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aMumford explores the devastating effect of the riots and how the city police, state police, and National Guard escalated the violence. He raises the controversial possibility that female looters stripping store mannequins may have been making a social statement about economic inequality. He also discusses such divisive personalities as Anthony Imperiale of the Citizens Council, with his anti-black sentiments, and the poet Amiri Baraka, who melded black nationalism with anti-white and, occasionally, anti- Semitic rhetoric.a
--"New Jersey Star Ledger"

"Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Newark tells an important story. Portraying a city that functions as an archetype for Black Power in urban politics, Mumford writes with great sympathy for an earlier liberal integrationist tradition, periodizing and explaining its rise and fall carefully, eloquently, and persuasively."
--David Roediger, author of "Working Toward Whiteness"

aKevin Mumford's history of race relations in Newark is full of arresting insight, fascinating detail, and memorable writing. With interdisciplinary creativity, he offers an important contribution to the understanding of modern America.a
--Randall Kennedy, Harvard University

aWhile acknowledging--and vividly rendering--the explosive moments in Newark's history, pioneering historian Kevin Mumford shows that the quotidian political struggles of aeveryday folka ultimately turned the city into one apeopled and run by African Americans.a Yet the ravages of de-industrialization, white flight, long-term corruption, and a draconian tax policy had hollowed out the city, transforming blacksahard-won prize into a congeries of social, economic, and political problems. Richly documented and immensely readable, Newark is also a model of sophistication. In Mumford's hands, concepts like the public sphere, citizenship, and racial identity take on a gritty reality that will engage political theorists, historians, and all those who care about the life and death of American cities.a
--Sonya Michel, University of Maryland, College Park

Newark's volatile past is infamous. The city has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis. Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of protest in the black community. Newark charts this important city's place in the nation, from its founding in 1666 by a dissident Puritan as a refuge from intolerance, through the days of Jim Crow and World War II civil rights activism, to the height of postwar integration and the election of its first black mayor.

In this broad and balanced history of Newark, Kevin Mumford applies the concept of the public sphere to the problem of race relations, demonstrating how political ideas and print culture were instrumental in shaping African American consciousness. He draws on both public and personal archives, interpreting official documents-such as newspapers, commission testimony, and government records-alongside interviews, political flyers, meeting minutes, and rare photos.

From the migration out of the south to the rise of public housing and ethnic conflict, Newark explains the impact of African Americans on the reconstruction of American cities in the twentieth century.

View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

aMumford explores the devastating effect of the riots and how the city police, state police, and National Guard escalated the violence. He raises the controversial possibility that female looters stripping store mannequins may have been making a social statement about economic inequality. He also discusses such divisive personalities as Anthony Imperiale of the Citizens Council, with his anti-black sentiments, and the poet Amiri Baraka, who melded black nationalism with anti-white and, occasionally, anti- Semitic rhetoric.a
--"New Jersey Star Ledger"

"Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Newark tells an important story. Portraying a city that functions as an archetype for Black Power in urban politics, Mumford writes with great sympathy for an earlier liberal integrationist tradition, periodizing and explaining its rise and fall carefully, eloquently, and persuasively."
--David Roediger, author of "Working Toward Whiteness"

aKevin Mumford's history of race relations in Newark is full of arresting insight, fascinating detail, and memorable writing. With interdisciplinary creativity, he offers an important contribution to the understanding of modern America.a
--Randall Kennedy, Harvard University

aWhile acknowledging--and vividly rendering--the explosive moments in Newark's history, pioneering historian Kevin Mumford shows that the quotidian political struggles of aeveryday folka ultimately turned the city into one apeopled and run by African Americans.a Yet the ravages of de-industrialization, white flight, long-term corruption, and a draconian tax policy had hollowed out the city, transforming blacksahard-won prize into a congeries of social, economic, and political problems. Richly documented and immensely readable, Newark is also a model of sophistication. In Mumford's hands, concepts like the public sphere, citizenship, and racial identity take on a gritty reality that will engage political theorists, historians, and all those who care about the life and death of American cities.a
--Sonya Michel, University of Maryland, College Park

Newark's volatile past is infamous. The city has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis. Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of protest in the black community. Newark charts this important city's place in the nation, from its founding in 1666 by a dissident Puritan as a refuge from intolerance, through the days of Jim Crow and World War II civil rights activism, to the height of postwar integration and the election of its first black mayor.

In this broad and balanced history of Newark, Kevin Mumford applies the concept of the public sphere to the problem of race relations, demonstrating how political ideas and print culture were instrumental in shaping African American consciousness. He draws on both public and personal archives, interpreting official documents-such as newspapers, commission testimony, and government records-alongside interviews, political flyers, meeting minutes, and rare photos.

From the migration out of the south to the rise of public housing and ethnic conflict, Newark explains the impact of African Americans on the reconstruction of American cities in the twentieth century.

"Interzones" is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. "Interzones" is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

"Interzones" is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. "Interzones" is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times-from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism-helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists-from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald-Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men. Drawing on an extensive archive of newspapers, pornography, and film, as well as government documents, organizational records, and personal papers, Mumford sheds new light on four volatile decades in the protracted battle of black gay men for affirmation and empowerment in the face of pervasive racism and homophobia.