Mark Krasovic. The Newark Frontier

This study of 1960s community action begins not with grassroots activism, nor even with the powerful effects of the southern mobilizations against Jim Crow, but with the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Mark Krasovic examines debates in successive presidential administrations over how to respond to a “groundswell of support for the civil rights movement,” and yet local activists inspired by the “groundswell” remain surprisingly off-stage (30). It is surprising because, according to Krasovic, organizing for rights, services, repairs, and so on appears to be a trickle-down affair. Clearly written and deeply researched, The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society credits President Kennedy for recognizing the potential of community action, narrates how Lyndon B. Johnson fostered it in the Great Society, and chronicles its implementation at Newark City Hall. Through a fly-on-the-wall perspective in meetings, Krasovic explains how a critical mass of administrators came to support programs that empowered youth and how, in turn, Newark’s political machine dispersed community funding unequally, sparking widespread protests. Next, the author introduces New Left icon Tom Hayden and an assortment of volunteers (black and white) who took small grants and protested against state inequalities. But Hayden’s involvement as told here is very familiar; Jennifer Frost has already detailed the activities of the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (2001); and black community action in Newark has been thoroughly covered by Komozi Woodard in A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (1999).

Civil society · Community economic development · Community organizing · Direct action · Downtown · Frontier · Grassroots · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Presidential system · Sociology · State (computer science) · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies