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The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990
Contributor(s): Rabig, Julia (Author)
ISBN: 022638831X     ISBN-13: 9780226388311
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
OUR PRICE:   $47.52  
Product Type: Hardcover
Published: September 2016
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States - State & Local - Middle Atlantic (dc, De, Md, Nj, Ny, Pa)
- History | United States - 20th Century
- History | African American
Dewey: 306.097
LCCN: 2015050879
Series: Historical Studies of Urban America
Physical Information: 1.4" H x 6" W x 9.1" (1.40 lbs) 336 pages
Themes:
- Ethnic Orientation - African American
- Chronological Period - 1950-1999
- Topical - Black History
- Geographic Orientation - New Jersey
- Locality - Newark, N.J.
- Demographic Orientation - Urban
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
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.

Contributor Bio(s): Rabig, Julia: - Julia Rabig is a lecturer of history at Dartmouth College. She is coeditor of The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Post-War America.