50 years after Newark riots, city leaders chart path ahead

Gripping the sides of the podium in front of her tightly, a Newark church official talked to the crowd about power. “Who has it, and who doesn’t?” Dr. Antoinette Ellis Williams asked the rows of people gathered Tuesday night to mark the 50th anniversary of the Newark riots. “And when you have it, what do you do with it?” Newark residents’ desire for power and agency over their lives, both in 1967 and today, was the theme of the interfaith prayer service that drew more than 250 people to Abyssinian Baptist Church in the city’s Central Ward. Williams, a pastoral assistant at Newark’s Bethany Baptist Church, told the audience the inequality and lack of upward mobility that characterized the city at the time of the riots have not disappeared.

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