She is also a spatial storyteller, using history, maps, and urban form to interpret cities, suburbs, and metropolitan change.
Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Dark Concrete introduces one of the central tensions of Black power urbanism (BPU): how to build a just and emancipatory city within political and institutional configurations that worked against these aspirations. Page 99 captures this tension playing out in Newark during the city’s second teacher’s strike in 1971. Black and Puerto Rican activists, parents, students and educators were struggling over the control of education, and by extension the future of the city. In this sense, page 99 serves as an illuminating snapshot of the book as a whole, as similar conflicts recur across the multiple cities and policy areas, including housing and policing.Visit Kimberley Johnson's website.
For proponents of BPU like Amiri Baraka, control over the Newark’s education system was not simply about jobs or contracts (the traditional terrain of machine politics). Instead, it was a struggle over who should teach, what knowledge should be centered, and the kinds of spaces that a new system of education could take place. Newark’s BPU activists believed that the city’s teachers and administrators were indifferent if not hostile to the needs of a now majority-Black and Puerto Rican student body trapped in crumbling underfunded schools, even as White residents (including the family of Chris Christie a future governor) and much of the teaching force, left for the suburbs. Although Newark’s education conflicts emerged in the mid-1960s, the movement for community control of schools would be epitomized in the explosive Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teacher’s Strike of 1968 in New York City, and would find its echo in Newark during the 1971 strike.
The election of Kenneth Gibson’s in 1970 as Newark’s first Black mayor appeared to create new political opening. Gibson empowered BPU activists to demand more community control and to condemn the teacher’s strike as a power grab. Yet Gibson’s political influence proved limited in effecting transformative change on the scale desired by BPU activists. Ongoing conflict with Italian American city council members and resistance from White ethnic neighborhood groups constrained Gibson’s capacity to govern. As a result, emancipatory ambitions, as well as tensions inherent in Black Power urbanism– the struggle to create just “new forms” of governance – clashed with precariousness of formal Black electoral power. Ultimately, Gibson pursued greater centralization of the school system (and more leverage over political opponents) rather than the neighborhood-based and alternative pedagogical models advocated by BPU activists. This outcome fostered decades of distrust between parents, activists and teachers on the other, stalling reform and paving the way for the state’s takeover of Newark’s schools in 1995.
At its core, BPU sought to develop “new forms,” a concept articulated by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture in their book Black Power (1967). Community control of education, along with ideas around housing and policing, were the most visible of these experiments taking place across the nation’s increasingly majority-Black and Brown majority cities. Dark Concrete traces this struggle not only in Newark, but also in Oakland, East Orange, and East Palo Alto, showing how efforts to reimagine urban life unfolded through experimentation, conflict and constraints. As page 99 demonstrates, Black Power urbanism ultimately reshaped the terrain of urban governance leaving legacies that continue to shape debates over democracy, equity and the right to the city.
--Marshal Zeringue
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