The Fixers

"The Fixers is analytic, narrative history at its finest. Rabig captures how the momentum of black power was channeled into efficacious policymaking in post-riot Newark--the largest city in America's most densely packed state. She cogently charts how visions of a better Newark transformed local activists, too easily dismissed as nihilists by critics, into bureaucrats of the shadow state--long after state government told Newark and Washington told all of urban America to 'drop dead.' Nimbly balancing telling detail with a colorful gaze on the big picture, The Fixers is one of those myth-shattering books--one that compels a rethinking of black political economy, urban crises, and recent America itself."--Devin Fergus "author of Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980"
"Rabig helps us explore Newark in a way that goes beyond the familiar story of the 1967 uprising, and demonstrates how innovative individuals and organizations in the city sought--and sometimes found--pragmatic ways to work around the structural and political constraints that faced Newark before and especially after the uprising. At times working within structures of corporate and governmental power and at others challenging such institutions, 'the Fixers' addressed problems of housing, employment, discrimination, and political neglect. The Fixers offers an account of what can be done in an urban environment struggling with conditions of rapid change and extensive regional inequality, and it shows that urban history in Newark did not end with the uprising. This is an important and engaging work."--Guian McKee "author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia"
"Rescuing 'the fixer' from the bowels of urban political history, Rabig reframes the black freedom struggle in Newark, NJ, during the 1960s and 1970s. . . . By carefully measuring their potent mixture of radical protest with backroom dealing, Rabig allows readers to see how fixers sought self-determination and to meet immediate needs for housing and jobs. The book builds its final section, three compelling chapters on three very distinctive community development corporations, all of which embodied 'a fixer ethos that shaped urban development on a national scale even as they remained locally focused.' Rabig convincingly argues that these organizations, more than harbingers of privatized welfare provision, represented the holistic responses of Newark residents to the urban crisis. Recommended."
-- "Choice"