Fixers - Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990

Klappentext Stories of Newark's postwar decline are easy to find. But in The Fixers! Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city's decline mounted by Newark's residents and suburban neighbors. In these pages! we meet the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates in unprecedented numbers. There are tenants who mounted a historic rent strike to transform public housing and renegade white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing and influence housing policy. These are just a few of the "fixers" we meet--people who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state. Rabig argues that fixers play dual roles. They support resistance! but also mediation; they fight for reform! but also more radical and far-reaching alternatives; they rally others to a collective cause! but sometimes they broker factions. Fixers reflect longer traditions of organizing while responding to the demands of their times. In so doing! they end up fixing (like a fixative) a new and enduring pattern of activist strategies! reforms! and institutional expectations--a pattern we continue to see today.

Product details

• Authors: Julia Rabig, Julia Rabig, Rabig Julia
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2016
• EAN: 9780226388311
• ISBN: 978-0-226-38831-1
• No. of pages: 336
• Series: Historical Studies of Urban America; Historical Studies of Urban Am; Historical Studies of Urban America; Historical Studies of Urban America (CHUP)
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, New Jersey, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, Social and cultural history, History of the Americas, Urban communities, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period)