The Newark Rebellion of 1967: Causes and Voices of Protest

National Guardsman passes a smashed storefront on Springfield Avenue in Newark during the 1967 uprising. Residents marked “soul” on some Black-owned businesses to dissuade destruction patch.com.

On July 12, 1967, decades of systemic racism and abuse at the hands of authorities in Newark, New Jersey reached a boiling point. That evening, two white police officers dragged a Black taxi driver, John Smith, from his cab and brutally beat him over a minor traffic infraction time.com. Smith’s arrest and rumored death in custody were the spark in a powder keg. A crowd of residents gathered at the Fourth Precinct station where Smith was held, fed up with “years of on-going white racist oppression” in policing wibailoutpeople.orgwibailoutpeople.org. Activists on the scene, like Junius Williams, a Yale law student spending the summer in Newark, at first urged nonviolent protest, attempting to channel the community’s anger into a march on City Hall theguardian.com. But the people’s patience was exhausted. “This time, the angry crowd didn’t go away… they didn’t listen to the leaders who urged non-violence,” Williams later wrote theguardian.com. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the precinct, and the uprising began.

Newark’s Black citizens did not view this as a mere senseless riot – to them it was a rebellion against long-standing injustice. “Long before [our organization] was established people were referring to the upheaval in 1967 as a ‘rebellion’ and not a ‘riot,’” recalls Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) blackstarnews.com. Local leaders deliberately chose the word “rebellion” because “it was Black people’s collective response to years of on-going white racist oppression and not simply a spontaneous mob riot in response to a single random incident” blackstarnews.com. In the words of Junius Williams, “Riots are mindless, aimless, spontaneous outbursts… But rebellions… are the result of long-simmering hurts with no other ways to redress grievances. Looking at the evidence, this was a rebellion.” njmonthly.com. Newark in 1967 was a majority-Black city ruled by a white political machine; the police force was over 90% white and notorious for brutalizing Black residents with impunity njmonthly.comblackstarnews.com. As one community activist put it, “People had been getting the crap beaten out of them for years” by Newark police theguardian.com. They had lodged complaints through official channels for so long, “and nothing substantive was done to remedy the problem” blackstarnews.comwibailoutpeople.org. Facing “racial disparities in policing…and civic disenfranchisement,”the community felt unheard patch.com. The rebellion was, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words, “the language of the unheard.” It was an explosion born of “the psychology of oppression,” as King had presciently warned just months earlier: “A riot is the language of the unheard…America has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened…that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met” time.comtime.com.

Residents who lived through the Newark uprising recall the fury and the purpose behind it. Amina Baraka, wife of the late poet-activist Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), remembers being caught by surprise at the outbreak – “It surprised me. It shouldn’t have” theguardian.com. She realized Newark was like Watts in 1965 or Harlem in 1964: a Black community “excluded from power, abused by police, and no longer willing to bottle its frustration.” theguardian.com Once the rebellion began, it was “like a movie” to see tanks and armored vehicles patrolling city streets, Amina said theguardian.com. Her husband Amiri Baraka became one of the prominent voices of the rebellion – on the second night, police pulled him from his car and beat him severely, then shamelessly chained him to a wheelchair in the hospital theguardian.com. (He was charged with carrying a firearm, but later acquitted theguardian.com.) Baraka’s cultural center, Spirit House, was ransacked by police in “revenge,” exemplifying how authorities lashed out during the chaos theguardian.com. Amiri Baraka survived and later used his platform to organize for Black political empowerment, but he bore the scars of Newark’s rebellion in his flesh.

Other community members had their own close calls. Junius Williams recounts being pulled over past curfew by Newark police during the unrest, staring down the barrel of a shotgun as jittery officers expected “outside agitators” and looked for any excuse to shoot Black youths njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com. Williams and his friends kept calm; a sergeant spotted law textbooks in their car and ordered the cops to let them go – a small miracle that likely saved their lives njmonthly.com. “It is hard to explain to anyone who was not there the climate of resistance in the streets during the 1960s,” Williams writes. Black Newarkers had been organizing nonviolently for years – marching, withholding rent from slumlords, boycotting merchants who sold spoiled food, protesting segregated schools and racist hiring, and always “speaking out against police brutality.” But when “ordinary democratic processes didn’t work for Black people…all that was left was the politics of confrontation.” Up to 1967 those confrontations had been nonviolent – now they had erupted njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com.

“A City Under Occupation”: The Four-Day Uprising and Its Toll

Once the rebellion ignited on July 12, Newark descended into chaos and conflict over the next four days. New Jersey’s governor, Richard Hughes, declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard and state troopers to restore order blackstarnews.com. By the thousands they poured into the city – nearly 8,000 law enforcement and guardsmen in total blackstarnews.com – armed with rifles, bayonets, and even tanks. “We were under military occupation,” recalls Lawrence Hamm, who was a teenager in Newark at the time. “I saw them marching with rifles and pistols…riding in trucks, jeeps, and tanks” through Black neighborhoods wibailoutpeople.org. The heavily armed presence did not immediately quell the violence – if anything, it often escalated the bloodshed, as untrained, fearful white guardsmen treated all Black civilians as enemy combatants theguardian.comtheguardian.com. Over those five summer days, 26 people were killed in Newark and over 700 injured, the overwhelming majority Black residents blackstarnews.compatch.com. An Essex County grand jury later found that “indiscriminate shooting” by police and soldiers, frequently under the false pretext of “sniper fire,” caused many civilian deaths – “anyone Black was fair game.” njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com According to investigations, at least 22 of the 26 deaths were caused by law enforcement bullets or brutality njmonthly.com. Victims included unarmed people like Tedock Bell, 28, shot dead “for running from police”; Billy Furr, 24, “shot down like a dog… for the crime of stealing beer” from a looted store; and Eloise Spellman, a mother of 11 killed by a stray bullet through her apartment window as troops recklessly fired at phantom snipers njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com. In one especially grisly incident, James Rutledge, 19, was cornered by state troopers in a looted liquor store – he attempted to surrender but was cut down by 39 bullets, with even the top of his head shot off as he lay prone njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com. Such extreme police violence far surpassed the damage caused by the “rioters” themselves, as Williams notes: the authorities inflicted “a pattern of death and destruction…that far surpassed the damage to property and theft done by those in rebellion.” njmonthly.com

Meanwhile, enraged residents did engage in widespread property destruction and looting, primarily targeting white-owned businesses that had long exploited or mistreated the Black community. Mobs set fires and smashed storefronts along major corridors like Springfield Avenue – Newark’s primary Black business district – and other “central ward” streets njmonthly.comamsterdamnews.com. Many small shops, bars, and restaurants were ransacked or burned. However, there was a method to some of the madness: merchants known to be fair to Black customers were often spared, and Black-owned businesses signaled with signs reading “soul brother” to ward off attacks njmonthly.com. Looters famously hauled stolen furniture and goods out of stores, then destroyed credit records to prevent debt-collection on poor customers njmonthly.com. The fury was such that even some older onlookers cheered the thieves – one local grandmother, watching a boy run off with groceries, yelled, “Hurry up son. Get all you can get,” seeing a sort of frontier justice in the moment njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com. The destruction, however, was extensive. When calm was finally restored by July 17, entire blocks lay in ruin, with more than $10 million in property damage (equivalent to nearly $100 million today) en.wikipedia.org. Newark’s economy and infrastructure – already weakened by deindustrialization – had taken a devastating blow.

The psychological impact on the community was profound as well. Newark’s Black residents had stood up and struck back, but they paid a heavy price. “The city was a battlefield; the front line was everywhere,”Junius Williams observed. “Newark at the end of six days was whipped, whether you were in the streets or cowering in your house.” njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com The trauma and anger would linger for decades. “I remember the Army and National Guard… riding on fire trucks,” said Newark’s Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose, who was a child at the time, recalling how even neighborhood stores he frequented as a boy were suddenly gone after the fires cbsnews.com. Yet in that ashes and anger, seeds of change were planted, as the next sections show.

Aftermath: Change Forced by “the Nameless Brother with the Brick”

When the smoke cleared, Newark faced a pivotal question: What now? In the immediate aftermath, the city’s white power structure finally realized it could no longer ignore Black demands. As one Black homeowner-activist, Louise Epperson, later put it: “Before the riot, I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me. But after the riot… everybody wanted to talk!” njmonthly.com. Fear of another explosion made officials willing to negotiate with community representatives on long-standing grievances. “They were afraid there was going to be another riot,” notes Junius Williams. In those negotiations, he quips, “we had that nameless, faceless brother with the bricks with us at the negotiating table.” theguardian.com The threat of further unrest gave weight to Black voices that had been ignored.

Significant concessions and reforms followed in Newark as direct results of the rebellion. For one, the contested plan to build a massive state medical school campus in the heart of the Black Central Ward was drastically altered. Prior to 1967, Mayor Hugh Addonizio’s administration had planned to bulldoze 150 acres of a mostly Black neighborhood – displacing 20,000 residents – to erect a medical and dental school complex njmonthly.com. This plan epitomized the “urban renewal” land grabs Black Newarkers saw as “Negro removal.”During the rebellion, activists like Williams and Epperson made it clear this was fuel on the fire. In late 1967, a community coalition (with Williams as co-chair) sat down with state officials and hammered out a compromise: the medical school footprint was shrunk by more than half (to about 60 acres instead of 150) and limited to mostly vacant land njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com. Another 60 acres of city land was set aside specifically for constructing low-income housing to rehouse those displaced njmonthly.com. Over the next few years, more than 900 housing units (affordable apartments and family homes) were built for Newark’s Black and Puerto Rican residents on that land njmonthly.com. Additionally, the state agreed to fund job training – ultimately training around 600 local workers – and to open up construction unions to Black workers for the first time njmonthly.comtheguardian.com. Many of those trained were hired to build the new facilities and housing, injecting jobs and economic opportunity into the community that had been excluded before the uprising. “Those were the biggest achievements coming out of the rebellion,” Junius Williams reflects, “Vacant land was allotted to affordable housing; a jobs program trained some 600 workers… We had that [angry] brother at the table.” theguardian.com.

Other proposed policies that would have further harmed Newark’s Black neighborhoods were also stopped in their tracks. For example, not long after 1967, activists mobilized against a planned state highway (Route 75) that would have plowed through residential sections of the Central Ward. In early 1968, Williams and a multiracial group – including members of the Black Panthers – famously traveled to Trenton and confronted the Transportation Department, warning officials that running another highway through Newark’s Black community would risk “another riot.” They even locked themselves in a conference room with the state director to drive the point home njmonthly.com. The result? Two weeks later, embarrassed state officials quietly cancelled the Route 75 project entirely njmonthly.com. Newark was spared another mass displacement. “Two weeks later…I got a call saying they really didn’t need that highway after all,” Williams recounts wryly njmonthly.com. This victory protected several thousand families from removal, a direct outcome of rebellious pressure.

Perhaps the most lasting change sparked by the Newark rebellion was a profound shift in political power. The uprising galvanized Newark’s Black community to demand representation in City Hall commensurate with their majority status. In 1966, all but one member of Newark’s city council were white, and the Black population had been shut out of real influence blackpast.orgblackpast.org. That changed abruptly after 1967. Activist Amiri Baraka leveraged his fame (and notoriety with the establishment) to convene Black leaders and militants into a united front. In 1968 he formed the United Brothers, which later became the Committee For Unified Newark (CFUN) – an alliance of factions from moderate clergy to radical nationalists njmonthly.com. CFUN and other community groups registered voters en masse and pressed for a single Black mayoral candidate to unseat the white machine. The candidate they chose was Kenneth A. Gibson, a politically untainted Black municipal engineer. In 1970, riding the wave of post-rebellion urgency, Gibson was elected Newark’s first African American mayor theguardian.com. Voter turnout in the Black community surged to 73%, reflecting the determination for change njmonthly.com. “The upheaval was catastrophic but it also gave added impetus to a dynamic movement for Black political power,” Hamm notes, “that led to the election of Kenneth A. Gibson as Newark’s first African American mayor” blackstarnews.com. Gibson’s victory was early in a nationwide wave of Black mayors taking office in large cities – Newark 1970 was followed by Gary, IN the same year, then Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Detroit within a few years theguardian.com. It’s arguable whether Gibson could have won without the rebellion, but clearly “the momentum… began with the events of July 1967”, as Junius Williams attests njmonthly.com. The uprising politically “finished” many of the old guard Black collaborators who had backed the white mayor – they “picked the wrong horse” in 1970 and lost credibility after the violence njmonthly.com. Even Mayor Addonizio himself met a disgraceful end: in 1970 he was indicted and later convicted on 64 counts of corruption, a final confirmation of the entrenched graft that had also fueled community outrage njmonthly.com. He went to federal prison, while a new slate of Black leadership took the helm in Newark.

Under Mayor Ken Gibson and his successors, Newark did begin to address some of the systemic issues highlighted by the rebellion. Gibson integrated the police department, whose ranks had been almost all white. He hired substantial numbers of Black and Latino officers (and women officers), gradually changing the force’s composition to better reflect the community njmonthly.com. For example, by 2000, the NPD was 37% Black and 27% Hispanic, no longer monolithically white en.wikipedia.org. Other reforms were attempted: Newark opened a Community Relations Bureau in the police department in 1966 and, for decades after 1967, activists pushed for a permanent civilian review board to hold police accountable en.wikipedia.orgwibailoutpeople.org. (This demand, voiced even before the rebellion, finally saw success in recent years – more on that later.) Black political power in Newark also led to improvements in services and a sense of community ownership. As Hamm describes it, by Gibson’s second term the city council was also predominantly Black blackstarnews.com, and the politics of patronage that had excluded Black Newarkers began to open up (though not without new problems of its own). Newark’s rebellion also directly inspired creation of community-based organizations like the influential New Community Corporation (NCC), founded in 1968 by a Catholic clergyman and Black activists. NCC used church and government funds to rebuild housing and provide social services in the Central Ward en.wikipedia.org, helping families displaced by the turmoil. These efforts were part of the “Black empowerment” era ushered in by 1967’s uprisings, which “contributed to reforms in law enforcement, economic inequality and the election of the first Black mayors” in cities like Newark and Detroit history.com.

At the same time, not all outcomes were positive. The riot accelerated forces that would plague Newark for decades: “white flight” went into overdrive, as thousands more white residents and business owners fled the city permanently in fear theguardian.comnjmonthly.com. As a result, Newark’s tax base and job market further contracted. Many looted or burned-out businesses never returned, and for years large swaths of the central city remained pockmarked with vacant lots and abandoned buildings – urban scars that were “still covered in decay as of 2025” in some areas en.wikipedia.org. Newark entered the 1970s and 1980s with intense challenges: rampant poverty, high crime, and an image as a symbol of urban blight. Some of the new Black leaders who came to power, like Gibson and his long-time successor Mayor Sharpe James, eventually fell short of their communities’ high hopes. They “adopted the old patronage politics” in many ways, and both Gibson and James would later face legal troubles of their own (Gibson for tax evasion, James for fraud) theguardian.com. The rebellion had opened the door to change, but entrenched economic and social problems proved harder to uproot. Still, residents now at least had a seat at the table of power, and as Junius Williams notes, “The people no longer felt they must resort to violent upheaval for change” once they could elect responsive leaders njmonthly.com. Indeed, Newark has not seen a repeat of 1967 in the half-century since, despite ongoing struggles.

Newark Today: Progress, Pain, and Parallels to 1967

Fifty-eight years later, Newark commemorates the rebellion of 1967 not only to remember the lives lost, but to remind everyone of the conditions that produced it – conditions that, disturbingly, still resonate today. Lawrence Hamm and the People’s Organization for Progress hold annual marches to mark the anniversary “because it [the rebellion] has continued relevance to our contemporary condition and circumstances.” blackstarnews.com The uncomfortable truth is that many of the same problems that drove Black Newarkers to rise up in 1967 remain unsolved in 2025. “Some progress has been made over the past 58 years,” Hamm acknowledges, “but Black people still face many of the problems” that fueled the rebellion blackstarnews.com. Police brutality is still a festering issue – Newark’s police are now far more diverse and better trained, yet incidents of excessive force have not been eradicated. In fact, only a few years ago a Newark detective fatally shot an unarmed Black man, Carl Dorsey, under questionable circumstances; no charges were filed, sparking protests in 2021 wibailoutpeople.org. It’s a grim reminder of the past – could police brutality spark another uprising in Newark? The city has tried to prevent it: after a federal investigation found patterns of abuse, Newark’s police department has been under a consent decree and federal monitor since 2016 wibailoutpeople.org. Reforms like de-escalation training and civilian oversight began to yield results (police shootings did decline) wibailoutpeople.org. In 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota set off nationwide protests, Newark notably avoided the kind of violent clashes that occurred in some other cities. Thousands marched in Newark, led in part by Mayor Ras J. Baraka – who, as the son of Amiri and Amina Baraka, has the legacy of 1967 in his blood. Mayor Baraka took a novel approach: he stationed clergy and community leaders between protesters and police to defuse tensions cbsnews.com, and instructed officers to hold back and “for something minor, don’t engage” cbsnews.com. The result was largely peaceful demonstrations. “My father was beat in the head in the rebellion in 1967,” Baraka told marchers, “This story is personal” cbsnews.comcbsnews.com. Learning from history, Newark’s police showed restraint in 2020; one officer noted, “We have cameras…use that [later] to investigate” petty vandalism rather than intervene and trigger chaos cbsnews.com. This contrasts sharply with 1967, when aggressive policing lit the fuse. Newark’s experience in 2020 suggests some lessons have been learned – better police-community relations and accountability can prevent conflict. Indeed, Newark under Mayor Baraka established a civilian police review board (after decades of activism) to handle complaints theguardian.com. Although police unions fought to weaken its powers, the very existence of Newark’s Civilian Complaint Review Board is a symbol of progress that emerged from the long shadow of 1967 wibailoutpeople.orgamsterdamnews.com. As Baraka often points out, the struggle for police reform in Newark predates the rebellion – it’s taken over 50 years to even approach the oversight that might have prevented John Smith’s beating.

Beyond policing, the socioeconomic ills that afflicted Newark in 1967 continue to challenge the community today – in some cases, they’ve worsened. “Newark’s poverty rate in 1967 was 18 percent. However, today it is 27 percent,” Hamm points out bluntly blackstarnews.com. Unemployment remains stubbornly high (around 7%, roughly the same as in 1967) blackstarnews.com. The city is still one of the poorest in America; fully one-third of Newark’s residents live below the poverty line theguardian.comtheguardian.com. Economic disparities along racial lines persist, both locally and nationally. Back in 1967, the Kerner Commission’s famous report warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white – separate and unequal”, unless massive efforts were made to invest in urban Black communities blackpast.org. That warning still rings true. In Newark today, gleaming new office towers and luxury developments have risen downtown, but the benefits often bypass local Black residents. As of a few years ago, Newark residents held only 18% of the jobs in the city (and a meager 10% of jobs paying over $40k) theguardian.com. Gentrification and corporate investment have driven a modest “comeback” downtown, but have also introduced pressures like rising rents (“gentrification” is now one of the problems Hamm lists) and economic exclusion wibailoutpeople.orgwibailoutpeople.org. Meanwhile, the “lack of affordable housing, low wages, substandard education, and inadequate healthcare” that Hamm ticks off as ongoing plagues could be taken straight from a 1967 list of grievances blackstarnews.com. Newark still has a long way to go to fulfill the rebellious cry for “better opportunities” and an escape from the “constraints of segregation” that Kevin Mumford noted were as present in the North as in the South time.comtime.com.

History Repeating? Attacks on Minority Rights in the Modern Era

Crucially, the alignment between 1967 and today extends beyond Newark. The mid-1960s saw a series of Black uprisings in cities across America – over 150 “disturbances” in 1967 alone – all born from racial injustice, police abuse, and poverty en.wikipedia.orgwibailoutpeople.org. Today, the United States faces a new wave of social unrest and a climate of backlash against minority rights, drawing eerie parallels to that earlier era. In the 1960s, progress on civil rights (like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act) was met with fierce resistance and “law and order” politics. Likewise, in recent years, hard-won gains of the Civil Rights Movement have been under assault. As Hamm observes, we may be “entering a time where attacks on minority freedoms are now open game for the federal government.” The evidence is visible: voting rights protections have been rolled back, and new laws have sprung up that disproportionately disenfranchise Black voters. The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, “swinging open the door for states to enact restrictive voting laws” that make it harder for people of color to vote brennancenter.org. Indeed, within years of that decision, multiple states imposed strict ID requirements, cut early voting, and purged voter rolls in ways that target minority communities brennancenter.org. Federal authorities, which once vigorously enforced voting rights, have pulled back – the U.S. Justice Department in the last administration abandoned many voting rights cases brennancenter.org. This regression threatens to undermine one of the fundamental gains of the 1960s: the guarantee of minority political participation.

At the same time, the current Supreme Court has chipped away at other pillars of racial equity. In 2023, it struck down affirmative action in college admissions, ending policies designed to help remedy centuries of discrimination. To many, this felt like turning back the clock on minority educational opportunity – a signal that federal institutions may no longer actively protect civil rights gains. Meanwhile, there is a resurgence of overtly nativist and racist rhetoric in national politics. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon rose to power exploiting fears of urban riots and promising “law and order” – code words that often meant cracking down on Black activists rather than cracking down on inequality history.com. Similarly, in recent years, figures like Donald Trump have openly disparaged movements for racial justice (for instance, calling Black Lives Matter protesters “thugs”) and implemented policies that hurt minority communities. Hamm specifically notes the “negative impact of Trump’s recently passed budget bill” on cities like Newark blackstarnews.com. In 2017, the Trump administration passed large tax cuts benefiting the wealthy while slashing social spending – “trillion dollar tax cuts for the rich and record cuts in food stamps and Medicaid,” Hamm explains wibailoutpeople.org. These cuts in federal support for social services inevitably hit poor Black and brown families the hardest, widening the very inequalities that led to unrest in the 60s. It’s a bitter echo of Kerner Commission’s call for “massive and sustained” investment to close racial gaps – a call that went unheeded. Instead of “mounting programs on a scale equal to the problems”, as Kerner urged blackpast.org, the federal stance in recent years has often been retreat or even hostility toward such programs. The Kerner Report warned in 1968 that “to pursue our present course will involve continuing polarization…and ultimately the destruction of basic democratic values”, whereas the alternative was “not blind repression… but a commitment to national action…backed by the resources of the most powerful and richest nation” blackpast.org. Yet, more than 50 years on, the national choice has frequently tilted toward repression over compassion. Consider the response to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020: in some cities, federal forces were deployed (often uninvited by local authorities) to “dominate” protesters, leading to scenes of militarized officers confronting citizens reminiscent of 1967. Then, as now, violence and disorder bred calls for more crackdowns rather than more justice. It is telling that President Lyndon Johnson himself, in July 1967 as Detroit burned, said on national television, “Not even the sternest police action nor the most effective federal troops can ever create lasting peace in our cities… The only genuine, long-range solution is to attack the conditions that breed despair and violence.” history.com. That remains true in 2025: without addressing root causes – poverty, racism, inequality – heavy-handed tactics will only “nourish repression, not justice,” to quote the Kerner Commission blackpast.org.

For Newark, the political and social alignment between 1967 and now is a mix of progress and persisting struggle. On one hand, Newark today is governed by Black leadership deeply conscious of the city’s turbulent history. Mayor Ras Baraka embodies this continuity – the son of a rebellion leader, now working from within the system to reform that system. The city has made notable strides in community policing, jobs programs, and even progressive policies like a pioneering inclusionary housing ordinance to combat displacement (requiring developers to reserve units for low-income residents) theguardian.com. Newark’s crime rate in recent years hit its lowest level since 1967, a hopeful indicator theguardian.com. The vibrancy of Newark’s culture – art, music, community activism – endures, showing the resilience of a community that “held this town together…tooth and nail” through hard times theguardian.com. There’s even a sense of pride in acknowledging the rebellion: a Rebellion Memorial now stands on Springfield Avenue where the unrest began, listing the names of those who died and ensuring they are not forgotten patch.compatch.com. The area is informally called Rebellion Park – a name that asserts dignity in what happened, echoing poet Jasmine Mans’ sentiment that she prefers neither “riot” nor “rebellion” but calls it “1967: The Ravishing” to honor “that impeccable moment of fighting” theguardian.com.

On the other hand, Newark’s people still ask, as Hamm does, “whether the conditions that led to the rebellion of 1967 still exist and whether the city will be able to avoid another upheaval in the future.” blackstarnews.comCould it happen again? The answer is a caution. Newark in 2025 is not the powder keg it was in 1967 – the city is no longer openly dominated by racist outsiders; there is greater community representation, and mechanisms (however imperfect) for airing grievances exist. However, the underlying frustrations have not been eradicated. As two Newark activists (father and son Che and Junius Onome Williams) reflected, many of the same issues that led to 1967 “are still relevant today” njspotlightnews.org. Economic injustice, racial bias in policing, inadequate housing and schools – these create a familiar combustible mix. The difference now is that those who seek to curtail minority rights are sometimes operating at a national level, in courtrooms and legislatures far from Newark, rolling back protections the community fought for. That raises the stakes: Newark’s fate is tied to the broader state of American democracy and racial justice. If minority communities feel under siege by federal policies, as they did by local police in the 1960s, widespread unrest could return in new forms. Hamm and POP explicitly connect the two eras, calling today for a “passage of federal and state legislation” to address police brutality, protect voting rights, raise wages, build housing, and even to enact slavery reparations – essentially, to finish the unfinished agenda of the civil rights movement blackstarnews.com. They also urge grassroots action: “increased citizen engagement and participation including voter registration, education and mobilization, economic boycotts, protests, and movement building for both reform and systemic change.” blackstarnews.com These are the tools, they argue, to prevent history from repeating.

Conclusion: Lessons from 1967 for a New Era of Activism

In Newark, the 1967 rebellion is not just a chapter in history books – it’s a living memory that continues to inform the fight for justice today. The people who led and lived through the uprising have spent decades translating its lessons into action. “The 1967 Newark Rebellion changed power relations in Newark forever,”Junius Williams wrote. “It ushered in a new era when race is not the only basis upon which to base one’s political choices.” njmonthly.com By shattering the old order, the rebellion opened possibilities for a more inclusive city. The challenge now, as Williams and Hamm both emphasize, is to learn from the rebellion without romanticizing violence. The rebellion’s legacy is complex – it highlights the desperate measures people will take when *“promises of freedom and justice” are continually broken time.com. It showed that oppression can and will be met with resistance. But it also showed that true progress requires structural change and good-faith effort from those in power. Newark avoided a repeat of 1967 in the turbulent summer of 2020, not by luck, but because community leaders and officials actively applied those lessons: they communicated, they addressed protesters respectfully, and they had already begun reforms, however modest, to show the city was trying to hear its “unheard.” In that, there is hope.

Yet Newark’s story is also a warning to America. The persistence of racial disparities and the resurgence of government actions that marginalize minorities (from voter suppression to cutting social aid) echo the conditions that the Kerner Commission warned would tear the nation apart blackpast.orgblackpast.org. As one Newark resident involved in 1967 put it recently, “Understanding why it happened is critical, because it opens the doors to understanding the continuity in how this country deals with race. The meaning [of] July 12, 1967… is what it means to us today.” theguardian.com In other words, 1967 is not ancient history – it is a mirror for 2025. We neglect its lessons at our peril. When federal or state authorities make *“attacks on minority freedoms…open game,” whether through neglect or deliberate policy, they risk lighting new fuses of anger. The task for today’s leaders is to heed the voices coming from communities like Newark – voices that say we need jobs, we need housing, we need justice and dignity – and to act on those needs before desperation speaks in fire and broken glass once again.

As Newark’s example shows, progress is possible: the city that was once synonymous with unrest is slowly rising “from the ashes.” It now boasts new development, a burgeoning arts scene, and perhaps most importantly, a populace that is actively involved in shaping its destiny, from city hall to neighborhood block associations theguardian.comtheguardian.com. The rebellious spirit lives on, not in violence, but in activism. “This could be Ferguson,” young poet Jasmine Mans warned at a Newark spoken-word event commemorating the riots, “The pull of a trigger and it could be our city on fire again. The new Newark that we’re trying to rebuild, this could be killed in a minute.” theguardian.com Her words capture both the anxiety and the agency that Newark’s story instills. The past does not guarantee the future; each generation must guard the progress made and push it further. In Newark, that means continuing to address the racism and inequality that remain, and pushing back against external forces that threaten to undo the gains.

The rebellion of 1967 taught us that when a people are systematically denied their rights and humanity, they will only endure it for so long. The United States in 2025 faces that same truth on a broader canvas. Newark’s journey—from oppression to explosion to halting recovery—offers a microcosm of what can happen when marginalized communities are ignored and what can be achieved when they are finally empowered. The rebellion’s monument on Springfield Avenue stands as a testament: “We will forever remember the names of those whose lives were lost” time.com. By remembering, we also remember why they were lost. If we honor that history, we must ensure that the injustices that drove ordinary people to rebellion are decisively confronted. Otherwise, as Dr. King warned, we will see “riots over and over again” time.com. Newark’s past is prologue to America’s present – and it urges us to choose a path of justice, equality, and humanity over one of repression and division, lest we find ourselves, once more, in the flames of rebellion.

Sources:

• Lawrence Hamm, Black Star News (July 7, 2025) blackstarnews.comblackstarnews.com

• Junius Williams, New Jersey Monthly (July 7, 2017) njmonthly.comnjmonthly.com

• Siddhartha Mitter, The Guardian (July 11, 2017) theguardian.comtheguardian.com

• CBS New York News (June 1, 2020) cbsnews.comcbsnews.com

• Farrell Evans, History.com (June 17, 2021) history.comhistory.com

• Kerner Commission Report (1968) blackpast.orgblackpast.org

• Patch Newark (July 9, 2025) patch.compatch.com

• Wisconsin Bail Out People Movement Press Release (July 8, 2025) wibailoutpeople.orgwibailoutpeople.org