The People Who Rebuilt Newark During Tumultuous Decades

Julia Rabig, senior lecturer in history at Dartmouth, details how Newark’s residents and neighbors came together to fight the city’s decline during its most turbulent years in her book, The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990. She profiles the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates to office, tenants who mounted a rent strike to transform public housing and white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing.