The Daily Newarker

From the second part of the ??Star Ledger??’s Crossroads series, “Part 2: 5 days that changed a city”:http://blog.nj.com/ledgernewark/2007/07/crossroads_pt_2.html.

In the second-floor office at 415 Springfield Ave., near the corner of Bergen Street in Newark, they had been publicizing the event for weeks, printing fliers on an overworked mimeograph machine and passing them around the neighborhood.

The final flier, dated Aug. 24, 1966, described the event simply as: “Stokely is here.”

Stokely Carmichael, a 25-year-old African-American, had come to national prominence earlier that year, when he helped black candidates overthrow a slate of white incumbents in Alabama’s Lowndes County. Then he began touring the country preaching something he called “Black Power.”

His arrival in Newark came as the city was reaching a significant demographic milestone: For the first time in its 300-year history, Newark had a black majority.

At 415 Springfield Ave., that was big news. The office was home to the United Community Corporation’s Area Board No. 2, a federally funded anti-poverty program in Newark that had become a hotbed for African-American agitation. It was also the unofficial home of the Newark Community Union Project, a radical student group headed by community organizer Tom Hayden, a white man who came to Newark in 1965 because he believed the future of the civil rights movement was in the Northern cities.

In some ways, the tasks that occupied the UCC and NCUP were entirely prosaic – getting stoplights installed at dangerous intersections; teaching poor mothers how to stretch a dollar by buying in bulk – but there was no denying their political agenda, which was wrapped in revolutionary rhetoric that made many whites uncomfortable.

And few were better when it came to rhetoric than Carmichael. By 8 p.m. on Aug. 25, about 400 people packed the UCC’s stifling hot office on the second floor to hear him. Dressed in a white suit and loosely knotted black tie, Carmichael spoke from the front of the room.

“In all other cities, they’re afraid of a rebellion,” he said. “But in Newark, New Jersey, they’re not even afraid of you.”

He continued for 80 minutes, drenched in perspiration even after shedding his jacket and tie.

“Whether you know it or not, you are the majority in this town,” Carmichael told the crowd. “You should already have taken Newark, New Jersey, over because it belongs to you.”

And yet it did not. Nearly every authority figure in the city was white – from police, whose reputation for brutality was notorious among the black community, to teachers, to City Hall bureaucrats. The mayor, Hugh Addonizio, was white. And while he appointed blacks to some prominent positions and consulted a council of black ministers whom he felt represented the African-American community’s interests, the people gathered to hear Carmichael were different.

They were young and frustrated by what they saw as a lack of progress in the civil rights movement, which had seemed to offer so much promise earlier in the decade. And they felt the time for Addonizio’s tokenism had passed.

“The politicians in Newark thought certain black people represented the black community, never realizing that group was out of touch with the masses,” said George Fontaine, now 77, then the second in command at UCC Area Board No. 2. “We wanted change a lot faster than anyone in the power structure was willing to give it to us.”