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Remembering the Newark Riots, Fifty Years Later

Aerial view of firemen as they continue to fight fires in Newark, N.J., late July 14, 1967 from rioting that started the night before and that morning.

It's been 50 years since the Newark riots took place, sparked by white police officers beating a black cab driver. Rebecca Carroll, editor of special projects at WNYC and Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers Institute--Newark, attorney and author of Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power (North Atlantic Books, 2014), talk about the riots (or rebellion, the word Williams uses) and the effects they had on the city, and Karen Rouse, WNYC New Jersey reporter, discusses the mayors elected since the riots, and what their tenures tell us about the city's trajectory.

Junius Williams says people were both helped and hurt by the riots in Newark. Nobody wanted violence, he says, but the rebellion, as he calls it, did affect the power structure in Newark. Black people in Newark were able to gain some political and social power as a result of the rebellion.