Blackledge struggles against Police Violence in the wake of Police Murders of george floyd in minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in louisville, and the attempted murder of jacob blake in kenosha have once again sounded a call for black liberation while raising familiar questions about electoral politics and black freedom struggles. 50 years ago, his landmark election came on the heels of a 1967 rebellion in newark when the Police Beating of an unmarked black man struck an uprising against white supremacy. Amidst heightened organizing around racist urban renewal projects and educational injustice, the beating recalled countless Police Killings of black men in the city that had gone unpunished over the years and brought thousands into the july. At the july National Guard was called into uprisingto stop the which cost lives. In the following days, months, and years, the black and puerto rican communities leveraged the power and momentum of the uprising to build Community Power and organize successful campaigns or Community Control of urban development, educational justice, and political power in the city. Organized around the principle of cultural nationalism and began building educational, cultural, economic, and political organizations including the unit the united brothers. Armed same time, heavily white militias patrolled the citys predominantly italian north award and terrorized black communities signifying the violent white black backlash to lactamase for human rights and selfdetermination. Into this charts political fray came can gibson, a political moderate who had run unsuccessfully in the previous mayoral election, running paris cana slew of candidates for city council, bring the rights of stevie wonder, harry belafonte, james brown, and isaac hayes to lend their celebrity to the cause. Meanwhile, in the streets and neighborhoods, organizers registered and mobilized in unprecedented voter turnout that has yet to be matched. The trend is to plant the wet White Nationalism in the late 60s and early 70s, his campaign and election illustrate the excitement and aspiration of black local power in the urban north. At the same time, his administration quickly revealed the limitations of seeking black liberation through the ballot box. A revelation that has again recently become abundantly clear in cities like chicago and atlanta. So, what are the legacies for this era of struggle and what lessons do they hold for a new generation of activists and organizers who have been in the streets for over 100 days now demanding systemic change and black liberation . Here to discuss the legacies and lessons of these histories are beatrice adams, a phd candidate and in africanAmerican History at Rutgers University and a researcher of newark. Com. Williams esquire, a special city historian fort newark and author of unfinished agenda, urban politics in the era of black power. Lastly, the professor of history at Sarah Lawrence college, the author of a nation within the nation. The first question will be for professor williams. You are a leader in the struggle against the urban renewal project that would displace thousands of newarkers. Into an agreement which called for 60 acres of land and medical schools, 60 acres of vacant land for Community Development for housing and on that, housing has been built for thousands of years of Housing Units of housing. An opportunity for black people to get involved through unions. One half apprentices, one third journeymen, and other aspects which i do not have time to go into. That was the beginning of the coalition that morphed into the united brothers. Then it morphed into the committee for unified north which was the platform that brought gibson into electoral power. Peter thank you, professor williams. Professor woodard, you remember the late 1960s and early 1970s. Can you explain the objectives be had the Gibson Campaign and how this election fit within black political power struggles . You are on mute. Prof. Woodard can you hear me now . All right. After the assassinations of malcolm x, dr. King, and the black panther fred hampton, the grassroots organizers felt a great vacuum in the leadership. By the time dr. King came to newark in march, 1968, amiti baracka had met with malcolm x and they had told him about the alabama black party organizing and planted the seeds of an idea to make newark the northern counterpart for the black panther party. Newark was supposed to be the black panther experiment in the jim crow north. When dr. King met with amiri, he proposed a black united front between the civil rights revolution and black power politics. King was assassinated less than two weeks after that meeting. When he was assassinated april 4, 1968, that black united front the june 1968o Political Convention in newark and the 1968 National Black power conference in philadelphia. At that point the National Black power conference made newark the test case for black power politics. All kinds of resources streamed into newark based on that agreement. From the Civil Rights Movement on the one hand, black Power Movement on the other hand, and the black cultural revolution that was going on in the popular art throughout the country. Accidentally, white vigilantes were attacking and mobbing africanamerican and Puerto Ricans in the streets of newark. In response, two poets, amiri baraka and felipe, signed a mutual defense pact insisting an attack on the Puerto Rican Community was an attack on the Africanamerican Community and vice versa. That mutual appreciation and trust grew into a Political Alliance that was articulated at the 1968 black and puerto rican Political Convention. That ended up being the winning formula. 1968 the united brothers ran an allblack ticket at an allblack convention. We lost. 1969, we started early organizing for the 1970 election. With the alliance of blacks and Puerto Ricans, and progressive whites, we won and the other piece is that the Campaign Apparatus for the newark fund did not disband when the election was over. After winning that election and learning how to use mass media and publications, they organized a congress of National African people in national and International Meetings in atlanta, georgia, then they organized the gary convention, the african liberation day in washington, d. C. And on and on. The group that put that together the Fund Community council. It met every sunday after church. That program was called face the , mimicking the tv program. Stand up they would the municipal officials and agreed to their paper, are you cleaning the streets, are you doing the Health Requirements and things like that, so it was an ongoing political movement, convention, some of us were students. We studied the black conventions in the 19th century and we thought that would be a workable formula for the 20th century and i think young people now just usingconvention last week that same method. In a nutshell, that is what the strategy was. Thank you. Peter thank you, professor woodard. Professor adams, you spent a lot of time researching various aspects of the Gibson Administration and continuing struggles for black selfdetermination during these years. Could you talk about how the Gibson Administration measured up to the expectations the people had for him . Prof. Adams of course. Thank you for dr. Blackmere for asking me to serve on this panel and also thank you for allowing be a part of these walking grand resources about the wonderful history of newark. I will talk a little bit about my research for the project in the event that comes to mind is the 1974 puerto rican riot. Im going to call it a rebellion, like so many rebellions in American History, it is sparked by Police Violence. There is the annual cultural celebration happening in newark. The Puerto Rican Community is being over surveilled, there are police there, lots of police. A wreps. Erupts. A little girl is trampled by one of the horses. Of course, this sparks intense intense tensions between police and the Puerto Rican Community who had already been frustrated for years. Arrives on the scene, he tries to calm the tensions. There is also mark march downtown in city hall. The next week, there is a meeting with some of the leaders in the Puerto Rican Community and also spanishspeaking community in general. Eliminating is eliminating. Gibson does something in this meeting that is a little bit candid for a politician. It speaks to the limitations of black political power. They are asking questions about unemployment, asking questions about housing, and gibson says, i can only do so much as mayor. Sometimes i listen to people say oh, the president is helping on a plumber go down, he is helping on a plumber go up and i think how much direct power do power do they have he is in a way dismissing experiences saying, i cannot do anything, this is beyond my control, these issues you are bringing to me, im not interested in your pain as a community at this particular moment. Gibson isis speaks a little less maybe a lot less radical revolutionary than the movement that gets him into office. We already mention the black and Puerto Rican Convention that allows them to become mayor of that movement. We already mentioned the black and Puerto Rican Convention that kind of allows him to become mayor. That is the way he rises to office. Many of us think about it as a comparison between gibson and amiri baraka and how there is not a lot of love there. Baraka is in the meeting and gibson is not necessarily hearing the people. But he is elected four times. He is doing something and i think he is modeling something. He is trying to be the mayor for everyone, trying to serve the totality of the community that has had internal ruptures. That had had internal tensions. There is a nobleness to that, but also i think and i compare him i talk about jackson in atlanta and the American South and he seems to have a different stance. By no way was jackson necessarily a militant but he does have this black empowerment stance if we think about one of his greatest successes was the creation of black millionaires. I do not know if we can save a about gibson. He does create this black Political Class of people working in and around city hall, but he is much more trying to brand himself as a mayor for everyone. I think that really speaks to both the possibilities of black Political Leadership and the limitations of black Political Leadership. Peter thank you. You all were much more concise than i anticipated. We have a little bit extra time and that gives me a chance to. Sk an additional question the black and Puerto Rican Convention of 1969 was brought up several times. Im wondering if you would like to speak more about the atmosphere at the convention, with that convention represented in newarks Political Climate in 1969 and maybe some of what you are recalling about the platform of that convention and how that compared to what gibsons administration was actually about and actually prioritize. Prof. Williams i can talk about that. The convention was supercharged with hope. Most of us were young. Most of us were black but we also had Puerto Ricans and an even smaller amount of white people. All who had come together in this coalition which was actually run by two sets of people. One where the moderates headed by the official leader and the other by amiri baraka. At that time, it was difficult for the thin Campaign Manager i was his first but by arrangement we had someone involved with more campaigns than i had. It was a hell of a thing trying to answer to two separate leaderships, two sets of people and also two leadership styles. But the convention went on without a hitch. You mentioned some of the folks who had been there. We had dick gregory, all kinds of stars, political stars, and stars from the entertainment world. It was a success. We went out of their thinking this was going to be the script if you will for what black power would look like in the city of newark. There were committees that were formed out of the preliminary session at the end. One of the planks in that platform was that the state should take over the financing of the School District because newark did not have enough tax money, as were in the suburbs, to do that. That did not happen and gibson never talked about that, but a 1981 we had the abbot versus bert case where they were going have to pay for the schooling in the abbott district. Another thing that came up was, one, the question of a Police Review board. People were adamant about that because the police had been beating up and killing people then as they are now. Gibson never mentioned that during his campaigning and when he was elected i said in a meeting and i heard him say, i am the Police Review board. We did not anticipate that. Those are two big instances of what we wanted versus what we got. Specific goals and objectives that were measurable. Objectivesals and that were measurable. One of the things gibson said he was going to do is meet with capacitya leadership on a regular basis. We had one meeting and he said words to the effect, i am the mayor for all the people and we are not going to do that. I remember baraka the elder saying to me afterwards, we elected him to be the mayor but nobody thought he was going to run the city by himself. That was a forecast of what was i have to say one thing. There was a leadership vacuum in newark when baraka got together. There is no leadership vacuum. We had a fantastic done a fantastic job setting the stage. There is leadership. There is letter leadership in the education area with callahan fight, the medical school fight. There were people there who were in leadership positions and i do not want people to think that there was nothing going on until our brother came in with these ideas. Baraka was from newark. But the political wave that followed in his absence while he was away was as homegrown as what was done when he got there and have the insight and foresight to do what he did as you explained. Prof. Woodard i am sorry. I was trying to make it brief. There was a section in my talk about a few years before baraka came back, there is a Mass Movement. I was a part of that stew student movement. There were thousands of people who meeting regularly, usually protest meetings against ethnic cleansing which they called urban renewal. That is what united the community. Small groups had had important protests, but the ethnic cleansing formula woke everybody up and everybody from street hustlers to auto workers, to welfare mothers to auto work there is a Mass Movement that baraka came back into. He got anointed leader because he was beat up by the police on the first day of the rebellion, right . That is the whole thing. It was this strange convergence of all of these different thatrs of everything happened in july 1967 that merged the National Black power conference, which it already been planned, with the newark and detroit rebellions. Because of that fusion it created a new master narrative of black political power. I definitely did not want to leave that out. I think that Community Council was, in essence, the early grassroots leaders who would already been meeting. As a matter of fact, the Research Suggests those people were active in the 1950s with the National Negro labor council. I was always trying to find out when i went to the first meeting in the 1968 why everybody understood the rules of how a black Political Convention work if it was the only first one. It was only after doing my homework i found out the elders had been organizing since the 1950s. That is a long struggle and many leaders were involved. Prof. Williams let me say one more thing that. You left out a step. That coalition did include people from that age group, but those of us who were involved in the urban renewal struggle were young people mostly coming from the younger organization. Poor, my own group, that was the first big coalition, the first step that i was talking about. Baraka did not organize that. That came around the medical school fight and we got specific. We won specific things and the next step was the united brothers and baraka called together some of us who had been involved in the police struggles and took it to the next step. Peter thank you. I want to ask one last question before we open up to the q a. I want to raise one more name that we have not named who is george richardson. He was organizing for black political power in the city during the mid1960s. Looking at city and county level and state level offices, putting together an Interracial Committee to organize and build political power. I just want to make sure we do not leave out of this progression. Just to cap this off and transition to the q a, i want to ask the three of you, from either your participation or study of this era, what kind of lessons do you draw from this era you would share with younger organizers and activists about . Ngaging electoral politics prof. Woodard when we sent black power we did not realize each class understood black power to be a different thing. When people like gibson were elected, he thought black power had been achieved. The people in the Tenant Movement who were suffering in Public Housing and going on read strike understood black power had not been achieved. One of the things in terms of having these conventions and political movements is that each sector of the Community Needs to articulate what they mean by freedom now or black power and make sure that is on the table. I remember meeting with a black businessman from atlanta, georgia who said he worked with dr. King. I said, what did you do . He said, my father insured his cars. [laughter] i was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The point is that each class was saying words, but they mean different things. We have to be clear from the beginning, if youre going to risk your life and raise the money and do these things to elect people. It needs to be understood what are these concerns . What is that agenda . Prof. Williams with respect to the election aspect, i heard a young minister on some National Radio program and he was asked whether he was going to vote on that, i guess years in his 30s, and he said he decided whether or not he was going to vote. People had been betrayed with the elections in the past therefore he was going to keep organizing in the street. I just wanted to say to him how foolish that sounds because you can do both. You have to do both. There is no point sitting around and letting the big house go to somebody who is going to keep you from organizing in the street and beat you down, kill you if they can, as opposed to using the street demonstrations as a punctuation mark to underline the faith people had put into those folks we put into office. If for no other reason than to think, well, our political objectives, if they have power nowadays not just black power but the way the black lives matter defines it we want to have power for that coalition of people, but you also want to get rid of somebody who is against you. That is just as relevant to what you are trying to do. If nothing else, see organizing for elections as part of the reason for your being. You want to achieve a political objective. You have got to do this one last thing to get the Playing Field a little more even. That is one of the things we talked about. We had a program which was about exactly june 16 to celebrate what the community did to elect ken gibson of which all you were part in some way or other. We were all involved in the website riseupnewark. Com. I want people to take a look at that because we have had over one million hits, i have stopped counting after that. In that particular two hour session we had which started out as what we have here and went to , some other mass media events, we had 18,000 people looking at what we call protests of power where we celebrated the ability of the people to change from street organizations, small, unpredictable, street organizations and come into correlation coalitions to bigger demonstrations. To morph even further into election organizations to put ken gibson into power. What we were not able to do is to sustain that movement afterward, to hold gibson accountable. At the same point i do not think anybody learned how to keep politicians accountable when you are talking about organizations from the left. Nobody has done that but the right, they control them by money. Nobody has learned how to do that. You do not stop doing it. You learn how to do that but the first thing you have got to do is make the Playing Field a little more even, so that means you have to participate in these elections. Prof. Adams am i good to slide in really quick . I wanted to Say Something about black women in this moment, this historical moment we were talking about as well. My vehicle into this history was a student rebellion that happened at rutgers newark. I was researching another public history project and it was vicki donaldson. She was part of that conference. She was this strong, powerful Freedom Fighter in this history i was telling about race and rutgers. Once i saw her, you can see this black united front included women of welfare fighting for welfare reform. When you talk about the tenants fighting the rent strike. Even when it came to urban renewal, a black woman called up her neighbors and said, did the mayor tell you he is trying to grab our homes . I had to give that little psa there. The women are fighting alongside everybody else. Prof. Woodard the community is organizing the institutions and economic development. That Initiative Came from grassroots and not from the top. Although i was at the groundbreaking of Frederick Douglass housing with reverend jones, and we saw gibson cut the ribbon and get the credit for it reverend jones looked at me and said, that is the way it goes. We do the work and the mayor comes in and takes the credit. We cannot have amnesia about who is doing the work otherwise the work will not get done. It is very important to understand all those community institutions, african free school, newark school, chad school, the black youth organization, there were hundreds of organizations that that is the meat and potatoes. When we came with milliondollar proposals to marry her gibson, would not bential interested in that. [laughter] we did not know they were in the room. We tried to tell him, all those abandoned factories, if you look in brooklyn, they turned that into the restoration corporation. We studied that and tried to bring that to newark and he vetoed that. With the police saying remember, disruption continued to be important. When the white vigilantes mobbed my construction workers at the towers, the community stormed into the City Council Meeting by the thousands to demand a Police Director. Lets remember, we had a white Police Director under gibson who resigned when it came to arresting black people i mean white people who had beaten up the black construction workers. It was a Mass Movement and the power of disruption to say, youre not going to have this meeting unless these thousand voices are heard. That, over and over again, is the persistent thing that made progress in newark. You are watching American History tv covering history cspan style with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures and College Classrooms and visits to museums and historic places. All weekend, every weekend on cspan3. This weekend, the last before tuesdays election, American History tv is showing archival coverage of president ial races. Sunday, the debate from the 2000 campaign between Vice President al gore and george w. Bush. Heres a preview. What would make you the best candidate in august during the middle east crisis . Ive been a leader. A person has to set a clear vision and convince people to follow. I got a strategy for the middle east. Let me say that our nation must speak with one voice during this time. I applaud the president for working hard to diffuse tensions. Our nation needs to be critical credible, strong, we say we are somebodys friend, everybody has got to believe it. Israel is our friend and we will stand by israel. We need to reach out to modern arab nations as well, to build coalitions to keep the peace. Think we need to be patient, you cannot put the middle east process on our timetable. It has got to be on the timetable of the people trying we are trying to bring to the peace table. You cannot dictate the terms of peace. You have to be steady. You cannot worry about polls or focus groups. Youve got to have a clear vision, that is ready leader does. We also understand that the United States must be strong in keeping the peace, Saddam Hussein still is a threat in the middle east. Saddam ision against unraveling, sanctions are loosened. The man who may be developing weapons of mass distraction, we do not know because the specters are not in. To answer your question, it requires clear vision and a willingness to stand by our friends and the credibility for people both friend and foe to understand what americas and we mean it. Vice president gore . I see a future when the world is at peace with the United States of america promoting the values of democracy and human rights and freedom all around the world. Ann in iran, they have had election that began to bring about change. We stand for those values and we have to be willing to assert them. Right now, our military is the strongest in the entire history of the world. I pledge to you, i will do whatever is necessary to make sure it stays that way. Now, what can i bring to that challenge . When i was a young man, my father was a senator opposed to the vietnam war. When i graduated from college, there were plenty of fancy ways to get out of going and being a part of that. I went and i volunteered and i went to vietnam. I did not do the most or on the greatest risk by a longshot, but i learned what it was like to be an enlisted man in the united its army. In the congress, and the house of representatives, i served on the House Intelligence Committee and i worked hard to learn the subject of Nuclear Arms Control and how we can defuse these tensions and deal with nonproliferation. Deal with the problems of terrorism in these new weapons of mass destruction. We are going to face some serious new challenges in the years. Ur ive worked on that long and hard, when i went to the senate, asked for an assignment to the Armed Services committee and well i was there i worked on a bipartisan basis as i did in the house. I work with former president reagan on the modernization of our strategic weaponry. In the senate, i was one of only 10 democrats along with Joe Lieberman to support governor bushs dad in the persian gulf war resolution. In the last years i served on the Security Council can i say just one more thing . No sir. The next question is going to be asked you, it is a related question. Watch the full debate sunday at 12 00 eastern, 9 00 pacific here on American History tv. Week, American History tvs real america brings you archival films that to mark election day 2020, we u. S. Government films created to explain the u. S. Electoral system to international audiences. First, tuesday in november features the 1940 four election between president Franklin Roosevelt and governor thomas duty, using the small town of riverton, california, to show the voting process. Then, the election of john f. Kennedy, president of the United States, a 1960 film that features the process as much as the personalities of Richard Nixon and jfk. In about a halfhour, from 1960 eight, a biographical documentary, Richard Nixon, the new president , and in about one hour, alexion 1976 they of decision, a look at the contest between incumbent president gerald ford and challenger jimmy carter. Narrator it is Early Morning of the first tuesday in november
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