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Treat's Trick. It was not an easy place to keep chilled. Bounded on the east by the waste-grey waters of the Passaic River and shrouded by a chronic cloud of yellow industrial smog, Newark's black enclave is a grassless realm of rotting brick and crumbling concrete; no less than 32.6% of the city's housing, according to a 1962 study, is substandard. Newark was founded 301 years ago by a dissident Connecticut Puritan named Robert Treat, who, by current standards at least, tricked the Indians into selling him a site including most of what is today, in all its greenery, Essex County for $700 worth of gunpowder, lead, axes, kettles, pistols, swords, beer and a number of other items. As recently as 1950, Negroes constituted a scant 17% of Newark's population. With the rush to the suburbs by whites in the affluent era that followed, and the northward hegira of Negro refugees from Dixie, the black population is now estimated at 50% to 55% and even more, making Newark the only major city in the North, except for Washington, with a Negro majority.
Under Mayor Addonizio, 53, a bulky, balding liberal Democrat who once quarterbacked for Fordham behind the "Seven Blocks of Granite" and served as an infantry officer from Algiers to the Bulge, Newark until recently was considered a city in control of its problems. Addonizio, who served 14 years in the U.S. House of Representatives before his election as mayor in 1962 —largely on the strength of Negro and Italian votes—outlined an ambitious urban-renewal program. Newark today spends $277 per capita on repairing urban blight—the highest annual figure for the nation's 50 biggest cities. Newark officials claim an overall unemployment figure of 7%—down from 14% when Addonizio took over city hall—and Newark has 125 federal poverty workers who spent $2,000,000 last year on community-action projects. But the funds face a cut because of the war, and the number of workers will be scaled down to 30 by September.
Dead-End Street. Newark's Negroes find plenty wrong with the city. Although Newark has two Negroes on its nine-man city council, neither was on hand to fill the ghetto's leadership vacuum during the riots: Councilman Irvine Turner was ill; Councilman Calvin West was in Boston for a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The city has no civilian review board (Mayor Addonizio refers all charges of police brutality to the FBI). Nor did it have any Negro police officers above the rank of lieutenant before last week (when Addonizio hastily ordered a Negro officer promoted to captain, and the city council later showed its good will by authorizing the move).
To many Negroes, the gravest grievance is one engendered by somebody's idea of an urban improvement. Last year Addonizio designated 46 acres of the Central Ward as the new campus for the New Jersey State College of Medicine and Dentistry—a move that would force some 3,500 Negroes out of their homes. However dilapidated those dwellings might be, the threat raised hackles throughout the city. A subsequent proposal to extend two interstate highways that pass near Newark through the downtown area might displace 20,000 more Negroes. The resolution of these problems is not yet clear.