Down and Dirty Jersey Style

Street Fight, Marshall Curry’s 2002 documentary provides fascinating and often disturbing insight into the down and dirty politics of Newark, New Jersey and the race baiting tactics used within the African American community to elevate one candidate while attempting to destroy another.

In 2002, Newark was literally drowning in poverty, ghettos, unemployment and crime. High school graduation rates were in the low 40% range. There were two cities of Newark–the thriving downtown and suburbs, where the “Renaissance” of the city had been thriving and the ghettos neighborhoods of the Portuguese, Latino and African American communities.

In 2002, Cory Booker, an up and coming young Democrat, community activist and local Ward Councilman, decided to run against four term incumbent, Mayor Sharpe James. What he didn’t realize was that he wasn’t just running against a lifetime politician (James had been in one office or another for 32 years in New Jersey).

Booker was literally running against the entrenched establishment that was determined to hold onto power, even if it meant using the same tactics that the whites had used in the South against civil rights activists 40 years earlier.

Mayor Sharpe James grew up in abject poverty, raised by a single parent, and rose through the ranks due in large part, to his participation and contacts made within the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Known as a hometown favored son, James held office in Newark for 32 years. Voters literally grew up with him and were fond of his humor and local understanding of their community.

Cory Booker’s parents, both civil rights activists and the first two African Americans to live in their local, all white neighborhood, instilled in Booker a love of civil activism. Booker’s grandfather was from North Carolina and had suffered mercilessly under Jim Crow laws in the 1930s’. His family were no strangers to the racist division that pervaded 20th century American society.

Booker was an all-star high school football player and went on to earn a scholarship to Stanford, where he excelled and graduated. He then earned his law degree at Yale. He decided to run for the City Council, and in a stunning upset, defeated a local incumbent. (Incumbents do not lose–they die or retire–whichever comes first in Newark.) Booker moved to the low income housing development in his Ward, in order to prevent himself from forgetting who he was representing and how they lived, day to day.

It is these two unique African Americans that Curry follows during the 2002 mayoral race. What starts off as a typical campaign race quickly degenerates into an often violent suppression of voters, by use of intimidation from both Sharpe supporters and the Newark police. Booker, his campaign staff, and worst of all, supporters/voters were subjected to physical threats, intimidation, coercion, financial shake downs, business closures, destruction of property, home and office break-ins, voter fraud and suppression of the vote.

But even intimidation, threats, financial blackmail and thuggery could not keep down the neighborhoods that began to support Booker in droves. Sharpe, realizing that there was a serious chance of being replaced, resorted to race baiting.

Not too far into the campaign, James pulled out his “ace in the hole” and began claiming that Booker was “too white” and was secretly a right wing Republican. (While technically the mayoral race was considered non-partisan, it was widely known throughout Newark that both candidates were Democrats in a heavily registered Democratic city.)

For one black man to accuse another black man of being too white brought the community nearly to blows. Sharpe James ran on a campaign slogan of being “The Real Deal.” His remarks, captured on tape by both Curry as well as local news networks, leave no doubt as to his insinuations that Booker was a well to do carpetbagger that was “too white” for Newark.

To paraphrase one Booker supporter, Sharpe’s accusation of Booker being “too white” to represent the black community of Newark was the same kind of insinuation that slave owners alluded to in order to divide their slaves and pit them against each other. To see an entire African American community engage in the same tactics as their former white suppressors was almost unbearable.

And that’s where this movie hits you between the eyes–the lengths that a local town bully will go to in order to keep his cushy $200,000 a year job (he gave himself a sweet pay raise), his two vacation homes, his 46-foot yacht and Rolls Royce. He gleefully engaged in the same vicious divisive tactics that were used in the 1960s’ by those who were determined to maintain their Jim Crow way of life in the South.

James pulled out the big political machine guns in order to win a 5th term–he enlisted the likes of the Newark police department, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to publicly endorse him, while engaging in behind-the-scenes thuggery and race baiting. They knew it. He knew it. And they all took part in it, in order to keep the status quo.

And win he did. By a little less than 4,000 votes, he managed to squeak out re-election for a 5th term.

Curry’s documentary is a powerful and often disturbing fly-on-the-wall view of both Sharpe’s tactics and the pain and division that were the results of a bitter race between a young civil activist and an aging establishment candidate, who would do anything to maintain power, including engaging in suppressing and intimidating his own people.

[Post script: In 2006, Booker, who had raised funds for 4 years and continued to build name recognition, ran for the mayor’s office. Two weeks after turning in his petitions to run for a 6th term, Sharpe abruptly withdrew, without notice, from the mayoral race. A token candidate State Senator Ronald Rice took Sharpe’s place to run as the establishment candidate. In a stunning defeat, Booker won 70% of the vote and became mayor of Newark.)