The fixers : devolution, development, and civil society in Newark, 1960-1990 / Julia Rabig.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rabig, Julia, author.

Series:

Historical studies of urban America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--New Jersey--Newark.

African Americans.

Newark (N.J.)--Social conditions--20th century.

Newark (N.J.).

Social conditions.

New Jersey--Newark.

Physical Description:

viii, 333 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

At the crossroads

Fighting for jobs in the "laboratory of democracy"

Restructure or rebel: Newark's war on poverty

"Case city number one": urban renewal and the Newark uprising

Fixers emerge

The making of a fixer: black power, corporate power, and affirmative action

Fixers for the 1970s: the Stella Wright rent strike and the transformation of public housing

Institutionalizing the movements

Black power, neighborhood power, and the growth of organizational fixers

From redeeming the cities to building the new ark: black nationalism and community economic development

The new community corporation: Catholic roots, suburban leverage, and pragmatism.

ISBN:

9780226388311

022638831X

OCLC:

936548608