The Prize (3 page)

When Booker ran for mayor again in 2006 with even more outside backing, Sharpe James dropped out rather than face likely defeat, and Booker beat his stand-in, state senator Ronald Rice Sr., in a landslide.

Once in office, Booker surprised reformers by paying little attention to the school district, telling them his hands were tied because of Governor Corzine's union allegiances. Instead, he set out to recruit charter schools, using his magic with donors to raise $20 million
in 2008 for a Newark Charter School Fund to support the sector's growth. Money came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund of the Gap clothing store fortune, hedge fund titan Julian Robertson's foundation, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of Apple founder Steve Jobs, as well as from four local foundations. With Booker's encouragement, Newark spawned some of the top charter schools in the country, including fifteen run by the nationally respected networks Uncommon Schools and
KIPP
.

New Jersey's troubled urban schools provided rich source material for Christie's run for governor in 2009. The issue of education reform had strong crossover appeal for a Republican candidate in a heavily Democratic state. Christie used it to aggressively reach out to black and Hispanic parents concerned about schools in inner cities where Republicans rarely campaigned. He also fired up his Republican base by lambasting the state teachers' union, the New Jersey Education Association, by far the biggest political donor in the state, boasting that he refused even to interview for its endorsement. “To get your endorsement I'd have to sell out the children of New Jersey,” he recalled saying.

He explained his passion for the issue in terms of his life experience. His ancestors had come from Italy and Ireland, finding opportunity in Newark. But as he was about to start kindergarten, the city was in rapid decline, and the family moved to suburban Livingston, New Jersey. He has often said that he believed he owed his success in life to his escape from the Newark schools—adding that it happened only because his parents were able to borrow $1,000 from each of his grandmothers for a down payment on a $22,000 home. “I remember being told by my parents that we were moving so that I could go to a good school,” Christie said.

The Newark public schools had a reputation for excellence well into the 1950s, when Philip Roth graduated from the predominantly Jewish Weequahic High School and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), the
late African American poet, playwright, and revolutionary, graduated from the predominantly Italian American Barringer High. But the schools declined in tandem with the city amid a convergence of forces that, viewed from the present, resemble a series of plagues.

In the bullish aftermath of World War II, the federal government aggressively promoted the growth of suburbs, with home mortgage subsidies and construction of new interstate highways to whisk middle-class breadwinners to and from jobs in urban centers. It helped families like the Christies achieve the American dream—a better life for their children.

But the dream had an underside. The policies fostered an epochal exodus of more than 100,000 white Newark residents in the 1960s that flipped the city's racial makeup in one decade from two-thirds white to two-thirds black. It was the fastest and most tumultuous turnover of any American city except Detroit or Gary, Indiana.
Once a thriving industrial hub where successive waves of immigrants found work and rose into the middle class, Newark lost factories to the suburbs, the South, and beyond.

The economic base collapsed near the peak of the Great Migration of black families from the Deep South, removing a ladder of opportunity climbed by earlier-arriving ethnic groups. In all, 160,000 men, women, and children came north to Newark, most from rural areas and with limited educations. A pattern of well-documented racial discrimination barred the new arrivals from the dwindling supply of good jobs.

Black families increasingly crowded into slums, where the federal and city governments were carrying out a strategy intended to revive cities: urban renewal. As in many distressed communities, Newark leaders used federal funds to bulldoze dilapidated buildings to make way for high-rise office towers, spacious civic plazas, public housing for the displaced poor, and commuter highways for an increasingly suburban workforce. Louis Danzig, Newark's urban renewal director, was a national leader of the movement and proved so masterful at securing aid from Washington that Newark cleared more slums and dis
placed a higher percentage of residents than any other city.
The theory was that slums bred crime, disease, and sloth, and that new housing would help eradicate all that—and poverty, too. “Good houses make good citizens,” Danzig said.

Not surprisingly, it wasn't that simple. In Newark and elsewhere, urban renewal became known as “Negro removal.” A state investigation later found that despite the massive dislocation, the great majority of federal money benefited moderate and middle-income residents, businesses, and downtown colleges and institutions.
The planners and developers destroyed long-standing neighborhoods and relegated residents to five large housing projects in Newark's Central Ward, including three high-rise silos with no ground-floor restrooms and minimal grass or open space, making it almost impossible for parents to supervise children. By the late 1960s, more than eighteen thousand residents were jammed into a one-and-a-half-mile radius, virtually all of them low-income African Americans or Hispanics—“one of the most volatile [ghettoes] anywhere on the eastern seaboard,” according to testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“Our city was set up to fail,” said Clement Price, a professor of African American and Newark history at Rutgers and a respected civic leader. “It was planned failure—in public education, in housing, and in job opportunity.”

It certainly began to look that way to Louis and Ella Mae Sherrer, who came north during the Great Migration and settled in Newark in the 1950s. Louis became a union plumber and started a home improvement business, and Ella worked in a hospital cafeteria. They bought a house two blocks from Orange Street, a vibrant thoroughfare with plentiful shopping and movie theaters. “You never needed to go downtown,” said Ella. On walks there, she and her three children passed home after home of families she knew well—“houses all the way from here to there,” she said.

Then, in the late 1950s, the state unveiled plans for Interstate 280, one of two federal highways linking downtown to the western suburbs. It would slice Orange Street and surrounding neighborhoods
to pieces; seven miles west, there would be an exit for Livingston, the Christies' future home. Barbershops, theaters, and stores began closing even before the route opened. Families who could afford to move did so—the federal home loan program had redlined almost all of Newark, deeming it too risky for mortgages or lending, making renovations unaffordable—and in time the Sherrers' neighborhood was pocked with abandoned houses, many occupied by squatters and drug dealers.

Turmoil engulfed the public schools as white children left en masse, black children arrived from the South, and widespread redevelopment displaced many families. African American students comprised ten percent of the district in 1940, fifty-five percent in 1961, and seventy-one percent in 1967.

“I remember how differently they started treating us,” said Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, a Weequahic High School student in the late 1960s, who later became a teacher and, after retiring, president of the school board. Weequahic's racial composition reversed in the 1960s, from eighty-one percent white at the beginning of the decade to eighty-two percent black by the end. Baskerville-Richardson recalled the district building a fence around the school, with the result that students couldn't congregate after dismissal. “It was as if we were animals,” she said.

The school district allowed the remaining white students to transfer out of predominantly African American schools, where substitutes taught up to a quarter of the classes. “In schools with high Negro enrollments,” the NAACP reported in 1961, “textbooks were either not available or so outmoded and in such poor condition as to be of no value as a text . . . We found that some class libraries consist of nothing but comic books.”

Although black residents were approaching a majority in the city, they were politically powerless to force local officials to address evidence of police brutality, substandard housing, or collapsing public education. An Italian American political machine, which became
dominant in the early 1960s, displacing Irish bosses, tightly controlled city hall and the schools, along with patronage jobs, contracts, and—it was well known—lucrative kickbacks from organized crime. Former U.S. representative Hugh Addonizio, the mayor at the time, famously explained his motivation for leaving the prestige of Congress to run such an impoverished city: “There's no money in Washington, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark.”

On the night of July 12, 1967, Newark exploded in six days of riots that many longtime residents still call “the rebellion,” an uprising against racial oppression. The immediate spark was a brutal police beating of a black taxi driver who was rumored—falsely—to have died. A crowd of more than three hundred hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police station where the driver was being held, and officers attacked with nightsticks and shields. Rioters smashed windows, burned buildings, and looted stores, laying waste to large swaths of the Central Ward. The state and local police and National Guard responded with indiscriminate gunfire that, according to multiple investigations, killed men, women, and children who were on stoops and sidewalks and inside apartments and cars. Eyewitnesses reported that the National Guard ransacked and shot up stores with signs posted to indicate they were black-owned; looters had spared many of them. Twenty-six people were killed, most by rifle shots from state police and the National Guard, according to a state commission. Two victims were white, twenty-four were African American. Although twenty-three of the deaths were classified as homicides, there were no indictments. Property damage exceeded $10 million, a wound that remained open for decades. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” concluded the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.

In 1967, Governor Richard Hughes appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the riots. Its report stated, of urban renewal, “In the scramble for money, the poor, who were to be the chief beneficiaries of the programs, tended to be overlooked.”
And, because of “ghetto schools,” most poor and black children “have no hope in the
present situation. A few may succeed in spite of the barriers. The majority will not. Society cannot afford to have such human potential go to waste.”

The report quoted the testimony of school board president Harold Ashby, the first African American in the job: “I think somewhere along the line, someone has to say, ‘Stop.' . . . Until such time as these reading levels and arithmetic levels come up, there isn't anyone who can say in the city of Newark, professional or otherwise, we are doing a good job because these children just can't read and do arithmetic.”

The legislature rejected a bid by Hughes to take over the schools, and the cycle of neglect and corruption continued.

In the next election, black voters and the growing Puerto Rican population united to elect Kenneth Gibson, a city engineer running on a reform platform, the first black mayor of a major northeastern city. He defeated Addonizio, then on trial for extortion. True to his words about the riches he expected to reap as mayor, Addonizio was convicted, along with four compatriots, of extorting $1.4 million from city contractors. Both Gibson and Sharpe James, his successor, also became convicted felons. Booker was the first Newark mayor in forty-four years not to be indicted.

In 1994, state Department of Education investigators cited gross mismanagement, corruption, and instructional failure throughout the Newark district, even as school board members treated themselves to public cars, tropical junkets, and expensive meals. The investigators found rat infestation, asbestos, and high levels of lead paint in a rented building being used as an elementary school. The school board was negotiating to buy the building, worth about $120,000, for $2.7 million. It turned out to be owned, through a sham company, by two school principals prominent in Italian American politics. They were indicted on multiple charges and later acquitted.

In a series of rulings in the nineties, the state supreme court found that funding disparities among school districts violated the state constitutional right to an education for children in New Jersey's poorest communities. The court ordered the legislature to spend billions
of dollars to equalize funding, portending a windfall for Newark. In 1995, the state seized control of the Newark district, just as money was beginning to flow.

Money had always been at the center of struggles for control of the Newark schools. “That's the prize that every mayor has been trying to get back control of,” said Junius Williams, a longtime education activist who came to Newark in 1967, just out of Yale Law School. When a reform mayor was elected in the 1950s on a pledge to purge city hall of corruption, purveyors of patronage simply relocated to the school district. In the early 1980s, with Gibson in the mayor's office, a grassroots campaign of parents, teachers, and many political organizations came together to wrest control of the schools from the mayor and give it to an elected school board. The shift was touted as a victory for democracy, but school board elections were held when there were no other races on the ballot, and turnout was minimal. The board came under the control of those who got the most followers to the polls—unions and the city's most powerful political boss. For decades, education seemed incidental to the purpose of the school district.