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Ras Baraka
2015 Conversation with Jelani Cobb
Ras Baraka has served as the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, since 2014. In 2015, he sat down with the historian, staff writer for The New Yorker and FRONTLINE correspondent Jelani Cobb, who also happens to be an old friend, to discuss policing and race relations in Newark. For more on their ongoing dialogue, read and watch a subsequent conversation from 2020 and learn about their intertwined stories.
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Early Experiences with Police
JELANI COBB: What were your experiences as a young person, in terms of dealing with the police?
RAS BARAKA: Well, as a—I have, like, so many stories as a regular kid.And I don’t know if I was ever a regular kid, now that I think about it.
Like, you know, on 11th Street and Clinton Avenue and things like that, you know, when the police stop us, the regular stop-and-frisk, you know, as growing up as a Black boy in Newark, you know, you get thrown on the wall, you get searched, you get put on the ground.I mean, this happens periodically, you know?If you’re on the street, in a neighborhood where drugs is being sold or a neighborhood where they—where stuff happens, you’re going to get searched.If you’re anywhere, you know, for that matter.So those kinds of things I went through regularly on Avon Avenue, on Clinton Avenue, you know, the kind of things like that.But then I had interactions with the police that were political interactions because of rallies and protests that I attended, you know, police breaking up rallies, breaking up protests, watching them, you know, hit people, do all kinds of things to adults as I was a kid, and then when I became a young adult and doing that and seeing them do that at rallies that I participated in, and then, you know, when I was a kid, seeing them, how they acted against my family.
Like, I was in New York one time with my family.I was really young.My mother and father had an argument in New York.They parked the car; they were arguing.The police came, and they didn’t even ask what was going on.They just grabbed my father out the car, and they started beating him, and then my mother got out to help him.If they were arguing, she would have just said, “Good,” and drove off or something, right?So she got out the car, and, you know, so they wound up beating both of them, really.
My father was arrested, and they charged him with resisting arrest, and he didn’t have nothing to be arrested for.And he wound up doing 90 days in jail.On the weekends—they let him go on the weekends and, you know, come home and finish his work and take care of his family.But that was, you know, that happened.
And, you know, there’s another story of my younger brother.He was around on 11th Street.He got into an altercation with some of the store owners around here.The police arrested him.I was home from college.My mother came storming out of the house.I jumped up, followed her.She went out on 11th Street to see what happened.They told her the police took him.She went around to the 5th district precinct.I followed behind while she went in there.The police came from around—the officer came from around the desk and started yelling in her face.I interceded.I tried to, you know, stop him from doing that.I said some stuff to him, and they wound up jumping on me.They handcuffed me and took me in the back, beat me, you know, threw me into the cell.And, you know, the whole community came out there protesting: my family, my father, everybody out there, you know.They took me to Green Street.But I, you know, luckily he had some kind of ties, and I was able to get out of there on that weekend, but that whole experience as a kid kind of informed me of what the relationship between the community and the police was, and it really wasn’t that positive at all, you know?
I’m pretty sure you remember this.I remember it vividly.In 1992—actually, 1991, you, me, four other people, we were in Cortlandt, New York, and we went upstate to have a retreat, an activist retreat.
I remember.
We decided we were going to go hike up this mountain, and we come down this mountain, and it’s, I think, five of us or six of us walking down this, like, road, and we get to the bottom of the road, and there’s a police car for each of us.There’s six cop cars that are right there.We’re in a mostly white town, upstate New York.You know, they want us up against the cars; they want all these things, you know.That idea about policing, and what that was and what that experience was, was in some ways, it was formative, and it was also kind of an example of exactly what we had been thinking about as activists.Like, this is the function of the police.
Yeah.
Because you remember that day?
Yeah.I remember I was going back into that house, and I’m coming there trying to tell people to come outside the house and bring their IDs and all this other stuff.
Right, right.
Yeah, I remember I didn’t go back outside either.That was—it was crazy.That was just a crazy situation.But all of those kinds of incidents, you know, it’s—and, you know, it’s interesting now that I’m in a different kind of position.But, you know, that kind of relationship was just clear that their job—as a kid you think their job is to come and disrupt and cause, you know, havoc almost, and not even to—and the real dichotomy of that is that we still, you know, thought that they should be doing their job in the community at the same time, right?If something happened, you call the police.So it’s like you’re stuck.
The Mayor and the Police
So we’ve talked about those formative experiences that—that we had as young people and the ways in which policing seemed to be a direct relationship—that it seemed to be a direct relationship between the police and the racism in the broader society that we experienced, and then you come home and become involved in politics.How do you kind of reconcile those two things?Like, was there an idea that policing could be different, that this was something that there was a means of changing it?Or kind of how did you understand policing?
I don’t think there’s a way to reconcile it.I just think that those experiences and your ideas inform—what you do in a larger sense is a part of what informs your practice, how you deal with it.And if you thought that things couldn’t be changed, you would just be in a hopeless state, right?You would just be living as opposed to changing, and I wasn’t, you know—I was involved in movement and struggle to change things, and I think that the police, to us, represented a group that protected power, protected racism, inequality and all of those kinds of things, and stopped us from changing it.
And we—this always to me has been about seizing power.And when you seize power completely, you begin to use power to transform society and not, you know, continue it as it’s going.So I think that, you know, the state has to change.Like, the things that drive and fundamentally inform the state have to change.Those ideas and all of those things have to change, and I think that the police change with that.
What the police function is in the community, how they relate to the community, all of those things I think can be changed.It’s difficult, and it’s like a heavy lift, but I would rather be involved in a process of doing that than sitting around being the victim of it and, like, just really allowing things to go on and just feeling hopeless about the way the situation is altogether.And I think it’s important that we reform after reform after reform.
The more that we, you know, add reform to something that is directed towards change, then ultimately, I think, you begin to change the character of it.And I think it takes a lot of work to get that done.
It’s like [Martin Luther] King used to say, you can’t legislate the way people feel about you, but you can legislate them to stop them from lynching you, right?So, I mean, it’s important for us to have a reform in place that checks the behavior and policies and practices of racists and other folks that are in these departments that have been running them for decades, centuries even, you know, to gear it in that direction, to check that, while at the same time making some fundamental changes in the department, in the relationship of power and all those other kinds of things, because you can be doing all of these things, and the system itself acts in a certain way.And I think the problem with the way some police officers and people look at it is that they personalize everything into each individual officer instead of looking at it as a systemic problem, right?
The police department systemically has been used as a weapon against working people and poor people in this country.Whether you were in a union, whether you were a new immigrant, whether you were a new slave or a migrant from the South, an African American, you know, it was used to, you know, keep inequality going.And that relationship has to be fundamentally changed, like power has to be fundamentally changed.And until we can fundamentally change that, we have to protect people’s lives, so they’re just not arbitrarily getting shot down in the street by racists who are in these departments, who are protected by a system who advocates racism, right?
So you have to put things in place to protect people’s lives, and not protect people just on the street, but protect police officers in the department, too.After you fight for inclusion in a system that has been inherently racist, you know, and misogynist and all kinds of other things. You fight for women, you fight for African Americans and other people of color to be in the department; you have to protect them in that department as well, like, get them to advance.And so what we have now in most of these departments around the country is you either have departments with no leadership at the top, or you have departments that have leadership at the top and everybody else at the bottom and nobody in between.
So you might have an African American police director, a Latino police director, a woman police director, so forth and so on—Asian—but everybody in the middle is still the same, and at the bottom is the people who work there who got onto the force, so the people that are making the day-to-day kind of systemic decisions is still not an—equalized.So the people at the top are put there because mayors and elected officials come into office and put them up there because you have the authority to do that.But you don’t have the authority to move people up the ranks, to put them in groups, to get them—to get them tests, to do what they’re supposed to do to move them up in the ranks of the department, right?So that kind of thing is still—and that’s an issue that, you know, is not really addressed.
It's a series of things that have to take place, and I think that's part of it, right?So there's a part of us beginning to seize power and transforming society and culture—larger society and larger culture that begins to help us transform what's happening here in our police departments and everywhere else, you know, from training to the types of police officers to power relationships in the country and all these other kind of things have to change in order for us to see any real concrete kind of difference in the relationship between the state itself and the, you know, the paramilitary arm of the state, which is the police, to be able to, you know, function in the way that, you know, is sane.
So 1967, your father is beaten nearly to death by police in Newark.2014, you are elected as mayor of Newark.And, you know, this entire movement—the United Brothers, the Committee for Unified Newark, you know, all those organizations—they were operating on the kind of premise that, you know, the city could be changed, that it could be made a more humane place and a more democratic place, particularly as it related to race.
Right.
So what you're doing—am I understanding this correctly?—is an extension of that work?
Absolutely.I think it's an extension of that and many other, you know, things, ideals around fighting for democracy for all people.I think to—it's never been just about like this, you know, this kind of thing that's not real.It's been about material kind of gain.It's been about the seizing of power, the seizure of power.It's not—we the people ain’t out here marching because they—you know, it's cool.Like they weren't, you know, involved in this stuff because it was like, you know, a great thing to be involved in.I think now, in some instances, people would, like, make it sentimental or commercialize it, all kinds of other things but.… People did this because they had to, right?It's never been about—people would rather be on vacation, you know, would rather be, you know, at the soccer game with their kid or at the baseball game or the basketball game or celebrating birthdays or doing all kinds of other things.But there were a few people in our community who committed their lives to change, and so they did not have the luxury to live ordinary lives, and they suffered in some instance because of that, and their children suffered in some instance because of that, because they made those decisions, and so there has to be some kind of payoff, right?There has to be some kind of payoff, like we didn't do all of this and hurt ourselves and our families for decades to get nothing, right?And that's how I feel about it, you know?
I mean, there's a whole generation of people—so, like, America has become comfortable with the civil rights movement in some sense, so it's the civil rights movement and then Barack Obama, President Obama.Like there's a whole segment of our history that’s completely skipped over.Like post-civil rights, 1966, to Barack Obama, to President Obama, is like, erased—all of the suppression, violence, you know, the murder of these people, you know.
We don't talk about the fact that, you know, Medgar Evers was murdered, you know what I mean?And King and [Malcolm] X, both Kennedys.It was a very dangerous time.They killed Kennedy and his brother [Robert], I mean, in broad daylight, in front of people and in front of the press, in front of everybody.Like, this is what happened.You know, they—you know, this is—after that stage and then the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, the radicalization of the movement and all these other—none of that stuff is really discussed.People think it was just kids marching for peace and being beaten on a bridge, and that was the end of it, but they don't talk about the extreme levels of violence that was taking place and the suppression that was used, or Mark Clark and Fred Hampton's house being raided early in the morning, you know, by police and being shot and killed in their sleep.
The Black Panther Party members in Chicago.
Yeah. That stuff is not talked about, and there's a whole generation of folks that was traumatized, who participated in that movement, you know, and their kids are still out here, because they had children, you know.
Family History
There’s so much that I think this particular place represents. I wonder if we can start just by talking about your family and how it was that, you know, the Barakas, then the Joneses, came to be in Newark.
You know, my father was born here, in Newark, and left and came back.My mother’s family came up here from the South.Both of them came from the South, though, their families, from the Carolinas into Newark, like most working people in the—African Americans in the South, tried to find a place in the North, industrial North, to make a living, jobs, housing, fleeing all kinds of things, and wound up in Newark, New Jersey.And, you know, my mother’s family, you know, a family of working-class people.Her mother was textile industry.You know, father—our grandfather that we knew was a Teamster truck driver, you know, and so they were from the serious working class in this city.And my father’s family was more like socialites, you know, postal worker, housing authority, those kind of jobs that Black people had at that time. Or else they, you know—educated Blacks, Black people that went to school at the university, had—I should say lettered, you know, not just educated—but, you know, had those kind of jobs, and so they were in the social fabric of the community, like the NAACP, all these other kinds of things that were going on.My father grew up in that—in the, you know, in the Central Ward of Newark.And so we’ve been here—our family has been here for a very long time.My father left, and he came back to Newark, and that’s when he, you know, in his journey back here he met my moms, and they began a family, not just a personal family, but a family in terms of what was going on in Newark—the Spirit House.My mother, you know, was an artist.
Spirit House, which was the—
Place where, you know, the kind of cultural nationalist artists went, and they, you know, did poetry, all kinds of dance, other kinds of things, plays.On Stirling Street, you know, they did that kind of stuff there.And, you know, from that, they had the Committee for Unified Newark out of that, and all these other organizations: United Brothers, you know, Congress of African People.All these organizations began centered around all the cultural nationalist and Black nationalist activity that was going on in Newark that my family was deeply immersed in in the city.
What year is all this, about?
The late ’60s, you know, right before and after the Newark rebellion.And you know, it really heated up around the election of Ken Gibson and all of that stuff that was going on then.I think my father’s stature was changing nationally at that time.He [Amiri Baraka] was already known as a—as an artist, as, you know, the Black Arts Movement in Harlem and in, you know, around the country, that was growing at the time, at the same time that the Congress of African People was—was growing, the whole relationship with the Kawaida kind of thing that was happening from L.A. and San Francisco and all of this stuff from, you know, Maulana Karenga.
So basically the entire network of Black Power-era politics.
But more like, yeah, Black cultural nationalism, and a lot of stuff happened as a result of that.All of these schools—and I usually have kind of discussions with the charter community about how we had a whole—a nation of African Free Schools at the time, and you know, a lot of that stuff came out of Newark and spread around the country, in Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans.It went all over the place.
And, you know, my father and my mother was deeply involved in that and in kind of organizing this city around people who were interested in that, and then getting involved in local politics at the same time, with the election of Ken Gibson, the successful election of Ken Gibson, probably the first kind of Black nationalist/cultural nationalist organization that actually elected—helped elect a candidate of a major city in America.
He’s the mayor—first Black mayor of Newark.
Yeah, first Black mayor of Newark.It kind of catapulted, you know, helped his stature, not just in the cultural nationalist-artists community but then became more in the political kind of community, as well, the national political community. …
The 1967 Rebellion
I wonder if you could talk about 1967 and what the conditions were in the city, you know, what happened during the uprising that the city saw there.
Well, there’s always this story about how the rebellion caused the white flight, but that’s like really not true.White flight was happening after World War II, and people were moving out of the cities in droves, and around that time was the first time the city had got a really large or predominantly African American—predominant African American population, over 50% very quickly in a—you know, in a very small span.African Americans began to outnumber the other populations in the city, which was, you know, because there’s always been like this little cultural enclave of people segmented.You know, you had Irish in one part, Italians in the other part, Jews in the other part, fighting each other usually around jobs, politics, sports.
So all of this stuff existed, and when Black people became the majority, the power still remained the same.Like, though we were the majority, the elected offices were not, like Ferguson, right?So we were in that situation, where the police department had very few African Americans.None in leadership at all.City Hall was the same way, fire department.Every kind of entity in the city was that way.And then on top of that, there was like concentrations of poverty, deep poverty in the city.And this was disproportionately African American, you know, so the access to upper mobility was less and less, and people were kind of stratified around that.So that was the—the atmosphere of that time.And then you had all these young, radical kind of folks who began to think differently than, you know, the civil rights kind of generation, had not reached the cities in a way that it was popularized in the South, and there was a new kind of thinking, you know, that was going on, this whole self-determination, this kind of Black Power.We need self-control; we need to be able to, you know, control your own community, your destiny, not just, “Treat me right, treat me better, or treat me equal.”It was more like we need to have control over things.
Malcolm’s children.
Yeah.And so it turned into—you know, the atmosphere in the city was very hot at that time, to say the least.The conditions in the city, you know, had to be like a powder keg because the rumor of a guy being arrested, John Smith, and beaten—some say was killed, but was really beaten in the precinct, this resulted in a rebellion in this town.
Talk about what happened with your father in the uprisings and rebellions in Newark in 1967.
Well, my father was a, you know, he was a very known kind of person in the city.Like I said, he was pulled over in a car with other folks.The police pulled him over, and he tells the story of how, you know, he knew one of the police officers.They actually went to school with him at Barringer [High], and he tried to communicate with him, and he busted him over the head with a nightstick.
And they took him to the hospital, and there’s a picture of him chained to the chair in the hospital, bent over, kind of bleeding from the head.My mother didn’t know what had happened to him or where he was.She was, you know, she talks about how she was running around looking for him, and that, you know, people, Allen Ginsberg and people like that from Europe had to call and, you know, ask where he was.
So how did people perceive—in the city, how did people perceive policing at that point and in the aftermath of that?
Well, it depends on which part of the community you was from at that time, you know?Some people thought the police protected them from, you know, looters or from, you know, people who were trying to take what they had, which is probably the same perception today.And then there were other people, you know, who thought that the police were suppressing them—I mean, officers that would pull them over, pull guns out on them, you know, do all kinds of, you know, extralegal things to them.And that—that—those group of folks viewed the police officers as the occupying force.And in some instances it remains.
Past Approaches to Fighting Crime
So we’ve talked a lot about the big kind of intellectual idea of this.But on a day to day, there’s like the issue of crime and violent crime in Newark.And, you know, you’re a big-city mayor that is charged with mostly people wanting to feel safe, so how does that fit into your strategy of police reform, in terms of both dealing with the issue of race and then the fact that a lot of people who are committing crime in the city are African American?
Well, I think that ultimately you have to begin to look at the premise of why violence and crime is taking place, and that’s why we started saying we have to look at it as a public health issue.And we begin to deal with it like a public health crisis as opposed to the kind of knee-jerk response, which is you have crime, we need more police, so we bolster up the number of police, we arrest as many people as we can, and that has a reduction in crime, when research is actually saying that right now, the kind of mass-incarceration strategy has had diminishing if no effect at all on the reduction in violent crime throughout the country.So it is clear that strategy has not worked and is not working.The only thing that it’s working at doing is putting more people in jail, and, ironically enough, more nonviolent offenders in jail than those who are committing violent offenses.
You know, so I think the strategy has to do with a lot of other agencies in the city getting involved in, you know, trying to change the—what’s going on in the community through job development, job growth, stronger educational systems, helping people socially and their families and providing opportunities for them to have strong neighborhoods, to deal with the abandoned property, the buildings.You know, I think the whole “broken windows” got it right in a social aspect but not in a police aspect, right?So they think that if you arrest somebody for selling or walking around with an open beer can that that’s going to help reduce violent crime, if you keep doing that.I think that the idea is crime lives in communities where there’s abandoned properties, vacant lots, windows that are busted out, lights that don’t work, you know, where poverty is like growing and deep in those neighborhoods.
So the idea is to fight poverty and fight the things in the community that create the crime.And then we know that crime moves like a disease, so it moves from one community to the next.But we also know where it’s going to move.It will move to specific streets in Newark, and so how do you police these streets?And police officers with a lot of experience and strategy can’t seem to put that all together because the premise of how they’re thinking about it is incorrect, right?
So the premise is these people are criminals; you know, it’s generational; they’re going to always be criminals.This kind of idea of us versus them, you know, doesn’t allow them to think creatively about how to reduce that.And some of them are not—are not qualified to do that, right?So there are other people that need to be brought into the scenario.That’s why in Newark we have the Safer Newark Council, which I don’t think is done anywhere else, but we brought the universities together with the private sector, with some police agencies and community folks on the board that thinks of alternative strategies and research to—to help us reduce violent crime, serious violent crime in the city.They look at the data; they look at the research.They put—they’re going to put out their findings—that is going to come out in the next couple of weeks—and begin to organize strategies around the things that they found in a creative way, other than just, “We need 1,000 more police officers in this area,” “We need to arrest 200 more people in this community.”And it obviously doesn’t work right? So—
So are there things about policing that you understand now as a mayor that you did not understand as an activist?Or rather, do you see this differently, being on the side of the table that you’re on now than you did when you were a kind of activist in the streets?
Well, I mean, I see the machinations of it, like systemically how it works, how it’s protected, the bureaucracy in it that allows these things to continue.
And it also helps me to understand what actually needs to be done and how we bring all the kind of forces together to try to move it forward.So I’ve become, I guess, more optimistic in a sense that I think that this stuff can be actually moved or changed, in a sense, if we really get it right.And I think that that takes people not just in power, but it—I mean, in office, but it takes people and activists and other folks in the community as well to help push this thing along, because you can’t do it by yourself as an elected official.And I think just, you know, saving—for the rest of these people, because I wasn’t the first person probably to take office to think that this stuff should be stopped and eradicated.I think to do it alone in there is very difficult, right; that you need other forces in the community to help you push this thing along in a way that it needs to go.You can’t ever give up any of your weapons.
Treating the Causes of Crime
There’s this question, you know.On the one hand, there have been high-profile incidents—you know, Ferguson, Baltimore, now Chicago—where people have, you know, a great deal of criticism for police and their excessive use of force.And on the other side of this, you hear questions where people are saying, you know, in high-crime communities where, you know, there’s predominantly people of color, very often African Americans who are victims of these crimes, that it’s really difficult if not impossible to protect the lives of these people without a kind of aggressive policing, without, you know, kind of bending the law as it relates to people’s rights.
You know, so you’re in a city which has this history that we talked about in 1967.Also has, you know, struggled with violent crime.Is it possible to deal with that, without bending the rules in the way that we’ve seen people do?
In order to police properly, you have to have the kind of—moral kind of position to be able to do it in a way to get the support from the community.
Right now it doesn’t exist.We don’t have the moral standing to be able to bring justice to a community that has been treated unjustly for centuries, right?So they can’t bring justice from the position that they have, that they’re in.So that has to be—that right there has to be changed and thought about, and a lot of things have to be transformed, you know, in the first place.
But ultimately, I think that there’s a way to police communities constitutionally, to abide—to obey the laws and treat people fairly and as human beings and police at the same time.But on the other—the other side of that, people always talk about aggressive policing.We have to be just as aggressive against poverty the same way that we are against crime.We have to—and I said that in the inauguration—we have to hate poverty the same way we hate crime.The way we hate and abhor violence, we have to abhor poverty and inequality in the same way: Who are the mothers of violence or the fathers of violence, right?
So we have to just as rigorously attack that the same way we attack violence.In fact, if we attack that more, I would argue that we would have to—we would spend less resources in having to deal with the kind of violence and crime that goes on in the community.Most of the crime, the violent crime, in this city is driven by drugs, right?It’s driven by the drug trade, just like Prohibition, right?So most of the violent crime in that time was driven by illegal alcohol and all of that that was going on.There were people dying in all these cities in America.I mean, front-page massacres of folks.That’s when people said “criminal,” they looked at it, they saw in their face Italian immigrants or Irish immigrants, right?When they said “gangster”—when you say “gangster” in the ’20s, you didn’t think of, like, NWA.You thought of guys in suits with Tommy guns, right, and, you know, from—immigrants from Europe.Now when you say “gangster,” you think of these African Americans with gold chains and gold teeth and gang members and all this other kind of stuff, you know?It has changed.The media has changed that view of it, which is interesting, all over the world, not just here.So I think that most of that is fueled by poverty and drugs and the lack of resources and money and those kinds of things.And it’s—it’s important to begin to see that and treat it that way.
This is long-term strategy, though.
It’s a long-term.
You can’t get rid of poverty.
No, it’s a long-term strategy, but we—what happens is that people use that as a reason not to do anything.Like, that’s like people who say why—poverty existed before you became the mayor, it’s going to exist after you leave out of office; why even say anything about it?If that’s the case, why am I even in it, right?So—and because to some folks, it’s just about a career.It’s like careerism, right?So they just, like, political—it’s their job as a career.So they think that getting involved with these things can actually be powder kegs and lead to you not being in office because you piss a few people off, you know.But these kinds of things is why you should be doing this in the first place, right?So you have to talk about the elephant in the room, and you’ve got to come up with strategies to reduce it gradually the same way.
And you can say the same thing about violence, right, and crime.People are going to say—people—when you talk to some of the higher-ups in the police department, you know, and around the state, they say you’re not going to get rid of crime; you’re not going to get rid of violence.The only thing we can try to do is contain it a little bit and let the numbers drop, right?So these are people that are saying that this task, this goal that we want is insurmountable, which is the same way about poverty.So what we’ve agreed to in this country is to live with violence and to live with poverty.
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