Bokelskere.no

PREFACE
I was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1957, back when it was a thriving
city, bustling with iconic department stores,
morning and evening newspapers, libraries and museums, a busy downtown,
and a large middle class. (...)
My parents, like millions of other Americans, moved to the suburbs
when I was a toddler.

/ /

Then, one hot July day in 1967, when I was nine years old,
I saw the city overtaken by turmoil.
As my father drove us into the city, the air grew thick with smoke:
Newark was engulfed in its infamous riots,
and police, National Guardsmen, and military vehicles lined its streets.

Eventually, a policeman flagged us down to warn us about "snipers."
As my father anxiously turned the car around, he instructed me to
lie down on the floor for safety.
More than two dozen people, mostly African Americans, died in Newark
over the next several days;
750 more were injured, and another 1,000 jailed.
Property damage was estimated in millions of dollars.
The devastating riots boiled over into many other cities, including nearby
New Brunswick and Plainfield, New Jersey; Detroit and Cincinnati in the
Rustbelt; and Atlanta in the South.
It would become known as the "long, hot summer of 1967."

In most cases, the precipitating event was police violence toward blacks,
but the root causes ran deeper. Jobs and economic activity, as well as
the largely white working and middle classes, had been moving out of those
cities for some time,
and many blacks, who had been moving into them as part of their Great
Migration from the South, were packed into urban ghettos.
_
I was witnessing the unfolding of what would come to be called
"the urban crisis."
For all of my life (...) all of modern history—cities had been centers
of industry, economic growth, and cultural achievement.
By the late 1960s and 1970s, that was no longer the case.
Middle-class people and jobs were fleeing cities like Newark for the suburbs,
leaving their economies hollowed out.
By the time I entered high school in the early 1970s, huge stretches
of Newark had fallen victim to economic decay, rising crime and violence,
and racially concentrated poverty.

( forlagsinnledning )

( omtale NYtimes )