During a three day period, over 13,000 rounds were dispersed by state militia resulting in the death of twenty-three black citizens. A total of twenty-six people lost their lives, eight of those by indiscriminate police fire, as this excerpt from the…
Following the initial outburst, Mayor Gibson asked the crowd of Puerto Rican citizens to join him at City Hall and hopefully come to a resolution. They marched to from Branch Brook Park and gathered outside on its front steps in hopes of being heard.…
Protesters demand a civilian review board in 1965. Robert Curvin, leader of the Essex County chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), warned that the “people were fantastically aggrieved” over the lack of police accountability following the…
Dr. Hilda Hidalgo, community activist, Rutgers professor, and member of the 1969 Black and Puerto Rican Convention, urged the community to vote in the mayoral election. She wrote, “Without attending the convention you will lose, Ken will lose, Blacks…
Mayor Kenneth Gibson with Ramon Rivera, Director of La Casa de Don Pedro and once a Gibson supporter. Given the city’s economic issues as well as Gibson’s political inexperience, the ties with the Puerto Rican community were later severed. Gibson’s…
This picture of the neighborhood boys around “seated Lincoln” in 1929 promoted an ideal vision of the city of Newark, which did not match the reality of power struggles between white ethnic groups and the new African American migrants relocating from…