“Wherever the central cities of America are going, Newark will get there first.” So declared Newark, New Jersey’s first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, as he took the helm of the state’s largest city in 1970, three years after it experienced one of the most violent uprisings of the 1960s. Newark had shifted from a white to an African American majority in the mid-1960s, yet Black people remained vastly underrepresented in the city’s political and economic life. Gibson prevailed over the two-term incumbent, Mayor Hugh Addonizio, with the help of a disciplined Black power front. Although many of Gibson’s allies deemed him merely electable—they knew he was no visionary—supporters still danced in the streets at news of his victory. He briefly emerged as a voice for reform in a city that was mired in corruption and contending with crumbling housing stock, clashes over urban renewal, and a shrinking tax base. Gibson’s proclamation, open to interpretations both foreboding and optimistic, reflected the ambiguity of a moment when Black Newarkers hoped to rebuild their city’s economy in the face of mounting obstacles. Gibson also framed a question that historians of Black power, urban economic development, and urban politics have yet to fully answer: where did Newark—and cities like it—go in the years that followed?

Recent histories of Black power rarely follow its institutionalization beyond the demise of so many Black power organizations in the mid-1970s. Political scientists have more frequently tackled this question by examining one of the Black power movement’s most visible and transformative gains: the election of thousands of African American candidates to political offices across the country during the 1970s and beyond. Yet, they find less to celebrate in the longterm legacy of these electoral victories, arguing that Black officials were often unable to surmount the cumulative effects of disinvestment, unemployment, municipal debt, and racial inequality that were decades in the making. They assumed the leadership of some of the most troubled US cities just as corporations, many residents, and the federal government were abandoning them. In the case of Newark, journalists have also addressed this question with countless features published since the 1970s that often conform to a simplistic dichotomy: the trope of the resilient city emerging from the ashes of 1967 or of the hopelessly damned one.