It’s a startling sight on a busy street in a rundown neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. On a five-story brick building, windows partially boarded up, is a larger-than-life-size painting of a young girl, her black hair tied up in two high ponytails, her hands holding a mound of soil out of which grows the word “love.” And she has sprouted two giant golden-orange butterfly wings.
Nearby, on a one-story wood-sided wall, giant portraits of Black Power leader Malcolm X and poet and Newark native son Amiri Baraka look over at a young man, who is staring straight out of the painting. The young man represents the artist, who is feeling the weight—and the inspiration—of carrying on the legacy of these heroes, according to my guide, Keith Aziz Hamilton.
On the November 2015 day of my visit, these murals were brand-new, among the 15 that were in the works or completed since Ras Baraka became mayor of Newark in 2014, and Hamilton was in charge of commissioning them. Hamilton, a former schoolteacher and a longtime friend of Mayor Baraka, is currently the manager of city-owned property. He has the warmth and toughness of a lifelong Newark resident and an infectious appreciation for the murals’ artists.
“We wanted the murals to reflect family, peace in our neighborhood, love for yourself, and love for your neighborhood,” Hamilton said. “And we wanted them to reflect beauty, some history, the place where you live.”
Newark could use some beauty. It is rated one of the ten most dangerous cities in the country, and 28 percent of the population live below the poverty line.1. Like many other U.S. cities, it has large areas of blight and entrenched, multigenerational poverty. But Newark is also the home of both the third-largest seaport in the United States and a major international airport, and it is located a mere 20-minute train ride from Manhattan. The city has a lot going for it.
Detail from a mural in Newark, New Jersey.
Mayor Ras Baraka began running for mayor 20 years ago, when he was just 24 years old. He is the son of the famous poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, and there are stories of Nina Simone and other cultural icons gathering at the family home. A group of Ras Baraka’s friends and collaborators who grew up influenced by the older Baraka have been activists in the city for most of their lives. Hamilton, who was Baraka’s campaign manager, is one of them.
For most of my road trip, I had focused on grassroots work, not elected officials. In Newark, though, I was interested in this new administration that had come directly out of neighborhood organizing and now was working at City Hall to end violence and lift up the prospects for the city’s poor. Ras Baraka was the principal of Central High School in Newark and served on the municipal council before winning election as mayor and being sworn into office in 2014.
When Baraka took office, one of his first steps was to launch a Model Neighborhoods Initiative targeted at Clinton Hill in the South Ward and the Lower West Ward, two areas known for blight and poverty. The plan was to focus city, nonprofit, and residents’ resources on cleanup, crime reduction, and housing, and to encourage businesses and artists in these two districts.
“It’s a place-based strategy to pump a lot of resources into neighborhoods with significant blight and problems with crime—areas that have been neglected for years and years,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton took me to visit the target neighborhoods; both are predominantly African American, with busy streets, vacant lots surrounded by chain-link fences, and buildings with boarded-up windows. Both also have well-maintained homes, parks, churches, and a smattering of businesses. In these neighborhoods, murals have been popping up like flowers after a spring rain.
Keith Aziz Hamilton, head of Newark’s city-owned property and the force behind the murals in Newark, New Jersey.
Progress here extends beyond murals. Mayor Baraka brings his own vision to the work of rebuilding this troubled city. He is committed to reducing violent crime, especially the murder rate. A video circulating on the Internet shows Baraka giving an impassioned speech at a rally that comes back over and over to “Round their asses up!” In the video, Baraka calls on the community to get involved—to get to know neighbors and to not tolerate violence in their homes and neighborhoods.
It might sound like a typical get-tough-on-crime stance, but Baraka favors a holistic approach to crime reduction; his administration is working to create jobs and recreational opportunities. Project Hope, for example, is hiring young people who were involved in violent crime and gang activities to help with reconstruction in the two target neighborhoods. Those who complete the program, which also includes regular checkins with social services, receive free vocational training in one of three areas in which jobs are available: construction, automotive repair, and commercial driving. The city also works to find jobs and housing for ex-inmates during the critical time when they are returning to the community.
Economic development overall is a central priority of the Baraka administration. When I finally met the mayor himself, on a quick return visit to Newark in 2016, he told me he was proud that the city had reduced unemployment rates, although not as much as he wanted. He has announced a 15-dollar minimum wage for city workers to take effect by 2018. He has instituted a municipal I.D. system for immigrants that allows them to come at least partway out of the shadow. And the city is investing in new and refurbished housing.
The Baraka administration also supports the arts. Hamilton took me to see a massive bank building, the former Clinton Avenue Trust, with stately columns and an impressive facade, which stood abandoned and decaying for decades. The mayor and other city officials broke ground on the restoration of the building earlier that month; it will become affordable living and working spaces for local artists, and it will be renamed the Nina Simone House. In addition, the city is building an outdoor stage on the street to attract cultural events to the center of one of the mayor’s two model neighborhoods, along with businesses.
“Trying to get financial institutions to invest at the level we need them to invest is the difficult part,” Baraka told me. These neighborhoods have been disinvested in for the last 50 to 60 years, he said. Most of the new investment in the model neighborhoods is city money, “but we’re not going to get to where we need it to be with just the city’s push.”
Hamilton and I stopped at one mural on the side of a furniture and appliance store that I now think of first when I think of Newark’s murals. The store owner wanted to continue using the top strip of the long wall to advertise his mattresses, box springs, appliances, and floor samples. The artist, confined to painting the lower area along the sidewalk, spent a lot of time talking to passers-by, according to Hamilton. His work incorporated the art already there—the graffiti of previous artists. And he incorporated comments people made during those sidewalk conversations.
One sentence on the wall stood out, even though it was a small part of the long mural: “We the People LOVE this place.” Nearby was the statement “In fact, we the people call this place our home.”
Those phrases sum up some of the most important things I had learned on my travels. “We the People,” the first phrase in the U.S. Constitution, speaks of us as powerful citizens—subjects, not objects—sovereigns of the place we call home.
“Love” reminds us that there are many dimensions of our relationship with place: the physical location, a network of relationships that add richness and complexity to daily life, and the intersecting cultures that create beauty and meaning. And we share our place with other species who also make that place home. Each place has a history, told and untold, of all those who have lived there before, and each has possibilities we can’t begin to imagine for the coming generations.
Wall paintings in Newark.
We the People LOVE this place: the artist made “love” the largest word. Love includes a commitment to the well-being of a place. And it is a reason why “We the People,” not we the corporation or we the government, are the final arbiters—or should be. Because only people are capable of love; only people can incorporate multiple meanings of a place based on deep knowledge and an understanding that every place, and every being within a place, are in a constant state of evolution.
Wendell Berry writes eloquently about the relationship of rural people with place, and poet Gary Snyder writes about the human relationship with the wilderness. This mural reminded me that in the most troubled cities, too, people love their block, their school, a local gathering spot, or a neighborhood park. This is where life unfolds. Children hold in a deep part of their memory the smell, feel, and physicality of the places they grew up.
In this period of mass culture and hours of screen time, we are much more of and by our places than we acknowledge. When allowed to make choices, people can, and often do, take care of their place.
When Baraka was elected, a friend told me, people all over the city were exuberant, walking around greeting each other, “Hello, Mayor!” “Hello, Mayor!” Baraka had said, during his campaign, that when he was elected, everyone would be mayor.
Two years into his term, the mayor is pushing hard for policies that will bring greater shared prosperity to Newark. The murals are a sign of the rising spirits and the city’s commitment to rebuilding the two model neighborhoods as a first step toward a genuine, inclusive renaissance.
