ABSTRACT
Italian-Americans shared political power with the Irish-Americans and had elected several councilmen under the new charter and commissioners under the old. As 1968 came to a close, black political power was less evident than could be expected from the proportion of blacks in Newark’s population. When political activists began to try to break Addonizio’s stranglehold over Newark’s electoral politics, the evidence strongly indicated that blacks could not win city-wide elections without the support of white and/or Spanish-speaking voters. The Black and Puerto Rican Convention had served a useful purpose in focusing black attention on a single mayoral candidate, but it was a temporary coalition. To the civil rights activists, white and black, the Addonizio administration represented all that was evil in society. Richardson and Wheeler were asked to drop out of the race by a number of national black leaders, including Representative Chisholm and Mayor Hatcher, but they refused.
