First-Hand:Community Activism

Submitted by A. Michael Noll, October 5, 2025

My mother and I were community activists before the term was even invented. Our home was in the upper Clinton hill section of Newark, New Jersey. I had lived there since my birth, along with my mother and father; he died in 1965. My mother and I lived there during the Newark riots of the summer of 1967.

Real estate agents used block-busting techniques to scare residents into selling and fleeing to the suburbs. “Did you see who just moved in down the block?” Panic and tensions were everywhere.

My mother was secretary for a community organization of neighbors in the upper Clinton hill section of Newark. She took notes during meetings and wrote up the minutes. I performed and wrote two case studies about the corruption and ineptitude of Federally sponsored programs in Newark. We were indeed community activists.

Ultimately, we had to leave Newark – my mother was attacked a few times, and absentee landlords were torching their properties to collect on insurance. Newark had become dangerous – and, unfortunately, portions still are decades later.

One Federal program was supposed to reduce the rat population. I had noticed that cats seemed to have disappeared. My mother set a trap and caught a huge rat, which easily could have killed a cat. The rat program ended up being a program to remove abandoned cars from local streets. This had little to do with rats, but generated income for those removing the cars. The SC Johnson Company donated cartons of a rat killer, which we then distributed to neighbors. In a few weeks, the rats were gone. I wrote a report about this failure of Federal assistance, and how community activism succeeded.

Another Federal program was supposed to enforce code enforcement and result in property improvement. My mother and I discovered from interviews with neighbors that home improvements were authorized, but never performed, even though contactors had been paid. I wrote a report about all this and concluded:

“It would seem that no program, no matter how innocent, can be engineered or implemented in Newark without being infiltrated, manipulated, and distorted to further the aims of corrupt and wicked officials at all levels. The end result is a justifiable despair, a hatred, and a total lack of confidence by the citizenry towards all levels of government.”

I gave copies of my two case studies to my management at Bell Labs. The studies then ended up in Washington with Dr. Edward E. David, Jr. who was the Science Advisor to President Nixon. He gave them to the appropriate Federal agencies. This might have been a factor in why Ed brought me to Washington to join his staff at the Executive Office of the President in mid 1971.

What is so disturbing is that these failures in social programs still seem to be occurring many decades later. Around 2010, Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to the city of Newark to improve its schools, but the funds simply seemed to evaporate. Oh well.