Camden Takeover ends amid quieted activism

January 25, 2010  |  Philadelphia Inquirer  |  Link to article

The night democracy returned to Camden, no one cheered. No one in Camden did much of anything.

After more than seven years, the state Legislature last week lifted New Jersey's near-complete control over city government, effectively ending an unpopular takeover and returning power to elected leaders.

But just two city activists made it to Trenton to watch history being made. There were no rallies applauding the move or protests against the rapid, secretive passage of the law, which gives the new mayor extraordinary powers.

The next day, the city's biggest civic group, Camden Churches Organized for People, issued an urgent news release, but the takeover wasn't mentioned. Instead, the group announced a rally to celebrate the demolition of two abandoned houses.

Legally disenfranchised during the takeover, citizens and activist groups who once helped to shape this hard-luck city have abandoned any coordinated attack on Camden's power structure. They instead focus on small, winnable neighborhood projects, content to watch from the sidelines as Camden's government is reshuffled.

"People are just beaten down," said Tom Knoche, a Rutgers-Camden urban politics professor who was once one of the city's most renowned community organizers. He now lives in a nearby suburb.

"They're just not engaged. And they generally believe that their participation does not matter very much."

CCOP members lobbied for the $175 million that came to Camden with the takeover law, and then they lobbied for changes to the law. But with this fight to rescind the law, they stayed home, taking a conciliatory, wait-and-see approach to the new mayor, Dana Redd, and the governor-elect, Christopher J. Christie.

"We have to try to build a relationship with them, try to work with them and go from there," said Rosa Ramirez, a leader of CCOP.

Activists say they don't expect the pie, or even half the pie. They'll take a sliver - two knocked-down buildings, for example, in a city of blight.

"Why bang your head against the wall? You're only going to have a headache," said Marianna Emanuele, coordinator of the group Camden United. "We have energy, and we still believe in what we do, but we want to focus that energy . . . even if we don't shift anything major."

'The people's champ'

Emanuele said the 2007 imprisonment of Ali Sloan El, an opposition City Council member convicted of corruption, was a blow to the activist community. He had filed one of three lawsuits against the takeover.

Last week, Sloan El, out of jail and still known as "the people's champ," took the podium at a mostly empty City Council meeting and conceded that the Camden County Democratic Party controls most of what happens in the city.

He said he just wanted 30 percent for the people - in the form of jobs or neighborhood projects.

Under the bills passed last week and expected to be signed by Gov. Corzine today, the takeover would end, returning power to the city's mayor. The mayor also would gain the ability to appoint all nine school board members and control the school budget.

While one elected school board member, Jose Delgado, cried foul in the newspapers about this new arrangement, he didn't lobby state legislators to stop it.

Delgado said he tried to call an emergency meeting of the school board, but there wasn't enough time. He considered going to Trenton, too, but to make a difference, he would need three or four busloads of people, he said, and who would pay for that?

"What chance do I have?" he asked.

Delgado looked at some of his old calendars and saw that back in the 1970s, he had meetings every night of the week with different activist groups.

"There was a core of people in the black community and Hispanic community that really tried to do things and change things," he said.

But then some moved, died, or relocated after graduating from Camden's college.

"There's very few of what you can call a core activist movement in the city of Camden," Delgado said.

'Erosion of civic energy'

Camden had once been respected nationally for its activism, according to Howard Gillette, a Rutgers-Camden history professor.

Schooled in the civil-rights movement, Camden activists fought top-down urban-renewal projects in the 1960s and led a successful push for housing by squatting in abandoned homes in the 1980s.

A new generation has yet to pick up where they left off, he said, because of a "long-term erosion of civic energy."

Knoche believes the decline in activism parallels the rise of the Camden County Democrats, who fund all the current county and city elected officials.

"Because this machine has so many more resources now, it makes it a lot tougher to fight it, and people know it," he said.

"They believe that winning is tied to maintaining some kind of positive relationship with the elected leadership. They cut a deal and compromise long before they need to and are not willing to go after the core of the problem."

Grassroots activity is not dead, though; it's just very local. Community development corporations have fought for better housing and services for targeted communities. Community gardens have sprouted throughout the city, as have several youth development programs.

But city governance is generally questioned only by the same four gadflies at City Council meetings.

One of those men, Kelly Francis, the head of the Camden NAACP, was one of the two activists watching the historic votes last Monday.

"There should've been busloads of people," he said.

The takeover - which handed an appointed chief operating officer the powers of elected leaders - muted the voices of citizens, Francis said.

"They're told, 'Go to the polls and vote.' Why? They just don't know what's going on, man. They've just given up."

It is possible that the people are just a sleeping giant. Hundreds showed up at rallies in 2006 to block a major redevelopment plan in the Cramer Hill neighborhood, which would have displaced 1,000 families. The community sued, and the plan was rejected in court on a technicality.

A new issue could galvanize civic opposition. Sloan El is leading a movement to block the possible construction of a privatized county jail in Camden.

He said he believed that people would come out en masse to defeat this plan, and more important, that it would act "as a driving force to bring us all together."

"They did us a favor," he said. "We're back."