The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990 (Historical Studies of Urban America)

Rabig, Julia

ISBN 10: 022638831X / ISBN 13: 9780226388311

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2016

About this Item

Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M022638831XZ3

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990 (Historical Studies of Urban America)
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022638831X
• ISBN 13: 9780226388311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

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 coeditor of The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Post-War America.