The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990 (Historical Studies of Urban America)

Stories of Newark’s postwar decline are easy to find. But in __The Fixers__, Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city’s decline mounted by Newark’s residents and suburban neighbors. In these pages, we meet the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates in unprecedented numbers. There are tenants who mounted a historic rent strike to transform public housing and renegade white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing and influence housing policy. These are just a few of the “fixers” we meet—people who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state. Rabig argues that fixers play dual roles. They support resistance, but also mediation; they fight for reform, but also more radical and far-reaching alternatives; they rally others to a collective cause, but sometimes they broker factions. Fixers reflect longer traditions of organizing while responding to the demands of their times. In so doing, they end up __fixing__ (like a fixative) a new and enduring pattern of activist strategies, reforms, and institutional expectations—a pattern we continue to see today. From the 1960s to the 1990s, civil rights, black power, and antipoverty activists confronted both deeply rooted forms of inequality and new variants produced by the urban crisis. Recognizing the limits of liberal reform in the 1950s and 1960s, they devised new approaches that altered the relationship between urban civil society and the state and endured as neoliberal governing priorities took hold. This transformation is explored through the emergence of individual and organizational fixers. Fixers made new alliances and leveraged sources of power available through new legislation, although their distinctive roles have not been widely recognized in the historiography. Fixers incorporated militant protests and black power goals while institutionalizing social movement gains and implement stalled reform on the local level. They protested private-sector discrimination, unfulfilled government promises, and the destructive consequences of urban renewal. They simultaneously attempted to build more equitable institutions and pursue methods of enforcement where government policies failed. By the 1970s, organizational fixers adopted a broad view of the interconnected aspects of racial inequality and capitalism, but sought to address them on a neighborhood scale through community development corporations. This book offers insight into the black freedom struggle in the urban north by examining the intersection of movements it enabled, the varieties of black power that briefly coalesced, and the significant—if incomplete—reforms it institutionalized in the transformation from liberalism to neoliberalism Intro -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part One. At the Crossroads -- 1. Fighting for Jobs in the "Laboratory of Democracy"--2. Restructure or Rebel? Newark's War on Poverty -- 3. "Case City Number One": Urban Renewal and the Newark Uprising -- Part Two. Fixers Emerge -- 4. The Making of a Fixer: Black Power, Corporate Power, and Affirmative Action -- 5. Fixers for the 1970s? The Stella Wright Rent Strike and the Transformation of Public Housing -- Part Three. Institutionalizing the Movements -- 6. Black Power, Neighborhood Power, and the Growth of Organizational Fixers -- 7. From Redeeming the Cities to Building the New Ark: Black Nationalism and Community Economic Development -- 8. The New Community Corporation: Catholic Roots, Suburban Leverage, and Pragmatism -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index