Stories of Newark's postwar decline are easy to find. But in "The Fixers", Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city's decline mounted by Newark's residents and suburban neighbors. In these pages, we meet the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates in unprecedented numbers. There are tenants who mounted a historic rent strike to transform public housing and renegade white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing and influence housing policy. These are just a few of the "fixers" we meet – people who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state. Rabig argues that fixers play dual roles. They support resistance, but also mediation; they fight for reform, but also more radical and far-reaching alternatives; they rally others to a collective cause, but sometimes they broker factions. Fixers reflect longer traditions of organizing while responding to the demands of their times. In so doing, they end up fixing (like a fixative) a new and enduring pattern of activist strategies, reforms, and institutional expectations – a pattern we continue to see today.
About the Author
Julia Rabig is a lecturer of history at Dartmouth College. She is co-editor of "The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Post-War America".
Reviews
"Rabig helps us explore Newark in a way that goes beyond the familiar story of the 1967 uprising, and demonstrates how innovative individuals and organizations in the city sought – and sometimes found – pragmatic ways to work around the structural and political constraints that faced Newark before and especially after the uprising. At times working within structures of corporate and governmental power and at others challenging such institutions, 'the Fixers' addressed problems of housing, employment, discrimination, and political neglect. 'The Fixers' offers an account of what can be done in an urban environment struggling with conditions of rapid change and extensive regional inequality, and it shows that urban history in Newark did not end with the uprising. This is an important and engaging work" – Guian McKee, author of "The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia"
"'The Fixers' is analytic, narrative history at its finest. Rabig captures how the momentum of black power was channeled into efficacious policymaking in post-riot Newark – the largest city in America's most densely packed state. She cogently charts how visions of a better Newark transformed local activists, too easily dismissed as nihilists by critics, into bureaucrats of the shadow state – long after state government told Newark and Washington told all of urban America to 'drop dead'. Nimbly balancing telling detail with a colorful gaze on the big picture, The Fixers is one of those myth-shattering books – one that compels a rethinking of black political economy, urban crises, and recent America itself" – Devin Fergus, author of "Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980"
"Rabig's beautifully written history of Newark in the 1960s and '70s, offers critical new insights into the ways that the War on Poverty worked on the ground and the complex connections between African-American community activists, politicians, labor unions, corporate elites, and the 'fixers' who built bridges between them. This important book brilliantly deconstructs the myth of the urban crisis in the city that came to embody that notion, offering a vivid analysis of how public-private partnerships in the late 1960s became the gentrified, privatized, neoliberal city of the 1980s. This is a must-read for historians of poverty, urban politics, race, and the history of capitalism" – Annelise Orleck, author of "Rethinking American Women's Activism"
"Newark's urban rebellion and black power movement produced the 'Fixers' – a constellation of individuals and organizations – that emerged to help shape the city's emergent black and brown urban regime. Rabig's book zeroes in on the multifaceted and complicated roles of the fixers in making Newark a just city for all of its citizens. More than just old-school reformers, Newark's fixers built new political coalitions and organizations, which bridged the promise and reality of one of America's most beleaguered cities. Rabig's work is an important contribution to urban history that pushes the field to address the US urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s" – Kimberley Johnson, author of "Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Pre-Brown South"
