AFTERMATH IN NEWARK
Whitehead, Ralph Jr.
AFTERMATH IN NEWARK no cause for indictment. an autopsy of Newark, by Ron Porambo. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 398 pp. $8.95. reviewed by Ralph Whitehead, Jr. At sixteen, Anthony Imperiale, born...
...His single success was earning a black belt rating for his judo and karate...
...The joint was near Imperiale's karate academy, and it wasn't long before he got word of the whites' dreary record...
...For those who remain in the city, as George Sternlieb of Rutgers University has pointed out, "fighting for such new programs is the only realistic response to the economic sterility of their environment...
...It never rang—not because racial passions cooled, but because publicity gimmicks quickly fade...
...Countered Jones: "Newark is a city where black people are in the majority and we mean to be masters of our own space...
...During the early 1960s, Jones parlayed some talent, racial hatred, and grantsmanship into a New York City literary career...
...To Mr...
...At first, they emerged as natural rivals for control of Newark, as it smoldered literally and politically after the riots...
...The other economy is fighting to emerge during the two-year-old administration of Addonizio's 1970 opponent and successor, Mayor Kenneth Gibson, a black...
...He turned to politics, won a 1968 election to take a seat on the City Council, and soon began to show signs of his success: a hair piece, sporty clothes, a Cadillac...
...He has chased the details of more than a dozen fatal police shootings of Newark blacks, for example...
...These two characters, Imperiale and Jones, dominate Ron Porambo's energetic book, No Cause for Indictment...
...Newark is cut by the struggle of two different political economies...
...We must untie the hands of the police department and restore full authority and law enforcement," Imperiale said of Newark's notoriously • brutal and corrupt force...
...He became an Orthodox Muslim (not a Black Muslim), encouraged his friends to do the same, and took a new name: Imamu Amiri Baraka...
...The clientele was racially mixed, and black-against-white fights were frequent...
...At sixteen, Anthony Imperiale, born into Newark's Italian ghetto as the last of nine children, quit high school for the Marine Corps...
...The scores of phone calls, the miles of streets and alleys walked, the stairs climbed, the hours spent around the saloons and greasy spoons of an uncongenial slum, the risks run of police reprisal—none of these strains makes it direcdy onto Porambo's pages, but the reflection is there...
...After Newark's July riots of 1967, however, Imperiale's rag-tag karate crew became transformed overnight into a menacing cadre of white vigilantes...
...He offered them cut-rate lessons to settle those scores...
...After his release, he, too, got into politics...
...However, he was rejected for jobs at least thirteen times by various law agencies, including the Newark Police Department...
...What they needed, he told them, was a knack for cleaving the bare edge of their hand into a black man's skull...
...He set up a black cultural center, Spirit House, offering dance, theater, art, writing, and history classes...
...Increasingly, they were losing the knife and fist fights of those early hours of inebriation...
...He is using urban subsidies to pull jobs for blacks into the town...
...Still, their rhetoric to this day marks off the town's ideological poles...
...After the saloon closing at two in the morning, drinkers dropped by to slump over their coffee or pick up sacks of burgers-to-go...
...Actually, the thirty-seven-year-old Imperiale was riding the crest of something neither he nor the media understood...
...He kicked around the service for a year or two before getting a less-than-honorable discharge...
...It was particularly bad at one of the North Ward's all-night restaurants...
...He twice came close to it during these years: one job as a plant security guard, another as a private eye for a West Orange agency...
...Some of the work of Jones, the up-against-the-wall poet, was familiar to the Newark cops—through word of mouth, if not at first hand...
...During the riots, as Jones and two friends drove their camper van through the ghetto after midnight, they were curbed by the police...
...Neither of the two economies, of course, is sufficient, for Newark, for Gary, for Youngstown, or any other of the dozens of America's dying, racket-ridden industrial towns...
...One story gave Imperiale an armed following of 1,500 citizens, a helicopter, an armored car, after-dark automobile patrols, and a huge arsenal...
...Barber (Benjamin, that is) we tender our inadequate apologies for this inexplicable error...
...SORRY On Page 54 of the March issue, the reviewer of Youth and Dissent was erroneously listed as "Samuel R. Barber" instead of Benjamin R. Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers and the author of Superman and Common Men: Freedom, Anarchy, and the Revolution...
...Imperiale tried to capitalize on it...
...He returned to civilian life and a long string of jobs: welder, old clothes collector, fish salesman, bus driver, trucker, laborer, delicatessen owner, patio contractor, and others...
...Newark's huge black ghetto (confining more than half of the town's 400,000 people) began to encroach on the ward...
...His parlor stood on a main drag inside the North Ward, a broad thumb of Newark, jutting into the suburbs— one of the last enclaves for the city's whites, particularly the Italians...
...However, the North Ward's market for combat skills improved sharply during the spring of 1967...
...For a long time, business was poor for Imperiale's evening classes, even though the fee was modest...
...At least, this is how the press suddenly portrayed them...
...Again, then, they shifted into opposition, and Jones began to prevail as he helped to organize black voters to take Newark at the polls...
...Later they fell into an ironic alliance...
...The story is wild, violent, colorful...
...His police force lined its pockets as the Syndicate's drugs and rackets bled the Newark poor...
...One was anchored by the scandalous eight-year regime of Mayor Hugh Ad-donizio...
...He opened a walk-up parlor where, as a sideline to his various jobs, he could instruct in these combat arts...
...It is difficult not to admire the sheer physical effort author Porambo puts into his work...
...He lived quietly, and often could be seen at dawn as he strolled along Clinton Avenue, one of the ghetto's main streets...
...The riots also changed the life of LeRoi Jones...
...The whole thrust of this economy was to take organized crime's major operations off the mean streets and tuck them snugly into the executive suite...
...Jortes suffered serious head cuts and wound up in solitary confinement on $25,000 bail for a weapons charge...
...The officers, after finding two hand guns in the camper, took their nightsticks to its passengers...
...The profits of these hustles backed Syndicate-controlled legitimate firms, and they picked up many of Newark's lucrative public contracts...
...Whitehead, a reporter now based in Chicago, covered the Newark riots in 1967...
...Then, at the end of 1966, he decided to return to Newark, where he had grown up...
...Violence was commonplace...
...They even set up a black-white telephone hot line to avert racial conflagration...
...It was a deal...
...Carrying the banner for the whites was a small band of young, under-employed Italians...
...One network ran almost five minutes of film to show the karate classes as if they were battle maneuvers for an impending racial war...
...Blacks and working-class Italians were forced to struggle along this racial frontier for control of the same thin line of shabby storefronts and dilapidated frame bungalows...
...However, the turbulence demands more thoughtful analysis...
...It was always Imperiale's dream to be a policeman...
...His business sense told him to approach the youths...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
