Video. Good morning. Thank you for joining us what promises to be a promising round table discussion. Looking back on the 50th anniversary on the struggle to elect kenneth a. Gibson. Elected in june of 1970, it marked a turning buoyant for the black Freedom Movement that was part of a National Wave of black political organizing that couple nated in the election of black m mayors in cities like cleveland, gary, atlanta, and detroit from 1967 to 1974. The histories feel particularly vital now as blackled struggles against Police Violence and attempted murder of jacob black have sounded the clarity call for black liberation while raising familiar questions about the rules of electoral clicks in black freedom struggles. 50 years ago, gibsons landmark election came on the heels of the 1967 rebellion when the Police Beating of an unarmed black man named john smith marked an uprising. Smiths beating recalled countless Police Killing of black men in the city that had gone unpunished over the years and brought thousands into the street. State policemen were called into the city to suppress the uprising claiming two dozen lives in the process including a 10yearold eddy moss and others. The following days, months, and years, the black and puerto rican communities leveraged the people power and momentum of the uprising to build Community Power and organize successful campaigns for community controlled urban development, educational justice, and political power in the city. They organized around the principles of cultural nationalism and began building educational, cultural, economic, and Political Institutions and organizations, including the united brothers for unified newark. At the same time, heavily armed white malitias terrorized black communities signifying the violent white backlash. Into this charged political fray came ken gibson, an engineer and political hod mod moderate. Gibsons campaign became a National Call with helping to bring the likes of stevie wonder, james brown, and isaac hayes to newark to lend their celebrity to the cause. Meanwhile, in the streets and neighborhoods, grassroots organizers registered and moe g mobilized an unprecedented voter turnout yet to be matched since. Gibsons campaign and election illustrated the excitement and aspirations of black political power in the urban north. At the same time, his administration quickly revealed the limitations of seeking black liberation through the ballot box. The revelation that is, again, recently become abundantly clear in cities like chicago and atlanta. So, what are the legacies of this era of struggle . What lessons do they hold for a new generation of activists and organizers who have been in the streets for over 100 days now commanding systemic change in black liberation . Here to discuss the legacies and lessons of these histories are bee try beatrice adams. Juniusw. Williams. And lastly komozi woodard. Author of a nation within a nation. So, the first question will be for professor williams. Youre a leader in the struggle against the urban renewal project that would have displaced thousands of black new workers to build a state Medical College in the late 19 0i60s. Can you describe how activists and organizers leveraged the momentum generated by the 1967 rebellion to organize for political power in newark . Youre on mute. Thank you, peter. Thank you for the work you have done in newark with rise up newark and other things. The medical school fight was an example of a strategy which combined all aspects of political rebellion. The demonstration had already taken place. A demonstration was the rebellion. So there was no need to go back in the streets. Wed been in the street. So i was working with Phil Hutchings who later became chairman of nationalists local chapter. I was working with him at that time. I had been working the sds project. I said we do something different. After the rebellion, people were scared. The white people were scared. Suppose we do something different. I was in law school at yale and taking classes at the architecture and planning and i said to my friend, can you design a plan that shows how we can take the plan they have for the medical school, which they want 150 acres, and you can get it. So he did that and make long story short, they came up with a plan. Then i got the lawyers from the Legal Defense fund where at that time they were working mainly in the south. They filed a complaint and said you cant build this Hospital Medical school because theres not enough housing. So with that in mind, there was a new coalition and the coalition levied the power of the nameless and faceless brotherhood into a plan. Into an agreement which called for 60 acres of land for the hospital and medical school. 60 acres of vacant land and Community Development for housing and on that housing had had to build almost a thousand units of housing. Low and moderate income. It turned off into a community for unified newark which was the platform that brought gibson into electoralwoodard, you reme a congress of African People in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Could you please explain the political analyses and objectives behind the Gibson Campaign and how that fit into the black political power struggle in the 1970s . Youre on mute. Can you hear me now . All right. After the assassinations of malcolm x, dr. King and the black panther fred hampton, grassroots organizers in newark filled a great vacuum in leadership. By the time that dr. King came to newark in march 1968 many baraka had met with malcolm x, and rat brown sniff in particular. They told him about the alabama black Panther Party organizing, and planted the seeds of an idea to make newark the northern counterpart for the lounds county black Panther Party. So newark was supposed to be the black power experiment in the jim crow north the way lounds county black panthers were that in the jim crow south. Thus, when dr. King came and met with newark, with baraka in newark, 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 4th, 1968 that black united front was packed into the june 1968 black Political Convention in newark and the 1968 National Black power conference in philadelphia. At that point the National Black power conferences made newark the test case for black power politics. So all kinds of resources streamed into newark based on that agreement, from the Civil Rights Movement on the one hand, the black Power Movement on the other hand, and the black cultural revolution that was going on in the popular arts throughout the country. Accidentally white vigilantes were attacking and mobbing africanamerican and Puerto Ricans in the streets of newark. And in response two poets bara of the spear house movers and flip pay luciano signed a mutual defense pact, insisting that an attack on the Puerto Rican Community was an attack on the black 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. And that ended up being, basically, the winning formula. 1968, the united brothers ran an all black ticket at an all black convention. We lost. 1969 we started early, organizing for the 1970 election, and with that alliance of blacks and Puerto Ricans, and progressive whites, we won. And the other piece of it is that the Campaign Apparatus for the gibson the newark fund didnt disband when the election was over. So after winning that election and learning how to use mass media, and publications, they organized a congress of African People and national, International Meeting in atlanta, georgia, then they organized the gary convention, the african liberation day in washington, d. C. , and on and on. So the group that put that together was called the c Fund Community council. It met every sunday after church. Got to remember it was after church, right. And their program was called face the nation, you know, the tv program. And basically they would stand up the municipal officials and grade their paper, you know, are you cleaning the streets . Are you doing the Health Requirements and the things like that . So it was an ongoing political movement. But that convention, some of us were students, you know, 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 are just had a convention, i think it was last week, you know, using that same method. So thats, in a nutshell, thats what our strategy was. Thank you. 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 work during these years. Could you please talk about how the Gibson Administration measured up to the expectations that the people had for him . Of course. I want to say, first, thank you so much to dr. Black mare for asking me to serve on this panel and also thank you for allowing me to kind of be in awe of these walking primary sources about this wonderful history of newark. So ill talk a little bit about my research for the project and the event that comes to mind when you asked me this question is the 1974 puerto rican riot, its often called, but im going to call it a rebellion. And like so many rebellions in American History, its sparked by Police Violence, right. Theres the annual cultural celebration happening in Branchwood Park in newark and the community is being oversurveilled, police there, mounted police and a tension erupts over a dice game, a dominos game, a debated historical fact. What has definitely happened is a little girl is trampled by one of the horses. This sparks intense tensions between the police and the Puerto Rican Community who had already been frustrated for years. Gibson arrives on the scene, right . He tries to calm the tensions. Theres actually a march, gibson participates in that day downtown to city hall. The next day gibson in a meeting with some of the leaders of the Puerto Rican Community and also more broadly the spanishspeaking community in general. And i think this is illuminating, right, because gibson does something in this meeting that is both a little bit candid for a politician to do, but speaks to maybe some of the limitations of black political power, right . So theyre asking questions about unemployment, theyre asking questions about housing. And gibson says i can only do so much as a mayor. And sometimes i listen to people say, oh, the president is helping unemployment go down. The president s helping unemployment go up. And i think, how much direct kind of power do political actors have over all these things we give them . So gibson is being honest in a way. But also, hes in a way dismissing their experiences, right, saying that i cant do anything, this is beyond my control. Some of these issues that youre bringing to me, im not interested in, right, im not interested in your pain as a community in this particular moment. And i think this speaks to, you know, gibson is a little less maybe a lot less radical revolutionary than the movement that gibson meant to office, right . Weve already mentioned the black and Puerto Rican Convention that kind of allows him to then become mayor, that movement is the wave he rides, right, to the office, and many of us think about it as a comparison between gibson and how there is not a lot of love there. For a long time, right . Its the same is happening, baraka is in this meeting with the same tension where gibson is, not hearing the people, or the constituency that got him elected but he serves as mayor four times so hes doing something. And i think he is modeling something that becomes important, hes trying to be the mayor for everyone. Hes trying to serve the totality of the community that has had internal ruptures, that has had internal tensions and there is some nobleness to that, right . But also, i think, and i compare him in a way to my own work, i talk about jackson in atlanta, i studied the american south, and he seems to have a different stance, right, by no means is jackson necessarily a militant, but he does have this kind of black empowerment stance, if we think about one of his greatest successes is the creation of black millionaires, contracts go from 1 to 27 africanamericans, right . I dont know if we can say the same about gibson, right . He does create this kind of black Political Class of people who were working in and around city hall, but hes much more trying to brand himself as a mayor for everyone. And i think what that really speaks to, are both the possibilities, right, of black political leadership, and also the limitations of black political leadership. Thank you. You all were much more concise than i anticipated so we have a little bit extra time so that gives me a chance to ask an additional question. The black and Puerto Rican Convention in 1969 was brought up several times and im wondering if any of you all would like to speak more about the atmosphere of the convention, what that convention represented in newarks Political Climate in 1969, and maybe some of the what youre recalling about the platform of that convention and how that compared to what gibsons administration was actually about and actually prioritized. Yeah, i could 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 then we had an even smaller amount of white people. All of who had come together into this coalition, which was actually ruined by two sets of people. One were the moderates, headed by bobker ben whos the official leader and the other by mary baraka. So at that time it was difficult for the then campaign manager, i was his First Campaign manager, but by arrangement we got someone who had been involved with more campaign than certainly i had who came in and it was a hell of a thing, dan said, trying to answer to two separate leadership people, sets of people, and also leadership style. But the convention went on without a hitch. I mean, you mentioned some of the folks who had been there. I think thats or maybe you didnt. We had dick gregory, we had all kinds of stars, quote unquote political stars as well as stars from the entertainment world. And it was a success. We went out of there thinking that this was going to be the script, if you will, for what black power would look like in the city of newark, among other things, whether there were committees that were formed and reported out in preliminary session at the end, one of the one of the planks in that platform was that the state should take over the financing of the School District because newark didnt have enough tax money, as were in the suburbs, to do that. Now, that didnt happen and gibson never talked about that. But in 1981 we had the abbott versus bert case which said just that, the state is going to have to pay for the schooling of the people in the socalled districts because they dont have enough taxes. It was pressing in that sense. Another thing that came up, one was another one was the question of a Police Review board. People were adamant about that. Because the police had been beaten 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 im the Police Review board. Well, we didnt anticipate that. So that was those were two big instances of what we wanted, versus what we got, and they offered specific goals and objectives that were measurable, specific goals and objectives that were measurable. One of the things gibson said he was going to do is to meet with those of us in a leadership capacity on a regular basis. We had one meeting, and he said words to the effect, im the mayor for all the people, and were not going to do that. I remember baraka the elder saying to me afterwards, we elected him to be the mayor, but didnt nobody think he was going to try to run the city all by himself. But that was a forecast of what was about to come. Now, i have to say one thing, i disagree with something that was said, that there was a leadership vacuum in newark when baraka got together with all these national people. No, there was no leadership vacuum in newark. We had done a fantastic job setting the stage for the next step that he was the leadership were, which were the united brothers. There was leadership, there was leadership in the education area, with the callahan fight, with the medical school fight. So there were people there who were in leadership positions, and i dont want people to think that there was nothing going on until our brother came in with these ideas. Now, baraka was from newark. He had people that knew him, but the political wave that followed in his absence while he was away was just as home grown as what was done when he got there, and had the insight and foresight to d