White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans

Abstract

Abstract Scholars have largely understood the urban crisis, including racial violence, as a matter of Black versus white, with white ethnics in possession of a largely inconsequential ethnicity. An examination of two community leaders from Newark’s North Ward reveals competing Italian American perceptions of the urban crisis. Anthony Imperiale, the race-baiting demagogue and politician, has been portrayed by the media and by scholars as the lone voice of the North Ward. Stephen Adubato argued that urban white working-class ethnics like Italian American Newarkers were reacting to economic hardship at a time when they believed the government was advantaging African Americans. Rather than foster a white identity and anti-black sentiment, Adubato aimed to promote stronger Italian American ethnicity as a basis for making claims on resources. A consideration of the two men, using newspaper accounts and archival sources, illustrates that Newark’s Italian Americans as a distinct ethnic group had diverse if at times overlapping interpretations of their experience of the urban crisis rooted in identification by race on the one hand and ethnicity on the other. The attitudes toward and relations with African Americans represented by both men were grounded in real and imagined socioeconomic, political, and cultural realms within the specific racial context of the era and the challenges of the urban crisis which extended to the Italian American community.