Remembering the Newark Riots, Fifty Years Later
It's been 50 years since the Newark riots took place, sparked by white police officers beating a black cab driver. Rebecca Carroll, editor of special projects at WNYC and Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers Institute--Newark, attorney and author of Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power (North Atlantic Books, 2014), talk about the riots (or rebellion, the word Williams uses) and the effects they had on the city, and Karen Rouse, WNYC New Jersey reporter, discusses the mayors elected since the riots, and what their tenures tell us about the city's trajectory.
Junius Williams says people were both helped and hurt by the riots in Newark. Nobody wanted violence, he says, but the rebellion, as he calls it, did affect the power structure in Newark. Black people in Newark were able to gain some political and social power as a result of the rebellion.
It's a full house to discuss the 50th anniversary of the Newark rebellion: (l-r) @rouse_karen, @rebel19 & Junius Williams: pic.twitter.com/PvHaA2B3x9
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) July 12, 2017
Junius Williams says in Newark, in 1967: "People didn't have any other redress for grievance."
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) July 12, 2017
A caller reminds us it's about what happened *leading up* to 1967. "Newark was a powder keg...Newark was a segregated city."
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) July 12, 2017
