The all-out street brawl for mayor of Newark, which concludes with next Tuesday’s election, is over more than control of a proud, troubled city. It’s also the latest round of a long-running national clash between old and new generations of black political leaders.
For the last decade and a half, young black political hopefuls bearing impressive educational and corporate credentials have been skirmishing against entrenched incumbents, many of whom came to power still bearing battle scars from the epic civil rights struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. In most cases, the bright young challengers have lost badly at first, outfoxed by their elders and unable to connect with working-class black voters unsure of what to make of their credentials and corporate style.
On the south side of Chicago in 2000, for instance, a young Harvard Law School graduate and state senator named Barack Obama challenged incumbent Congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther activist. Obama got clobbered, shunned by the black political establishment and ultimately winning just over 30% of the vote.
That same year, Brooklyn incumbent Rep. Ed Towns fended off his second consecutive challenge from Barry Ford, another Harvard Law grad. Further down the ballot, then-Assemblyman Roger Green, a veteran of the fight for community control of schools, was busy beating Hakeem Jeffries, another upstart lawyer with corporate connections.
The best-known of these contests was a vicious 2002 election pitting longtime incumbent mayor Sharpe James of Newark against Cory Booker, a young attorney who’d been a Stanford graduate and Rhodes Scholar. As captured in the documentary “Street Fight,” James ruthlessly commanded a vast patronage-drive political machine, painting Booker as a kind of alien usurper with a hidden agenda.
Over the next 10 years, change came as incumbents gradually yielded to the insurgents. Obama, sidestepping the black political establishment that had rejected him, instead ran statewide for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2004 and immediately launched an audacious bid for the White House.
In New York, Towns and Green eventually decided to retire rather than continue running bruising campaigns against well-funded youngsters. Ditto for James in Newark, who eventually ended up in federal prison for fraud.
All of which brings us to next Tuesday’s race, pitting City Councilman Ras Baraka against attorney Shavar Jeffries, a former top-ranking staffer in the state attorney general’s office. Both candidates are young — Jeffries is 39, Baraka 45 — and both hail from the city’s troubled South Ward.
But voters in this overwhelmingly black city are getting yet another choice between a street activist and a corporate manager.
Baraka, the son of the late literary giant Amiri Baraka, represents an unmistakable link to the past, right down to the huge photo displayed on his campaign website alongside a key supporter, convicted felon Sharpe James.
“He’s absolutely rooted in traditional racial politics, machine politics and transactional politics,” is how Jeffries described Baraka to me yesterday. “I’m entirely focused on results. You have to be very practical.”
Jeffries — a distant cousin of New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who has raised money for him — says the most pressing practical business facing Newark is the city’s double-digit unemployment rate and a spike in violent crime.
With 111 murders last year, the city saw its most violent 12-month stretch in 25 years. As the former third-highest-ranking official in the state attorney general’s office, Jeffries points to anti-crime prosecutions he has managed, and promises more of the same as mayor.
“We’re going to eradicate gang culture. There is no truce. Gangs sustain their enterprise through drug sales and murder” Jeffries told me — a pointed jab at Baraka’s negotiation of a temporary gang truce.
Jeffries, who formerly ran the city’s board of education, has links to charter-school supporters and private-sector developers. But in an interesting scramble of the usual storyline, Baraka has affected his late father’s fiery street rhetoric and populist style, painting Jeffries as an elitist, when the reality is almost the opposite.
Baraka the activist grew up in a home with parents who were world-renowned artists, while Jeffries was raised by his grandmother after his mother was murdered and his father abandoned the family.
And while Baraka has the style of an outsider, he’s been a fixture in the City Council for years and enjoys the advantages of name recognition. Jeffries, by contrast, has not been endorsed by ex-mayor and current Senator Cory Booker.
Recent polls suggest the race is a four-point squeaker. As they’ve been doing around the country for years, black voters will have to decide whether they need a movement or a manager.