If Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is elected governor of New Jersey in next year’s election, he’d make a lot of history.
He’d be the first Black person elected to lead the state; in fact, no major party in New Jersey has ever even nominated a person of color for governor in the 180 years of direct gubernatorial elections. He’d join Senator Cory Booker, himself a former Newark mayor, as the two most successful Newark politicians in modern political history.
And being elected governor would mean that he, at last, will have won more elections than he’s lost.
Baraka, the son of a renowned and controversial poet and civil rights activist, didn’t have a terribly auspicious start in politics. A teacher and poet himself, Baraka ran for mayor of Newark in 1994, when he was just 25, and got smoked; he followed that up with three unsuccessful runs for city council and a short stint as an appointed councilman, but the holy grail of elected office was always just out of reach.
Finally, in 2010, Baraka’s efforts paid off when he won a council seat in the South Ward, his longtime base and the launching grounds for several prominent Newark political families. That proved to be the foot in the door Baraka needed; he was elected mayor in 2014 in a tough race, and was easily re-elected twice more after that.
Baraka’s eight campaigns – one every four years since 1994, always for a local office in Newark – paint a picture of a politician who is dogged, resilient, and frequently uninterested in playing by the standard political rules, for better or for worse.
Now, after nearly a decade of leading the state’s largest city, Baraka is turning his attention to the next big prize: the governorship. He’ll have to get past a lot of tough opponents from both parties to get there, but as his three decades in politics have shown, discounting him would clearly be a mistake.
This is the fourth in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney, Jon Bramnick
Activist origins
When Ras Baraka ran his first no-hope campaign for mayor in 1994, it was the beginning of his long electoral journey – but the story of the Baraka family’s involvement in politics goes back decades further.
Baraka’s father, Amiri Baraka, was born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark in 1934. The son of a postal supervisor and a social worker, Jones grew up in a Newark that was rapidly changing in some ways while remaining frustratingly stagnant in others; between 1930 and 1960, the city’s Black population grew from 39,000 people to nearly 140,000, but African Americans remained largely shut out of the city’s political and cultural elite.
After studying at Rutgers and Howard and a stint in the Air Force, Jones – who went by LeRoi Jones in his early adulthood – spent the 1960s becoming increasingly ensconced in the Black Power movement as one its chief artistic voices. He became widely known for his plays and his poetry, and was the chief visionary behind the Black Arts Movement, which aimed to provide an artistic outlet for, and record of, Black accomplishment.
And as Jones shaped the movement around him, it shaped him back. In 1965, he left his Jewish first wife, with whom he had two daughters; in 1968, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Amiri Baraka.
The Newark of the 1960s was similarly undergoing massive changes. Between 1960 and 1970, the city became majority-Black for the first time, a development that was not well-received by the city’s white population. Years of racial tensions and Black disenfranchisement exploded in the 1967 riots, when the beating of a Black cabbie by two white police officers led to five days of chaos and 26 deaths.
When the city’s 1970 mayoral election arrived, many of the city’s Black luminaries, among them Baraka, recognized that their moment might have finally arrived. A young Black engineer named Kenneth Gibson, who had lost a previous race for mayor in 1966, ran that year against white Mayor Hugh Addonizio on a message of Black representation and anti-corruption – and won by more than 11,000 votes.
Gibson’s election made him the first Black mayor of a major East Coast city, and he was instantly catapulted into the ranks of the nation’s most prominent Black politicians. He failed to pull many of his council running mates with him that year, but was more successful in the 1974 elections, after which Councilman Earl Harris became the city’s first Black council president.
Baraka was not interested in elected office for himself, and he was not among the rising Black political stars who forged their careers in the Newark elections of the 1970s. But he was close with Gibson and was a key part of the era’s Black political revolution; he saw the election of a Black mayor as a key stepping stone to Black self-determination.
“Newark, New Ark, the nationalist sees as the creation of a base, an example, upon which one aspect of the entire Black nation can be built,” Baraka said shortly before Gibson’s victory. “We will build a ‘city-state,’ or make alliances throughout the area to develop regional power in the scatter of Black cities of northern New Jersey.”
It was in that contentious, optimistic era of Newark politics that Ras Jua Baraka was raised. The son of Amiri and his second wife, fellow artist Amina Baraka (born Sylvia Robinson), Ras was born in April 1970, just a few months before Gibson was elected mayor and Newark politics changed forever. (The city, which continued to witness an exodus of white residents post-1970, has only elected Black mayors since then.)
As Ras grew up in the predominantly Black South Ward, Amiri continued with both his artistry and his activism, though he moved away from the Black nationalism that was once his guiding cause. In 2002, he was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey by Gov. Jim McGreevey – and less than a year later, he was forcibly removed from that post by the state legislature after he read a poem implying that Israel knew about the September 11th attacks before they happened.
That controversy, and his long lifetime of revolutionary views, came to overshadow some of Amiri’s other work; the New York Times labeled him a “polarizing poet and playwright” in the headline of its 2014 obituary. But for Ras, who was in the midst of his ultimately successful second mayoral campaign when Amiri died, his father was first and foremost a man who loved Newark and would do anything to make it better.
“My father loved this city of violence. He was a Newarker to his core,” Ras said. “Because he chose to fight here, so do I.”
Rage against the machine
In many ways, the young Ras Baraka was an echo of his father.
He, like his father, went to Howard University, where he became a student activist who led the occupation of an administration building in protest of the appointment of top GOP strategist Lee Atwater to the school’s board of trustees. He, like his father, was a poet and an artist, most famously playing a guest role on the 1998 R&B album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
But Ras was unlike his father in one key respect: he had intentions of running for elected office. And he started with the highest office the city had to offer.
The Kenneth Gibson era in Newark politics had come to an end in 1986, after the legendary mayor had led the city for 16 years, waged two unsuccessful bids for governor, and served a stint as the first Black president of the United States Conference of Mayors. Dragged down by high unemployment and the continued hollowing-out of Newark’s downtown, Gibson lost that year to Sharpe James, a three-term city councilman.
James was re-elected unopposed in 1990, and no top potential challengers were interested in taking him on in 1994, either. Instead, a few lesser-known names stepped up to run: William Payne, a political operative and the brother of Rep. Donald Payne Sr. (D-Newark); Colleen Walton, a physician and local party leader; and a 25-year-old middle school teacher named Ras Baraka.
No one thought Baraka stood much of a chance of defeating James, seemingly including Baraka himself, who told the New York Times a week before the election that his chief concern was making sure James didn’t go uncontested.
“Mayor Sharpe James won unopposed in the last election, which is an indictment of the level of democracy that takes place in this city,” Baraka said. “This election we wanted to at least make a statement. In college I learned that if your ideas aren’t presented, people in power aren’t going to do anything about your concerns. So we’re bringing our concerns to the public.”
But Baraka wasn’t just running to tilt at windmills, he said; he was also fighting to improve education, guarantee that Newark residents had certain basic rights, and upend the feeling of hopelessness that had overtaken the city. When the Times asked him whether he considered himself a “revolutionary,” he said yes.
“People see revolution as a bad thing, but to me it’s like science,” Baraka said. “It’s complete change. If jeans can be revolutionary and detergent can be revolutionary and they don’t affect people’s lives except to make clothes cleaner or more durable, why can’t we revolt to make our lives cleaner and more durable? The truth is, I think everyone should be a revolutionary.”
As expected, Newark voters were not in a terribly revolutionary mood that year. James won outright in the first round with 64% of the vote, while Baraka came in third with 8%; Baraka got crushed even in his home turf in the South Ward, which was home to both the James and Payne families as well.
It was a brutal loss, but Baraka clearly caught the political bug. Newark only holds local elections once every four years, and Baraka has run in every single one of them since that first mayoral campaign.
In 1998 and 2002, Baraka ran for an at-large spot on the city council, which meant running in chaotic multi-candidate citywide races for four seats. He made it to the runoff in 1998, but wasn’t able to cross the finish line either time, losing to incumbent councilmembers and other experienced politicians with more substantial establishment backing.
In each race, Baraka ran separately from any mayoral candidate, choosing instead to define himself entirely on his own terms. From his first campaign onwards, Baraka made it clear he had no particular intention of joining anyone else’s team – even in the 2002 election, where the divide between James and up-and-coming Councilman Cory Booker nearly tore the city apart.
But after his 2002 defeat, Baraka finally got an invitation to join the halls of power in Newark rather than remain stuck on the outside looking in. He accepted.
Cracking the code
As Baraka was losing his race for the city council in 2002, James was winning the concurrent mayoral election over Booker, a bitter contest that became immortalized in the documentary Street Fight. Booker’s career was far from over, of course, but no one knew that at the time; with Booker off the council, James decided he wanted a different young whippersnapper with unorthodox politics to join his administration. Baraka was ready and waiting.
Shortly after being sworn in for a fourth term, James named Baraka as one of the city’s deputy mayors (which in Newark is an appointed position rather than an elected one). Eight years after running directly against James, Baraka was now part of his inner circle.
“I remember a young man who ran against me for mayor,” James later reminisced in 2014, when he endorsed Baraka’s second mayoral campaign. “He saw a problem, he worked on the problem, he fixed the problem. Ras Baraka did that.”
After a couple of years in the mayor’s office, another opportunity presented itself due to a tragedy on the city council. Councilman Donald Kofi Tucker, who had been among the earliest wave of Black councilmembers elected in the 1970s, died in 2005 after years of health issues, leaving behind the at-large council seat he had held for more than 30 years.
With James’ support, Baraka was chosen by the council to fill Tucker’s seat, beating out the councilman’s widow, now-Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker. Baraka at long last held the office he’d wanted for years – but he immediately faced a tough fight to keep it.
After initially filing paperwork to run for an unprecedented sixth term, James bowed out of the 2006 mayoral race; he’d go on to be convicted on federal fraud charges related to his actions as mayor a few years later.
Into the vacuum left by the retiring mayor came Booker, who became the heavy frontrunner in the race after originally planning on a potential bloody rematch with James. That was bad news for Baraka, who remained unaligned with Booker and had to once again forge his own path without help from the top of the ticket.
Booker defeated State Sen. Ronald Rice in a landslide in the first round of voting, while Baraka headed to a chaotic seven-way runoff for the council’s four at-large seats. Once again, the runoff proved to be Baraka’s undoing; he was defeated by Booker’s three running mates – Luis Quintana, Mildred Crump, and Carlos Gonzalez – and the late Donald Payne Jr., the son of the longtime congressman. Baraka came in fifth, 4,145 votes behind Gonzalez.
By that point, Baraka had solidified his base in the city’s South Ward; in the first round of voting, he was the top South Ward vote-getter across all 12 candidates running. But he struggled to make a dent elsewhere in the city, especially in the East and North Wards, which were home to the city’s burgeoning Hispanic community.
Just as Newark’s Black population exploded between 1930 and 1970, its Hispanic population rose dramatically in the later decades of the 20th century, going from 12% of the city in 1970 to 34% in 2010. Baraka had little pull in that community, which was increasingly flexing its political muscle to support Booker and elect its own members of the city council, and his poor showing there sank his citywide campaign.
The 2006 loss was the roughest blow yet to Baraka’s political fortunes. This time, he hadn’t just been a passionate outsider butting up against the fortress of establishment politics; he had been a member of that establishment, only to lose his place again and be forced back out into the cold.
Shortly after his defeat, Baraka became the principal of Central High School; he was also raising three young daughters. But he was adamant that he wasn’t through with city politics, and in 2010 he finally dropped his citywide aspirations and ran for the office closest to home: the South Ward council seat.
The incumbent councilman, Oscar James II – no relation to Shape James – was a strong ally of Booker, who was seemingly on a glide path to re-election in 2010. But there was reason to believe that Councilman James was vulnerable, given that he had eked out a runoff victory in 2006 against John Sharpe James, the former mayor’s son.
Baraka, still an intractable Booker critic, teamed up with Clifford Minor, a former Essex County Prosecutor who became the anti-Booker standard-bearer. The first-term mayor, Baraka said, hadn’t done nearly enough to fix the troubled city’s many issues, and the South Ward needed an independent voice to push back against the mayor rather than a yes-man like Oscar James.
“You might not like me, but you’ve been bamboozled and fooled,” Baraka said of the city’s leadership. “There’s no clear plan on the horizon, and I’m here because the South Ward needs a vision.”
As expected, Minor lost the 2010 mayor’s race; Booker’s popularity and myriad institutional advantages were too much to overcome. But in the South Ward, anti-Booker sentiment – and pro-Baraka sentiment – won the day. Minor carried the ward by nearly 1,000 votes, and more importantly, Baraka ousted James in a 56%-37% rout, winning all but two of the ward’s voting districts.
After sixteen years of running for office and being rebuffed each time, Baraka had finally won a seat in the city he had lived in all his life. And he did so having never fully joined any political establishment or team; he’d made alliances, sure, but his political fortune still rested almost entirely on his own skills and relationships.
Booker mostly got the outcomes he wanted in other council races that year, but he knew that Baraka’s victory would create a thorn in the side of his second mayoral term.
“We have a new councilman in Ras Baraka,” Booker said peaceably after the results were in. “The voters have spoken. We will partner for progress moving forward.”
Mayor at last
“I am honored to be here today on this auspicious and historical occasion – finally, after some 16 long years – to serve you as the South Ward councilman of Newark, New Jersey. It has truly been a long and sometimes tumultuous [few] years, but each time we were knocked down, we had the courage and the strength to get back up.”
So began Baraka’s 2010 inauguration address, a fiery speech that went back to his revolutionary roots and blasted those “using [their] education, multisyllabic words, and high-minded quotes to trick people into giving away their goods or as a weapon to rob them of their dignity” – one of many lines that seemed like it may have been aimed squarely at Booker. The relationship between the new councilman and the second-term mayor was not going to be an easy one.
But not long after the 2010 election, Booker began looking outside of Newark for his next opportunity. In 2011, he set up a committee called CoryPAC in pursuit of a potential future U.S. Senate campaign – and indeed, in 2012, Booker said he’d explore a campaign against Senator Frank Lautenberg in 2014. Lautenberg died in June 2013, moving up Booker’s schedule; he was elected to the Senate in October of that year.
After Booker resigned from the mayor’s office, Councilman Luis Quintana was chosen as the city’s interim mayor, becoming the city’s first Latino mayor. But Quintana did not want to run for a full term in 2014, meaning that Newark was looking at just the second open mayoral race since the advent of the city’s modern mayor-council charter in 1954.
By the time Booker left for the Senate, Baraka had already been campaigning to succeed him for eight months, a campaign that had long been anticipated by political observers. And just like in his prior five campaigns, Baraka ran as a progressive populist unafraid to criticize the powers that be, among them the Booker administration.
“The minute he stepped in the door, his eye was somewhere else, and I think that affected his ability to govern and manage the city effectively,” Baraka said of Booker in 2013. “I think it’s time, now, to transform that into real work in these neighborhoods – to roll up our sleeves and become committed to the real systemic problems that we have in our city that can’t be solved through TV and Meet the Press.”
He didn’t have the mayoral field to himself. North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos, Central Ward Councilman Darrin Sharif, and former state Assistant Attorney General Shavar Jeffries all threw their hats in the ring as well, each with their own bases of support.
Ramos and Sharif didn’t last long, each dropping out of the race on the same day in February 2014. That narrowed the field down to just Baraka and Jeffries, two men born and raised in the South Ward.
The resulting contest wasn’t as legendary as the James-Booker fight of a decade earlier, but it was still a nasty, bruising battle. Supporters of each candidate got in verbal and physical fights on the street; millions of dollars flooded into the city via the candidates themselves and via outside groups, making it the second-most expensive municipal election in the state’s history at the time (behind only Booker’s 2006 win).
As journalists at the time noted, the actual policy differences between the two candidates weren’t necessarily yawning. (The exception was perhaps education: Baraka was a public school principal, while Jeffries was a charter school advocate.) But personality-wise, there was a huge gulf; Baraka accused Jeffries of being the willing puppet of outside interests looking to control the city, while Jeffries said that Baraka’s revolutionary past as a “protester-in-chief” would make him an ineffective mayor.
“[Baraka and Jeffries] share similar views on many issues, both are registered Democrats, and they grew up in the same part of the city where each now lives,” the Star-Ledger wrote two days before the polls opened. “But in the rancorous street fight that marks the race to elect the next mayor of Newark, the two candidates battling for the job might as well be from different planets.”
Even though a member of their community wasn’t on the ballot, the city’s Hispanic residents played a crucial role in the race. Ramos got behind Jeffries after dropping out, as did East Ward Councilman Augusto Amador and Councilman At-Large Carlos Gonzalez, giving Jeffries a huge leg up with Hispanic voters.
But just as crucially, most of the city’s Black establishment got behind Baraka instead. Both Sharpe James and Kenneth Gibson, the city’s only living elected mayors besides Booker, endorsed Baraka, as did a number of sitting city councilmembers, although Rep. Donald Payne Jr. backed Jeffries. (Booker himself stayed neutral in the race, though Jeffries was seen as the candidate more aligned with his administration.)
The Baraka coalition proved to be the sturdier one. On Election Day, Baraka earned 24,358 votes – around eight times as many as in his 1994 campaign – and beat Jeffries 54%-46%. Jeffries won the Hispanic-majority North and East Wards, as expected, but Baraka dominated in most Black neighborhoods – including a tremendous 43-point win in the South Ward.
Five of Baraka’s running mates also won their respective races for the city council, giving the new mayor a narrow working majority on the council. Previously the domain of Gibson, then James, then Booker, Newark was now Baraka territory.
At his victory party on election night, Baraka shouted out the slogan he had plastered all over the city for months: “We are the mayor!”
King of the hill
That, as it turned out, was the last competitive election Baraka would have to face – until next year’s gubernatorial contest, that is.
Once in office, Baraka didn’t entirely let go of the activist, sometimes incendiary rhetoric that had propelled him for twenty years. The priorities he focused on as mayor, though, were very down to earth.
In 2017, the New Jersey Board of Education voted to return control of the Newark school system to the city’s voters after a two-decade takeover, an issue that Baraka had heavily campaigned on in 2014. A year later, after increased lead levels were found in schools, Baraka launched a program to replace all lead pipes in the city, a program which finished ahead of schedule in 2021 (though additional lead was found earlier this year in some pipes).
When the mayor’s office came before voters again in 2018, Baraka got a challenge from Councilwoman Gayle Chaneyfield Jenkins, his former running mate. But her campaign went absolutely nowhere; Baraka retained the support of the rest of the city council, and won 77%-23%.
Baraka detractors had even less of a shot in 2022, when the only candidate to file against the mayor was Sheila Montague, a former teacher. Baraka won 83%-17%, the largest margin of victory for a Newark mayor since Sharpe James’s uncontested 1990 win. After previously rejecting Baraka over and over, Newark voters couldn’t seem to get enough of him.
But under the hood, there were some warning signs for Baraka in his easy re-elections.
For one, although he’s made nice with all nine members of the council – every council winner in the 2022 elections won under the Baraka banner – many of them are not truly committed members of Team Baraka. The city’s Hispanic elected officials in particular are allied with Baraka more out of convenience and a lack of interest in waging pointless fights. While Baraka may be the city’s most powerful politician, he’s never made himself into a true power broker.
That’s also evidenced by the precipitously low turnout that recent Newark elections have witnessed. When Baraka won in 2022, he did so in a race that attracted only 17,784 voters to the polls, less than 10% of the city’s registered electorate. Around 92% of Newark voters didn’t vote for him that year, and even though the 2018 and 2014 races had higher turnout, the large majority of Newark voters have never voted for Baraka ever.
That could bode poorly for the 2025 gubernatorial contest, when Baraka will need to mobilize huge voter turnout out of Newark and other similar urban areas in order to get past many of his more suburban-focused rivals. Baraka, whose brother Amiri Jr. serves as his chief of staff, simply has a weaker campaign infrastructure to start out with than many other candidates have.
Case in point: Baraka has had perennial issues with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC), the state’s campaign finance watchdog. Baraka and a former campaign staffer were fined $30,000 over issues with Baraka’s 2014 campaign finances, and ELEC recently filed a new complaint over Baraka’s failure to submit fundraising reports from his 2022 campaign – a mistake that was very much avoidable.
But spelling out the demerits of a politician who has already repeatedly defied the odds is in some ways a futile exercise.
Looking at the Ras Baraka of the 1990s and early 2000s, few would have predicted a particularly bright electoral future. Righteous though his cause might have been – renowned though his father may have been – the young Baraka simply couldn’t crack the political code that would lead him to elected office.
Until, suddenly, he did – and he did so while remaining the same impassioned, unbought, unusual figure he had always been. The Ras Baraka that has led New Jersey’s largest city is in some ways a transformed politician from the one who threw his hat in the ring against Sharpe James in 1994, but he is in other ways the same as he ever was.
“I know even today that there are those that question my ability to make this happen, to struggle daily with the lives of our children, and to struggle for greater democracy in our city at the same time,” Baraka said in his 2010 inauguration address. “But there is no contradiction in that. There are many that would abdicate their responsibility or question my intentions from the shadows of indifference and the crowded spaces of opportunism and cowardice. I say differently.”
What will the voters of New Jersey say?