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Exhibition Review
"What's Going On? Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties." New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, N.J. http://www.jerseyhistory.org/exhibit_detail.php?recid=46.
Temporary exhibition, Sept. 2007–Dec. 2009. 1,500 sq. ft. Linda Caldwell Epps, president and CEO; Beth Mauro, project director; KPC Experience Media Group, exhibit design and media production; XPLUS, exhibit fabricator; Max Herman, lead oral historian.
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| In 2007 the city of Newark engaged in a broad civic effort to commemorate the violence—popularly known as "the riots"—that rocked the city forty years earlier. As part of this commemorative season, the New Jersey Historical Society opened a multimedia exhibition in its downtown Newark headquarters entitled "What's Going On? Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties." When you first walk into the exhibition, a trio of flashing television monitors provides a broad context for that decade. A timeline of key events in U.S. and Newark history flashes across the screens. With each passing decade, a new musical selection plays, while in the background images and film clips appear and disappear, all against a backdrop of the Newark city skyline. It is attention grabbing. |
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Yet from somewhere in the back of the room, through the commotion of this dynamic introduction, comes the sound of voices. You can make out certain words and phrases ("scared," "shouted stop," "gunshots," "get down on the floor") and you know that somewhere in this room people are talking about the riots, the five days of looting and police and military suppression in July 1967 that left twenty-six people dead, all but two of them black. But the overlapping aural fields signal that "What's Going On?" involves much more than those five days of violence. They are not displaced completely, but they are decentered. You have to work your way through some history before and after you get to the riots. The exhibition suggests something profound about its home city: Newark, for so long at the mercy of the memory of this violence, is finally taking control of the "riots." |
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Since commemoration can be a messy process, sometimes involving raw memories and bitter interpretive battles, it is the great strength of this exhibit that it asserts a coherent historical narrative in its text panels, while refusing to be dictatorial about the preservation of that narrative. It allows space for qualification and dissent, both of which are abundant in its oral history excerpts. It performs an educational function for those seeking a cohesive introduction to Newark in the 1960s, but those seeking out the messiness, perhaps those already familiar with some version of the story and hoping for something new, will not leave disappointed. |
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The exhibition consists of four main sections arranged in a horseshoe pattern, all contained in one room. The first section provides a prologue to the 1960s, and the second covers the political activism of that decade in Newark. As you turn the corner of the horseshoe (a highly symbolic act in this context), the third section presents the violence of July 1967, with the final portion covering the ensuing years. The information contained in these sections comes in three forms: physical artifacts, excerpts of oral history interviews, and interpretive text panels. |
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The storyline contained in these text panels is decidedly black: It is about African Americans and their role in shaping Newark's history. In the first display case, on a panel entitled "A Suitcase Full of Hope," the contents of a beautiful carpet bag are laid out, and in the scattered artifacts—including a comb, straight razor, mirror, and handkerchief—the exhibition offers an image of black migrants to Newark: people concerned with personal maintenance but on a more profound level with the making and remaking of the self that accompanies migration. The artifacts convey a sense of self-possession and hope. And indeed, the exhibition continues, in the early years of this migration Newark provided "a job, a home, a place to grow." Work was plentiful for the migrants, and they enjoyed its riches. But the dream quickly soured and hope was lost when the city entered a period of industrial decline. |
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