The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society

The Newark Frontier

Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda Seligman

James R. Grossman, editor emeritus

Also in the series:

The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980

by Aaron Shkuda

Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits

by Ansley T. Erickson

Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era

Edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers

The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

by Evan Friss

Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

by Ocean Howell

A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

by Benjamin Looker

A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid

by Nancy H. Kwak

Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis

by Andrew R. Highsmith

Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

by Lila Corwin Berman

Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago

by Gillian O’Brien

A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950

by Marta Gutman

A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

by N. D. B. Connolly

Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

by Cindy R. Lobel

Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington

by Jeffrey Helgeson

The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972

by Christopher Lowen Agee

Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto

by Camilo José Vergara

Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run

by Sarah Jo Peterson

Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities

by Lawrence J. Vale

Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago

by Lilia Fernández

Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

by Richard Harris

Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities

by Carl H. Nightingale

Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago

by Tobias Brinkmann

In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930

by Peter C. Baldwin

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

by Mark Peel

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin

by Christopher Klemek

I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

by Cynthia M. Blair

Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City

by Lorrin Thomas

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

by Jordan Stanger-Ross

New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era

by Jennifer Fronc

African American Urban History since World War II

edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter

Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing

by D. Bradford Hunt

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California

by Charlotte Brooks

The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia

by Guian A. McKee

Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis

by Robert Lewis

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York

by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

in association with the American Antiquarian Society

Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940

by Chad Heap

Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America

by David M. P. Freund

Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955

by Adam Green

The New Suburban History

edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark

by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919

by Margaret Garb

Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age

by Ann Durkin Keating

The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston’s Public Schools, 1950–1985

by Adam R. Nelson

Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side

by Amanda I. Seligman

Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

by Alison Isenberg

Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century

by Andrew Wiese

Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919

by Robin F. Bachin

In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863

by Leslie M. Harris

My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965

by Becky M. Nicolaides

Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto

by Wendell Pritchett

The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940

by Max Page

Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877

by David O. Stowell

Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920

by Madelon Powers

Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960

by Arnold R. Hirsch

Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874

by Karen Sawislak

Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era

by Gail Radford

Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

by John T. McGreevy

The Newark Frontier

Community Action in the Great Society

Mark Krasovic

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Mark Krasovic is assistant professor of history and American studies and associate director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modem Experience at Rutgers University–Newark.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago.

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35279-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35282-4 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226352824.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Krasovic, Mark, author.

The Newark frontier : community action in the Great Society / Mark Krasovic.

pages cm — (Historical studies of urban America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-35279-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-35282-4 (e-book) 1. Newark (N.J.)—History—20th century. 2. Newark (N.J.)—Social policy. 3. Race riots—New Jersey—Newark. 4. Social action—New Jersey—Newark—History—20th century. 5. Newark (N.J.)—Politics and government—20th century. 6. Liberalism—United States. 7. United States—Social policy. 8. Community activists—New Jersey—Newark. 9. United States—History—1945– I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

F144.N657K73 2016

974.9′32—dc23

2015035008

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Louis and Frances Krasovic and Clement A. Price

Contents

Introduction: Plotting the Great Society and the Urban Crisis in Newark

Part I: The Rise of Community Action

ONE / The Construction of Community Action in the Great Society

TWO / Community Action Comes to Newark

THREE / Convergence

FOUR / The Newark Police Department’s Great Society

Interlude: The Riots

Part II: The Commission Response to Rioting

FIVE / The Kerner Commission

SIX / The Governor’s Commission

SEVEN / The PBA Commission

Part III: New Directions for Community Action

EIGHT / Law and Order

NINE / Departures

TEN / Control

Conclusion: Community Action and the Hollow Prize

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Notes

Index

Introduction: Plotting the Great Society and the Urban Crisis in Newark

Lyndon Johnson had used the phrase several times before—at a hundred-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser in Chicago, for example, where supporters dined on filet mignon and serenaded the president with a rendition of Deep in the Heart of Texas before he left on a tour of poverty areas. He used it again in Atlanta, before a crowd of Georgia legislators and at another fundraiser in Atlantic City, where he spoke from the same stage at which he would later that year accept his party’s nomination for a full term. What exactly it meant, no one could say for sure. It was used too off-handedly, with no specifics and no explanation. It was little more than a placeholder, a fragment of rhetorical stuffing, as his speechwriter later called it, a phrase in search of a meaning.¹

In that way, it mirrored the new administration. Burdened by the doubt and suspicion of Kennedy supporters both in and out of the White House, Johnson worked to assure them not only that he shared their ideals but that he could make them a legislative reality. In his first State of the Union speech in January 1964, he committed himself to Kennedy’s nascent antipoverty and civil rights programs. In February, he signed Kennedy’s long-proposed tax cut. It had been, by those measures, an exuberant and accomplished few months. But Johnson could claim only partial credit for those successes. The need to distinguish his presidency from the previous one, to at once fulfill Kennedy’s promise and go beyond it, weighed on him heavily. He said as much one day in early April 1964, while skinny-dipping in the White House pool with his speechwriter and a close aide. He asked them to craft a vision of his presidency that would define a new national purpose and outline a plan to aggressively pursue it. The deadline, he explained, was May 22, when he would address a crowd of about eighty-five thousand in the University of Michigan football stadium.²

At Ann Arbor, Johnson relaunched his administration and pulled it out of his predecessor’s shadow with a repurposed phrase, ceasing its casual use and hanging his presidency firmly on it. After tentatively circling each other for several months, the administration committed itself to the Great Society, and the Great Society became the inescapable byword of the administration. The vision contained therein and offered to Michigan’s graduating class—and soon to the rest of the nation—was firmly planted in the historic dilemmas of the moment. Johnson asked Americans what they would do with their hard-won postwar affluence: would they place their riches in the service of their higher aspirations, or would they allow unbridled growth and base commercial desires to trump those ambitions? The Great Society would result if they chose the first path, the merely rich and powerful society if the second.³

1. Newark in the mid-1960s, with key locations, including four of the city’s antipoverty area boards. (Michael Siegel, Rutgers Cartography)

To get there, though, the nation would have to alleviate the needs of all Americans. In this vision, affluence was widespread but not perfectly distributed. The work of building the Great Society, Johnson suggested, should begin where the need was greatest, where the dire costs of runaway growth were clearest. It would begin, he said, in the cities. By that point, a large literature, growing out of an even longer tradition of writing on the possibilities and pitfalls of metropolitan expansion, had established America’s inner cities as the capitals of economic contradiction, spaces at the center of dynamic regional conurbations that only rarely shared in their wealth. By the time Lyndon Johnson stepped on the stage in Ann Arbor, Detroit’s creeping urban agglomeration on the horizon, there was widespread agreement that we had reached a moment of decision—of crisis—in the cities.⁴

When the president debuted the Great Society that sunny day in May 1964, he staked the future of his administration on what might become of the cities. But he didn’t stake it on what his administration could accomplish alone. On the contrary, he acknowledged that, while there were numerous federal programs targeting the problems that stood in the way of the Great Society—the following year a congressional committee would count thirteen different federal departments and agencies involved in at least forty different urban development programs—I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems. But he did promise one thing: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. These best minds would generate the experimentation sorely needed in a nation facing the contradictions of postwar prosperity. Because those contradictions were most evident in the cities, the work would start there, on what the president called the frontier of imagination and innovation.⁵

From its outset, then, the Great Society sought to address a problem of knowledge production. Despite its expanded postwar activity and its apparent success in fostering widespread affluence, the federal bureaucracy did not know how to bring that prosperity to the remaining redoubts of poverty. Newer, fresher knowledge would need to be found and brought into the workings of the state. In Ann Arbor, President Johnson called for a creative federalism, a new concept of cooperation between the national capital and the leaders of local communities to achieve those ends. Most immediately, he announced the formation of various working groups to begin that effort.⁶

Seated behind President Johnson on the dais in Michigan Stadium, listening to him lay out his plans, Roger Lowenstein turned to a friend and rolled his eyes. He was among those Americans who were very skeptical of the Texan. As student-body president, it was his duty to recommend a commencement speaker to the university president, and he had really wanted John F. Kennedy there that day. But after the assassination, the invitation had passed to Kennedy’s successor.⁷

Skepticism of the man may have been warranted, but the Great Society was much bigger than the president. Launching it via a set of small ad hoc working groups, Johnson yoked the Great Society to a class of administrative tools that would quickly carry its work well beyond the White House, to a greater pool of knowledge, new ways of thinking, and new political desires. In the search for the new knowledge out of which the Great Society would be built, those administrative structures took hold in specific places, where they encountered the particularities of local history and politics. Through such encounters, the state would be stretched in new directions, pulled by the innovation and imagination that Johnson called for but whose consequences he could not foresee. Nowhere was this truer than in Roger Lowenstein’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey, where the work of local reformers and activists (Roger’s father among them) had laid groundwork that would make Newark the Great Society’s greatest laboratory, where its imagination would be stretched to its frontier.

Newark was no stranger to the midcentury depredations then being gathered under the label urban crisis. It lay at the exact center of what Yale researchers in 1955 described as a six-hundred-mile-long urban agglomeration that stretched from Maine to Virginia.⁸ And it was one of the nation’s most densely populated cities, 438,000 people crammed into its roughly 23.5 square miles, much of that uninhabited marshes, industrial and port areas, and an airport. With that came a host of urban ills now commonly associated with America’s postwar years: an aging housing stock and subsequent slum clearance projects, employment competition in the midst of a dwindling job base, and the growing racial segregation of the inner city.⁹

Residents were not quiescent in the face of such challenges, and they recognized, as President Johnson would more than a decade later, that the very administrative form of government helped shape the possible responses to them. In the mid-1950s, they took advantage of a new state law providing residents the tools to reform their local government. In signing the legislation in 1950, Governor Alfred Driscoll had celebrated the way it kept government as close to the people as possible.¹⁰ In Newark, where the existing municipal charter had produced a city hall bogged down in patronage and corruption, reformers sought a modernized government, one that would be more responsive to the urban challenges of the moment and to the city’s changing population. They believed that administration mattered, that the form government took and the way it interacted with its people were important factors in determining its ability to address postwar ills. And after Newark voters approved a referendum establishing a municipal charter reform commission, Alan Lowenstein—Roger’s father and fellow Wolverine—was chosen as its chairman.

Many of Newark’s midcentury administrative thinkers were exceptionally attuned to the racial implications of their work, especially as the city’s black population grew and spread. Since around World War I and the first mass wave of migration, Newark’s black community had been concentrated in the Third Ward, in roughly the geographic center of the city. Yet that geographic density, under the existing municipal charter, did not translate into political representation. So proponents of reform successfully pushed for a redrawing of voting-ward boundaries to ensure, for the first time, political representation for residents of the expanding black ghetto. Among the benefits of this upturn in black political opportunity was the election of the city’s first black councilman in 1954. Another was an intensifying attention to race relations in city hall. In a landmark 1959 report, the Mayor’s Commission on Group Relations revealed that, should current demographic trends continue, Newark would soon be a majority-black city.¹¹ That year, the impending demographic shift was front-page and national news.¹² Four years later, the New York Times reported that Newark had the largest proportional Negro population of any major metropolitan center north of the Mason-Dixon line.¹³ In 1965, one new arrival, a native of Richmond, passed through downtown and thought that the only other place he’d seen so many black people was Nairobi.¹⁴

2. Over the course of the 1950s, Newark’s black population spread outward from the Central Ward. The consciousness of an imminent black majority would powerfully shape local politics in the 1960s. (Michael Siegel, Rutgers Cartography)

Though municipal charter reform brought new opportunities for black political power, local outposts of the black freedom struggle continued to battle racial discrimination in both the public and private sectors. And as the consciousness of a black majority grew on either side of Newark’s color line, movements to pry open the institutional structures of local government and admit the voices and knowledge of that population accelerated, while movements to secure those structures against such incursions attempted to keep pace. Parties to this struggle sought assistance wherever they could. When the Great Society’s administrative structures snaked their way out beyond the capital, Newarkers grabbed hold and bent them to their own desires.

The urban crisis—variously configured as uncontrolled metropolitan expansion, human migrations, the financial and demographic depletion of inner cities, and the political and physical conflicts engendered in particular places by those broad social phenomena—is often traced to the apparent contradictions of postwar American liberalism: how, despite its commitments to integration and widespread economic security, liberalism had produced segregated cities and decimated their economies. Newark appeared the most profound symbol of that failing, an impoverished, deeply divided city where liberalism’s promise had gone up in flames during the summer of 1967.¹⁵

But that’s not the end of the story. In the face of those contradictions—made abundantly clear by the black freedom struggle and the discovery of poverty amid postwar plenty—Great Society liberalism fostered a critique of the modern liberal state that looked beyond the politics of economic growth and entertained the anxieties growth had produced. While a range of social critics denounced the conventionality and shortsightedness of postwar affluence, Great Society liberalism acknowledged that the state itself had grown similarly staid and inadequate to the challenges of the period. Insisting that the state, in order to address its contradictions, look outside itself for ideas, it cultivated an antibureaucratic and community-oriented ethic that valued experimentation, flexibility, and decenteredness. It sought the guidance of elite experts, to be sure, but it also sought out the knowledge and desires of the other America, those communities left behind by growth politics. And voices emanating from that community would prove the most consequential, as a growing body of work on the Great Society has begun to appreciate.¹⁶

Much of the drama in this story is produced by the fact that the community, so broadly rendered in much discourse of the day (community action, community participation, community development, community control), was necessarily and, to an extent, knowingly illegible to the state that was calling it into duty.¹⁷ That, after all, was the idea: the administration wanted innovation, new ideas, new imaginations. It didn’t have the answers and didn’t know what would come of attempts to find them. Opening up the state to a broad, abstract community, illegible, full of difference, and, especially in the years of the modern black freedom struggle, dissenting and protestant, was an invitation to conflict. That opening in Newark—a city keyed to its imminent black majority, whether out of desire or fear—became liberalism’s leading edge.

More specifically, the drama here is often generated by encounters between official state agents and those communities whose knowledge would be the new stuff of governing. The medium for such encounters was a profusion of decentered administrative forms that reached out beyond the halls of federal power: the ad hoc task forces and working groups that sought new ways of looking at the problems of the postwar years, for example; grant programs that encouraged unique, locally appropriate approaches to locally defined problems; and investigative commissions that constructed knowledge out of an often intractable range of sources. These forms were not entirely new, but they were newly popular. They had exploded in the postwar years, out of a desire to balance new demands on the state with American democratic traditions, to face, in other words, the challenges of the times without succumbing to totalitarianism.¹⁸ Theirs was a model of government well suited to the ironic social style of postwar liberalism rather than its bureaucratic tendencies, to the desire for experimentation rather than purer, unpolluted forms of statism.¹⁹ They grew in sheer numbers during the Johnson years, and more and more of the work of government was accomplished through them.²⁰

When such administrative forms arrived in Newark, they provided unprecedented resources, opportunities, and allies to those engaged with its urban crisis and the particular political struggles it engendered. The specific forms that play central roles here—the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program (CAP), the executive commissions that investigated Newark’s civil disorder, and various congressional hearings on the War on Poverty and violence—gave local activists new operational spaces and new pathways by which they could inject their voices into both local and national politics. For the most part, this was to the benefit of those seeking greater power for Newark’s black majority. But one of the ironies of this story is that the community action ethic, as I will call it, and the administrative forms that embodied it also contained opportunities for Newarkers more interested in maintaining the prevailing political order, opportunities most manifest in the politics of local law enforcement.

In addition to the ethic and the administrative structures of the Great Society, then, were the people who populated them and gave them specific meanings and purposes. Newarkers were uncommonly prepared for the Great Society, whether they had an appreciation for the importance of administrative form because they had participated in the recent municipal charter change; because they were concerned about the ills plaguing their city and convinced that local government was impotent or too incompetent to deal with them; because their racial consciousness had reached new heights with the news of the impending black majority and believed the time had come for that majority to exercise its full political power; because they felt threatened by the shifting demographics and sought to secure whatever power they had; or because of some combination of these factors. These were the people—from black power militants to the most conservative upholders of law and order, and the many, many Newarkers in between—who sought and used the opportunities and resources afforded by Great Society liberalism.²¹ With that access, they struggled against the fallout of the larger social forces that liberalism had, at best, left unaddressed and, at worst, fostered.

Ultimately, the conflicts produced by those struggles rendered the experiment unsustainable. The postwar liberal state and its guardians, it turned out, did not have sufficient stores of the improvisatory and pragmatic qualities needed to deal with such an influx of community. The Great Society’s earliest and most vociferous critics, Daniel Patrick Moynihan most prominent among them, decried the local conflicts generated by the Community Action Program. But many others, especially the local people who made use of it, believed protest and conflict were eminently reasonable uses of federal resources and institutional and political change its most desirable outcome.²²

The Great Society thus proved a brief attempt to rebalance the relationship between the state and the community, when it became apparent that the former, despite postwar growth, had not done well by the latter. It linked modern American liberalism’s commitment to state action and the unprecedented spending permitted by postwar affluence to calls for political empowerment and economic citizenship from some of the nation’s most marginalized peoples, whether in the hollows of Appalachia, the reservations of the Great Plains, or the declining cities of the Rust Belt. The agents of that linkage were the decentered administrative structures that spread out from Washington to those places and residents who took hold of them and, in stretching them toward participatory democracy, brought postwar liberalism to its frontier.

The story here plays out on either side of Newark’s riots. One of the reasons those five days in July 1967 have resonated so deeply is that they contained, as some observers quickly recognized, two phases of violence: the initial black rebellion and the state suppression thereof. I find riots a useful term worth preserving—though I use it carefully and not exclusively—for several reasons. First, it has the capacity to include both the insurrectionary and reactionary forms of violence. Second, for me it invokes a scholarly tradition that, far from seeing mass violence as politically unmotivated, insists exactly the opposite.²³ Finally, and most important, those five days appear in this book more as narrative than as fact, though fact the violence and its awful toll surely were. In the years afterward—even to today—the riots were used as a particularly powerful political and cultural bludgeon, an immediately usable past that was enlisted in much longer racial-political struggles of which it was surely a part, but not the whole. It’s that use of the violence that I want to emphasize by calling it a riot.

Though there are glimpses of events from earlier in the century, the story proper begins in the early 1960s, as community action began to take shape amid small task force and executive committee meetings in the Kennedy administration and came to full legislative fruition under Lyndon Johnson. It then moves quickly to Newark, one of the first cities to file a grant application under the new Community Action Program and arguably the city in which it most quickly reached the heights of national controversy. In Newark, community action encountered, changed, and was changed by the existing struggles for and against greater black political power, with which it became intimately intertwined. But it also came to town in other forms, including a greater attention among some municipal and police leaders to the relationship between the city’s police department and what had taken shape as the community, a byword that had come to stand in for the coming black majority. That relationship, though never generally warm, had recently taken a turn for the worse, through a series of events that lent more cohesion not only to the community but to a nascent alliance between the police department and many white Newarkers facing the reality of their shrinking numbers and looking to the department as their last municipal stronghold. They forged their own brand of community action, a warping of the black community’s version, as if in a funhouse mirror.

The riots that occurred in and grew out of this context provided ammunition for all sides in these struggles. But first, their chaos and death and destruction had to be given some order. They had to be made to yield some useful meaning. The problem of doing this is seen most clearly in two investigative commissions established to do just that: to make the violence make sense. The challenge for the liberal government-sponsored commissions considered here was that, if they were to be taken seriously and their investigation and conclusions and recommendations were to have any legitimacy, they would have to hew closely to the ethic of community action. That is, they would have to make sure that they considered a wide array of knowledge and perspectives. This was not only immensely difficult but, in the case of one commission, almost fatal.

For the emerging politics of law and order, this was a problem to be avoided by appearing to take it seriously. When the state Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association launched its own investigation and responded harshly to the others, it wore a cloak of commissionness but refused a commitment to community action and, therefore, its epistemological pitfalls. Its report was the most confident yet, and it arrived just as more and more Americans—white Americans especially—were becoming more and more convinced that the politics of community action, as it had played out in Newark especially, had led only to mass disorder and violence. The response was a growing willingness to give law enforcement agencies what they wanted in order to guard the social order, a dialing back of the concern with police-community relations, and an expanded sense of solidarity with the police, as more and more civilians took to the streets in defense of their neighborhoods and what they considered the American way of life.

For two public intellectuals of national stature in the late 1960s, the Newark riots demonstrated not the dangers of community action but its essential impotence. The state needed neither to be defended nor opened up but to be the target of a revolution. Soon after the violence ended, Tom Hayden, whose articulations of participatory democracy had brought him to Newark and its Community Action Program, left the city to work full-time in the antiwar movement, where he would increasingly dabble in the politics of guerilla violence, convinced that the American rot was so complete that the system might need to be burned down rather than made more accessible. For Nathan Wright Jr., the black Episcopal priest and former Freedom Rider who chaired the organizing committee for the first National Conference on Black Power in Newark, American liberalism could never countenance true black power. So the state needed to be remade in what he called a politics of black self-empowerment, which would ultimately merge with the rising New Right and its romance with market, rather than participatory, democracy.

While Hayden and Wright left Newark before the close of the decade, their faith in the possibilities of the Great Society shattered, the struggle to pull and stretch its mechanisms toward local desires and goals continued apace. If nothing else, the riots had demonstrated the great inability of the local power structure to maintain order and, once order had been lost, to deal with the situation in a humane way. Among veterans of the city’s community action struggles, the goal shifted from opening up that structure to taking it over. The politics of participation yielded to a politics of control, with consequences that continue to shape Newark today.

PART ONE

The Rise of Community Action

ONE

The Construction of Community Action in the Great Society

What sparked President John F. Kennedy’s initial interest in American poverty was not a politically powerful constituency of the hardcore poor but some disturbing reading. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, several public intellectuals and journalists—chief among them John Kenneth Galbraith, Leon Keyserling, Michael Harrington, Harry Caudill, and Homer Bigart—rediscovered American poverty and hauled its ugly visage before the American public.¹ Poverty had largely been a partisan Democratic issue—Senator Paul Douglass of Illinois, for example, had repeatedly led the charge for area redevelopment legislation in the 1950s—and Kennedy had made poverty and unemployment a significant theme during his West Virginia primary campaign. But the broader message of the campaign, the one he deployed regardless of where he stumped, was that the Republican Party had done very little to foster national economic growth. Once in office, then, his number one domestic priority was to pass a tax cut and get more capital circulating, a Keynesian ploy promoted most stridently by the head of his Council of Economic Advisors, Walter Heller. Once the tax cut was passed, Kennedy turned to Heller in late 1962 and asked him to investigate the claims about which he had been reading: that postwar conventional wisdom (as Galbraith called it) was beset by gaping holes in our national self-perception, that the golden age of American affluence was in fact run through with stubborn strands of poverty.²

Though Kennedy maintained a public optimism that, as he would put it almost a year later, a rising tide would lift all boats, Heller and other presidential staffers furiously searched for ideas well into the fall of 1963.³ They established a process that now appears, looking back, a good model of what was to become the Great Society’s attention to community action. Their search began in the established halls of power, collecting ideas from the old-line federal departments, but soon reached out beyond them, pulling new actors and new ideas into the process. Eventually, that process spiraled out beyond bureaucratic places and ways of knowing and incorporated ideas from academia, private foundations, and, crucially, local communities of impoverished Americans and brought those ideas back into the administration. In the end, the process itself proved the answer to Kennedy’s question about how to deal with the contradictions of growth liberalism. If the solution could not be found in the tide and the state actions that lifted it, maybe the administration had to look beyond the state. The story of how this was done, then, begins with the president, but it soon leaves him behind to follow the administrative routes by which new ideas about how to confront poverty were found and brought into the workings of the state.⁴

During the summer of 1963, the Council of Economic Advisors convened an informal working group of staff from several cabinet departments and executive agencies to consider the problem of poverty, which was, Walter Heller came to believe, even more widespread and intractable than first anticipated. They met every few weeks on Saturdays and discussed both broad diagnostic issues (how is poverty defined? how is it measured?) and specific program proposals. They spoke not only of economics but of politics and race. The results were discouraging. The existing bureaucracy, it turned out, had little imagination. Many of the proposals involved little more than money for existing programs. None conjured as comprehensive and experimental an approach as the problem of poverty demanded. It was quickly clear, one council staffer later recalled, that we were getting old categorical program ideas warmed over.⁵

Heller extended the council’s search into the fall of 1963 and, with Kennedy’s blessing, established a formal task force on poverty. The president’s closest advisors were canvassing for program ideas that would take them into the 1964 campaign season, and Heller was determined that a broad antipoverty effort be on their list. The task force issued a formal call for proposals, but the results were no better than the summer’s products. I got back, predictably, garbage, the head of the task force said. People went into their file drawers and pulled out old programs that they had been floating around or that they had been trying to float before. There were lots of bits and pieces but no overarching theme. Even worse, several departments began to resent this new, annoyingly picky task force and to assert their deeply rooted bureaucratic interests. The Department of Labor insisted on a jobs program, while the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare advocated programs in the fields of health, education, and welfare.⁶

The youthful energy and idealism of Kennedy’s closest advisors had been slowed by the tangled bureaucratic morass of the mainline federal agencies. Those in the Bureau of the Budget were particularly disgusted. In the 1930s, Congress had moved the bureau from the Treasury Department to the newly created Executive Office of the President. With the bureau nearby, proponents of the move argued, the administrator in chief would be free of contending bureaucratic interests and would have direct access to the best organization and management research available. It was practically designed to ruffle bureaucratic feathers, and the bureau quickly garnered a reputation as a hotbed of administrative experimentation.⁷ When he interviewed for the job with the president-elect, Kennedy’s eventual budget director insisted that the bureau was meant to be the strongest arm of the executive with oversight of all other departments and agencies. Under him, he promised, the bureau would be particularly active.⁸

It was a bureau staffer, then, who finally led the task force through the federal bureaucratic tangle and its unoriginal proposals. He knew David Hackett, who had recently led the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. I knew Hackett and his crew were around and I thought they had some fresh ideas, the bureau staffer recalled. At least they weren’t the ideas coming in from the line agencies. In early November 1963, he asked Hackett to submit a memo outlining his ideas for the administration’s proposed antipoverty program.⁹

David Hackett was in his sophomore year at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts when Robert Kennedy entered the class one year ahead of him. Hackett considered himself something of a misfit at the school, more interested in hitting the athletic fields than the books. When John Knowles, who attended Milton rival Philips Exeter, later wrote his novel A Separate Peace, he modeled the character Phineas, who considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, on Hackett.¹⁰ He immediately befriended Kennedy, whom he regarded as a fellow oddball. And when, in the late 1950s, Bobby’s older brother ran for president, Hackett worked on the nomination and then the general election campaign. He later commended the campaign’s youth and ingenuity: while Senator Lyndon Johnson built his support by rallying his fellow senators, Hackett said, the Kennedy campaign built support state by state and from the ground up. It proved perhaps the single most interesting thing, he said, that this group, in effect, was smarter and had better political instincts than its much older and more experienced competitors. They developed a different system and they won. When President-elect Kennedy named his younger brother attorney general, Hackett agreed to join the Department of Justice as his special assistant.¹¹

Before the inauguration, Robert Kennedy asked Hackett to begin studying up on juvenile delinquency. The problem had sparked a national moral panic in the 1950s, and that may have been enough to attract the attention of the soon-to-be attorney general. But Kennedy also knew of the problem from his older sister Eunice, who in the late 1940s, after their father funded the establishment of a delinquency bureau in the Justice Department, became the department’s first executive secretary for juvenile delinquency. Then, in the early 1950s, Eunice—who was sometimes called the conscience of the Kennedy family—had gone to work at the Federal Penitentiary for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she encountered and befriended some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, including Tokyo Rose and the queen of Washington, DC’s, numbers game.¹² Eunice’s younger brother and his old prep-school friend had comparatively little experience with America’s down-and-out, but they were eager to get some. I think that he and I were quite similar in that we’d never been involved with close poverty before, Hackett later said, and certainly never had been involved up-close with Negroes. In the early months of their work on delinquency and over the next year or so, they traveled around the country to see American poverty firsthand. The experience was eye-opening. They visited poor white mountaineers in Appalachia, Chicanos in East Los Angeles, and black Angelenos in Watts. Kennedy visited schools, playgrounds, and swimming pools in neighborhoods surrounding the capitol building in Washington.¹³

The new attorney general hoped to keep these trips out of the public spotlight, but the press caught up with him in New York in March 1961. He and Hackett took a walk up Manhattan’s East Side. The tour had been arranged by a contact at the New York Youth Board, who arranged several meetings between the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and members of the Puerto Rican Viceroys and the Italian Redwings, some of them drug addicts and robbery suspects. Kennedy took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. When he asked the gang members about the problems they faced, some spoke about the lack of jobs and places to play. Others were more reluctant to engage the suspicious tousle-haired white guy with the Brahmin accent. What do you want to know for? they demanded. What are you doing here? Kennedy responded simply—I’m interested, I’m the Attorney General—and they spent over two hours talking.¹⁴

Whatever the source of Kennedy’s interest in juvenile delinquency, it was only that: an interest. There was no method yet, no ideas for how to address the problem. Hackett had been given no specific instructions, so he spent about six months traveling and talking to people, asking everyone he met what they would do if given $30 million to solve the problem of juvenile delinquency. First, he hit up federal agencies, including colleagues in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He later estimated that he found about ten people working on youth and youth programs in the entire federal government, and what was very striking was the lack of coordination between any of them. That was true even within the Justice Department, he said, where the Bureau of Prisons never talked to the FBI and vice versa. Hackett recommended, therefore, that the administration establish a new cabinet-level committee to address the problem, a body that would coordinate federal efforts rather than leave them scattered in the established departments.¹⁵

While casting about for ideas, Hackett asked the head of youth affairs at the Ford Foundation if he knew anyone who could get a juvenile delinquency program up and running. The official turned to a recent foundation hire named Richard Boone, and Richard Boone suggested Lloyd Ohlin. Hackett had heard the name before, and on a subsequent visit to New York City he met Boone in a bar to learn more.¹⁶

Boone had first met Ohlin in the 1950s at the University of Chicago, where Boone had worked on a project tracking felons who were released into the Illinois Selective Service. Upon leaving the university, he worked at the Illinois State Reformatory during the Adlai Stevenson administration, and when one of his Chicago faculty members became the sheriff of Cook County, Boone became a captain in the county juvenile bureau. While there, he served as a consultant to the Chicago YMCA’s detached worker program, which recruited community residents to work closely with gang members. Boone quickly came to believe that social welfare professionals—especially psychiatric caseworkers—were frauds with little ability to help delinquents. In seeking alternative personnel for the program, he experimented with hiring the gang members themselves. They rose to the task, Boone found, with impressive results, and he decided to toss the professional caseworkers out of the program altogether. Since the predominant approach toward delinquency was at that point psychiatric, the program’s initial funding had come from the National Institute of Mental Health. But after his successful experiment with hiring gang members, Boone poured his new ideas into a funding application that he sent to the Ford Foundation.¹⁷

While working on the detached worker program, Boone frequently sought Lloyd Ohlin’s advice. Ohlin and his Columbia University colleague Richard Cloward had devised a theory that turned conventional thinking about delinquency on its head. They argued that delinquency was the product of a systemic rather than personal pathology and that delinquents, rather than pursuing lives of crime, would take advantage of better (and legal) opportunities if their communities provided them. The individual delinquent, therefore, was not a deviant who needed to adjust (or be adjusted) to the system. Rather, the system was dysfunctional and had to be reformed. Furthermore, rather than unilaterally swooping down with some social science derring-do to rescue the denizens of impoverished neighborhoods, Ohlin and Cloward insisted that residents themselves participate in that reformation.¹⁸

Ohlin’s ideas received their first real tryout on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a multiracial neighborhood marked by high unemployment rates and increasing youth crime. In 1958, after a local businessman offered the neighborhood’s Henry Street Settlement seed money to begin planning a delinquency program, the esteemed and long-standing social service agency submitted a grant application to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a project they called Mobilization for Youth (MFY). The plan was to mobilize existing agencies and saturate the area with social services. But the NIMH rejected this initial proposal and insisted that the project engage more with community organizing (rather than organizing among the local social-service agencies), with local institutions like the schools, and with current social science research.¹⁹

That is where Ohlin and Cloward came in. The application of their research fulfilled the NIMH’s demand for a more modern and scholarly approach. Together, they advocated the organizing of residents to advocate on their own behalf, not by incorporating