The War Is Here: Newark 1967

by Bud Lee (Photographer), Ras Baraka (Introduction)

Overview

With a foreword by the Honorable Ras J. Baraka, 40th Mayor of Newark, NJ, The War Is Here is Life magazine photographer Bud Lee’s dramatic, empathetic, and still shocking record of the Newark uprising of 1967—a pivotal moment in a summer of protest and rage across the country, whose reverberations we still feel today. 

July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark—already a tinderbox—became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage caused. The scars on the city remained for decades. 

Bud Lee, a 26-year-old novice photographer for Life magazine, was called upon to cover the civic uprising in Newark as it broke out. Lee and Life reporter Dale Wittner arrived to find a majority Black population—already struggling under a corrupt local government and a vicious, authoritarian police force—trying to persevere in extraordinary circumstances: stores burned and looted; a city under siege by trigger-happy city and state police; and the young, inexperienced, and exhausted National Guardsmen sent to patrol it day and night. 

The War Is Here documents the several days Bud Lee spent in Newark. These photographs capture life in a city transformed into an urban war zone. Lee witnessed first-hand two policemen shoot a man named Billy Furr in the back. Lee’s dramatic images of this cold-blooded murder ran in Life. The same bullets also hit and wounded a 12-year-old boy named Joey Bass Jr., who had been playing at a nearby intersection. Lee’s stark, emotional image of Bass, lying bleeding and contorted in pain on dirty concrete, ran on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life, sparking a national conversation on race and police violence and becoming the defining image of the “long, hot summer” of ’67—a summer of fire and fury, protest and rage across the country. 

Over half a century later, Bud Lee’s raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of Newark, at a turning point in the city’s history, continue to resonate: a testament to their resilience and fortitude.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781736309360
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	841,726
Product dimensions:	9.62(w) x 11.94(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bud Lee (1941-2015) is a self-taught photographer, who first took up a camera professionally in the military and received fine art training at the National Academy in New York. He had an idiosyncratic eye unconstrained by the conventions of documentary photography. Between 1967 and 1974, he worked on assignment for Life, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and many other publications, somehow finding himself at the centre of some of the biggest stories of the time. An outsider who got insider access, his work is poetic and painterly, occasionally droll and irreverent. The War Is Here is the first book to collect his photographs.

The Honorable Ras J. Baraka is the 40th Mayor of the City of Newark. Born and raised in Newark, with family who've lived in the city for more than 80 years, Mayor Baraka’s progressive approach to governing has won him accolades from grassroots organizations to the White House. His father, the late Amiri Baraka, a legendary poet, playwright and political activist, was intimately connected with the events that occurred in Newark in 1967.

Chris Campion is a British author, journalist, and editor, and has written for publications that include The Guardian, The Times (UK), Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, NME, Dazed & Confused, and Vice. He is an archivist for the Estate of Bud Lee, the editor of The War Is Here, and contributes an essay on Bud Lee and the story behind photographs, entitled “On Avon, Between Badger and Livingston”.

Editorial Reviews

06/26/2023

In July 1967, Life magazine photographer Lee (1941–2015) was sent to Newark, N.J., to cover the civil unrest convulsing the city, notes journalist Campion (Walking on the Moon) at the outset of this harrowing visual account. The uprising was triggered by the beating, arrest, and incarceration of cab driver John Smith by police, but more broadly resulted from decades of “endemic poverty, institutional racism, corruption, and abuse that found the black majority population of Newark... with little hope for change.” Lee captured the event as it unfolded, including store lootings; the arrival of the National Guard; their violent, heavy-handed response; and 26 deaths and countless injures. Especially striking is Lee’s photo of 12-year-old Joe Bass Jr., who lies in the street, limbs askew, in a pool of his own blood; the image was selected for the cover of Life magazine and fueled national dialogues about racial justice. But most of these photos have never been published, including those of apocalyptic-looking streets emptied out post-looting, and National Guard soldiers outfitted in uniforms and helmets, juxtaposed bizarrely with the plainclothed people of Newark. Fifty-six years later, the images resonate in their ability to capture with depth and honesty the particularities of a historical moment, and in their disturbing timeliness. This is powerful. (May)

Publishers Weekly

The Summer of 1967 lives in the DNA of our city—the traumatic pain, the savage injustices, the violence and destruction. Also, what was born from that summer was a Newark with a better understanding of its own indelible core. The stirring images within The War is Here bring Newark’s summer of 1967 back to life in vivid detail, reminding us that the past is with us.” —Senator Cory Booker

“Bud Lee captures the 1967 Newark riots…. Lee’s pictures opened up a nationwide debate about police violence. A new book, The War Is Here: Newark 1967, collects those images, many of them unpublished, and reinhabits not only the fear and the violence—but also … the defiance of that bloody week in Newark history.” —Tim Adams, The Observer

“The War Is Here represents one of the most comprehensive collections of photos about the 1967 Newark Rebellion and Billy Furr that I have ever seen.  It tells a story of police violence, community response, and the destructive narrative that was like a weight upon the city of Newark for many years. I can appreciate it both as a memorial to the photographer, who I never met, and as a story about what we once endured.” —Junius Williams, Official Newark Historian, author of Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power

“Bud Lee was a graphic storyteller who made informative, often gripping, pictures of despair and anger. He watched and documented Billy Furr being fatally shot in the back and the critical wounding of twelve-year-old Joey Bass, Jr. His photographs of death and destruction were given the cover and a six-page feature in Life.  Six pages and a cover were effective then, but now we have The War Is Here, an in-depth record by a gifted and empathetic photographer, ‘lest we forget.’” —Anne Wilkes Tucker, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography Emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston

"Powerful." —Dave Simpson, The Guardian

“We live in a time when journalists, including photojournalists, have lost the public trust. Bud Lee was a reporter. He wasn't seeking to impress you with his singular vision. He was in Newark to look, listen, and report on the complex, tragic events unfolding in front of him. And he did his job, but it’s the way that Bud Lee addressed the tragedy that sets him apart. We see that in The War Is Here.” —Eugene Richards, photojournalist (formerly with Magnum Photos, now VII Photo Agency), author of Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, The Fat Baby, and War Is Personal

“A haunting portrait of Newark’s bloody summer of unrest.” —The New Yorker

“[A] harrowing visual account… Fifty-six years later, the images resonate in their ability to capture with depth and honesty the particularities of a historical moment, and in their disturbing timeliness. This is powerful.” —Publishers Weekly

“In 1967, Newark burst into flames. But what lit the match?...The War Is Here suggests that, whoever you blamed or whatever you called it, the greatest casualty was Newark itself.” —New York Daily News

“The War Is Here collects unforgettable photographs Bud Lee took on assignment for Life magazine, capturing the lives of ordinary citizens as their neighborhoods were transformed into war zones.” —Public Libraries Online

“An in-depth look at the work of Bud Lee, a photographer whose work provides a disturbing record of racial injustice and police brutality in the city [of Newark]… Provides a harrowing record of the events that unfolded.” —Huck Online

“Lee’s photographs from Newark’s ‘long, hot summer’ remain to mark what happened not just in Newark those 5 days in July, but stand in for all the other cities where rage and war reigned in 1967… But Lee’s work also resounds today.” —Blind Magazine

From the Publisher