first term an extraordinary team of young, vibrant thinkers and doers, people like Bob Curvin, who went on to write editorials for the New York Times and run the Ford Foundation’s urban programs; civil rights lawyer/activist Junius Williams, and Roper, himself, who served two stints as the Port Authority of NY & NJ’s policy and planning chief. 

It was a heady time, but it did not last. As the years and terms wore on, Gibson’s City Hall increasingly bore the marks of torpor and cronyism that invariably erode every administration that stays around too long.  (Gibson himself would be twice indicted and tried, but never convicted, on charges of official corruption.) The secular trends of inner city poverty, suburbanization (accelerated by the build-out of the federally-funded interstate highway system), poor schools and de-industrialization battered Newark during this period.

Those were forces beyond the scope of any one person or institution to turn around. But what this one man undoubtedly accomplished, with his calm demeanor, his inclusive approach to politics, and his personal authenticity, was to restore civility, community and purpose to a city that was on the brink. And on the strength of those contributions, Newark, since he lost election to a fifth term in 1986, has come back, staging a modest, yet solid renaissance and becoming a vital cultural hub for a diverse mix of minority and immigrant communities. 

Newark this year has been punished by the COVID pandemic. But the years of Ken Gibson are a testament to the city’s resilience. The voices in this volume recall the good and the bad, the successes and disappointments.  A Mayor For All The People is a potent reminder that in times of crisis and disruption, the first prerequisite for recovery is for people to come together.