Exemplar of the urban crisis, touchstone for black nationalism and a reflection of the accomplishments and liabilities of black power, the workhorse city of Newark, New Jersey, has in the last decade become the object of increasing historical scrutiny. Kevin Mumford has significantly enlarged this body of work with Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America. Attempting a ‘return to the great American political narrative’, Mumford has produced a book both evocative and frustrating. His imaginative analysis is often obscured by haphazard organization within chapters, and although he stakes intriguing claims that engage recent scholarship on consumption, nationalism and the gender politics of social movements he frequently retreats from them or allows them to languish.

Mumford persuasively argues that the city's residents – both black and white – often engaged in battles over civic symbols, culture and discourse with little direct economic motivation. But his reductive assessment of recent work in urban history implies a dichotomy – political economy versus the public sphere – that his own rich evidence does not support. Indeed, Mumford shows that Newark's black public sphere was anchored in streets, housing projects, businesses and schools that underwent a tremendous economic, physical and demographic transformation, one that foreclosed the militant interracial activism of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which Mumford admires, even as it opened new possibilities for black nationalists.

Mumford's book also joins the recent outpouring of scholarship on the black power movement, which moves beyond vilification and romanticization by recognizing the pragmatic, coalition-building efforts of black power advocates, their debt to earlier traditions of black organizing and their continuity with the Civil Rights Movement. Mumford advances this scholarship with his critical assessment of black nationalism's effect on civic life writ large. A chapter entitled ‘Baraka vs. Imperiale’ charts the escalation of race-baiting between Newark's pre-eminent black nationalist leader, the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, and its most outspoken ‘white nationalist’, Anthony Imperiale. Imperiale, a ward leader, city councilman and state representative, rose to prominence advocating both vigilantism and loyalty to the Newark Police Department. Noting the increasingly marginal position of Newark's Italian-Americans, Mumford gives depth to the anxiety and desperation beneath the surface of Imperiale's trigger-happy bravado. Mumford perceptively documents the ways in which Imperiale and other white residents enthusiastically adapted the tactics, strategies and rhetoric of black power to build their own coalition with John Birchers and other mainstays of right-wing New Jersey.

Mumford makes an earnest appeal to lost visions of a public sphere that would simultaneously recognize these differences and permit substantive public debate. Early in the book he argues that Newark's African Americans, more liberal than radical, grounded their protest in ‘classic political ideas’ about the public sphere. Yet by the 1970s, he argues, Newark's black nationalists and their white opponents had ‘polluted the public sphere with epithets’, and in their mutual antagonism collaborated in the creation of ‘rigidly opposed, yet dialogically constrained, identities of ethnocitizenship’ (p. 189). Mumford suggests that some black nationalists wrested the public sphere from the more moderate majority and ultimately promoted a limited version of black power. But if nationalist spokesmen constituted such a significant force in Newark, as Mumford argues, then perhaps the post-war liberalism that Newark's black residents shared for a time with their white ethnic neighbours was not so difficult to reconcile with nationalism. Ironically, as black power settled beneath the low horizons of machine politics in the 1980s, it was ardent nationalists such as Baraka, who, whatever his shortcomings, continued to theorize what black power could mean, revisit its failures and offer more expansive permutations, who sought to unite a critique of political economy with cultural liberation.