Ras J. Baraka: A Cornerstone to Rebuilding the Village

I don’t know everything about the killing of a Newark police officer by a 14 year old kid. My heart goes out to both families. Precious lives have been lost on both sides of the gun. May Allah (The Creator) comfort the hearts of all families during their time of loss. Aameen! Our village is broken. It has been broken for decades. Since the beginning of 2025, there has been an uptick in multiple shootings and murders in the city of Newark, NJ. Just recently, one of the acts of senseless community violence claimed the life of a little 9 year old boy named Yasin Morrison. He was killed on Friday, January 31, 2025. His little body got caught between the crossfire of bullets on Osborne Terrace. Although our village is broken, the damage due to senseless community violence is not beyond repair. We have been blessed by Allah (The Creator) with Mayor Ras J. Baraka and his army of peace makers coming forward to help put the village back together.

Although the politically pragmatic brilliance of Mayor Baraka is calling for him to serve as Governor of New Jersey to help everyday people in the Garden State, he has done some great work in Newark.

Mayor Baraka has replaced old water leadlines with new ones without burdening its citizens with the cost of bills. He has taken Newark out of debt. Mayor Baraka led the movement to liberate the Newark Public Schools from state control to local control. He has been at the forefront of a renaissance of housing development while providing affordable housing for Newarkers. But for our most marginalized homeless population, Mayor Baraka has provided shelters and resources for them to find a way off the streets. His efforts to help the homeless has reduced homelessness by 56% in Newark. Mayor Baraka has created policies for big and small businesses to thrive in the city, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods. He has relentlessly supported public schools and public school teachers as an elected official and as a community activist. Mayor Baraka has shared his enormous platform in the state of New Jersey to support reparations for people of African descent that experienced centuries of slavery and segregation. Four hundred Newark residents, ages 18 and older and with household incomes that were 200% below the federal poverty level, received a guaranteed income for a sum of $12,000 each for over two years from his administration. Most importantly, since being the Mayor of Newark, he has reduced crime and violence by 60%.

Because of his progressive work in Newark, NJ, Mayor Baraka is the best candidate for Governor of New Jersey. I will be voting for him in the June gubernatorial primary elections of 2025.

If Mayor Baraka wins the primary and the general gubernatorial elections, he will be the first African American Governor in the history of New Jersey. And by the way, New Jersey was the last state in the Union to end the enslavement of Black people.

However, as Mayor Baraka ventures out from Newark, NJ to place his stake on the Governorship of New Jersey, I think his record of reducing crime and violence must be analyzed to understand the significance of his work to address violence through the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. Mayor Ras J. Baraka, and his office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, is the national model for resolving senseless community violence in a major city, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

The Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery he created as mayor was birthed out of Baraka’s Newark Anti Violence Coalition. In the city, the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition is affectionately known as the NAVC.

Before he became America’s most progressive mayor, he was a respected community activist. He spent many of his days and nights working to create peace in the streets of Newark, particularly in Black and Brown neighborhoods, from the disease of senseless community violence.

Concerned about the growing pandemic of violence plaguing the city, Ras J. Baraka (the son of internationally and nationally respected poets and activists Imamu Amiri and Amina Baraka) made the calls to create the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition (NAVC). He did this in response to the killing of Nakeisha Allen. The founding date of the NAVC was on July 20th 2009.

Exercising his constitutional rights to assemble and peacefully protest, Baraka led the NAVC protest on July 22, 2009. During week number #1, the NAVC walked into the middle of the intersection at Meeker and Elizabeth Avenues and successfully blocked traffic to host a massive anti-violence rally for murder victim Nakeisha Allen-a mother of two children. She became the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting while walking home from her neighborhood store on Meeker and Elizabeth Avenues in Newark a few days prior to the NAVC anti-violence rally.

I answered Baraka's call to help him create the NAVC. At that time, I was outraged about the violence gripping our community. As a school teacher, I had lost many of my students to violence in the streets (as of this date, I have lost over 50 students to violence.)

The NAVC became a broad coalition of activists, teachers, principals, lawyers, revolutionary members of the Bloods, and Crips, social workers, progressives, members of churches and masajid (mosques), community - based organizations, victims of violence, aunts, uncles, mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, and concerned citizens of the community.

From its founding date, the NAVC led anti-violence civil disobedience demonstrations all over Newark's major and minor intersections for over 155 straight weeks! The strategy was simple: inconvenience the city by bringing traffic and business activity to a halt to challenge Mayor Cory Booker (during the time of the NAVC’s protest against senseless community violence Booker was in office as the Mayor of Newark), the city's elected officials, and the community to address the pandemic disease of violence in Newark, especially in African American and Latino American neighborhoods.

To help solve the problems of violence in the community, five demands were created and presented to the city of Newark, NJ! They went as follows: 1) The removal of Newark Police Director, Garry McCarthy and the restoration of the position of Chief of Police, 2) Mayor Cory Booker as the Chief Executive Officer of the City to call a mass meeting with grassroots community based organizations, law enforcement, social services providers for the City of Newark, UMDNJ (Violence Institute), Newark’s business community, clergy, to declare violence as a public health issue, 3) Secure and create employment opportunities for Newarkers, 4) Support the implementation and enforcement of the Amistad Bill (A1303) that will teach the contributions people of African descent made to human history and simultaneously provide African-Americans and Latin Americans with the knowledge of themselves, and 5) Calling all street organizations (gangs) to lay down their guns and adopt non-violent conflict resolution strategies.

After the NAVC's protest against senseless violence, which was the longest protest against senseless violence in the United States, the demands were met.

Ras J Baraka's struggles with senseless community violence as an activist did not end with the NAVC. He made ending senseless community violence a priority in his administration when he became mayor.

When was elected as the mayor in 2014, Baraka established the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. It became an ecosystem of community activists, anti-violence organizations, and therapists all working together to stop senseless community violence in Newark by using healthy holistic strategies to help people in the community find peaceful measures to prevent conflicts. Sometimes they work independently of one another. At times, they work together. But the ultimate goal of the mayor’s office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery is unity without uniformity to stop the violence in Newark.

Mayor Baraka brought in people like Keesha Eure, a respected community leader and certified social worker, to help him lead the efforts to stop the violence on an administrative level.. Baraka made her the Deputy Mayor on Public Safety.

He invited community -based organizations into his Office of Violence Prevention to play a major role to curtail all forms of violence. Mayor Baraka's department has provided the means and the platform for anti-violence community-based organizations such as the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, Brick City Peace Collective, Newark Street Team, Safe Zone, New Direction, the Street Academy, and One Hood to all work together, and sometimes independently of one another, on a daily basis to reduce senseless community violence.

There is no doubt that the mayor’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery has helped him dramatically reduce homicides in the city since being elected as mayor of Newark. For example, according to channel 7’s ABC news report that broadcast on air to the public its findings on Monday, December 30, 2024, “the numbers revealed homicides decreased 23% in the city from last year, marking the lowest level since the 1940s. (https://abc7ny.com/amp/post/ne... )

But the city still has a long way to go to totally eradicate the violence as a culture from the streets, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Unfortunately, our people have experienced some of the worst forms of violent conditions in America and in the world's human experience (i.e., the Trans -Atlantic Slavery, US slavery, Arab slavery, racial segregation, lynchings, the fight for civil rights, the struggle for Black Power, COINTELPRO, the War on Drugs, the Black Lives Matter struggle against police and racial violence, etc). We have internalized the world's violent conditions to become de-sensitize and callous towards peace on a mass level, especially in America. Yes poverty, jobless, miseducation, racism, self hatred, incarceration, and dysfunctional families have contributed to senseless community violence; but at the root of senseless community violence is learned violence from our experiences in American oppression and in the world's thirst for human bondage for the sole purpose of monetary gains.

This is why Dr Joy Degruy, a psychologist, writes in her book, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), a theory that explains our tendency to act out in violent ways towards our fellow human beings, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods. She argues that the multigenerational trauma of slavery and its aftermath can lead to psychological, spiritual, emotional, and behavioral effects, including low self-esteem, internalized racism, and difficulty in forming healthy relationships. We must heal from the trauma of the past in order to truly be liberated in contemporary times.

Dr. Degruy writes,

“understanding the role our past plays in our present attitudes, outlooks, mindsets, and circumstances is important if we are to free ourselves from the spiritual, mental, and emotional shackles that bind us today, shackles that limit what we believe we can be, do and have. Understanding the part Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome plays in our evolution may be the key that helps to set us on the path to wellbeing.”

In conclusion, the struggle to end senseless community violence is a protracted struggle. We thank Allah (the Creator) that Mayor Baraka was raised up to lead that struggle to stop the violence. He has provided support and needed resources to help many people in Newark find a way to navigate through senseless community violence. But there is a truth that we as a society must come to grips with in order to heal from the culture of violence plaguing the city and America, a truth that makes Mayor Baraka's job extremely difficult. We don't want to admit this truth in America, but we live in a society that embraces violence over peace on all levels of humanity as a way of life. Our youth are growing up in a culture (i.e., movies, tv shows, video games, music, etc) that views violent conditions as normal. They don’t see peace as an optional way of human life. Imam I will end my editorial with a quote from Jamil Al Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown. He was known for his radical activism in the 1960's. I believe he captures the essence of our struggles against ending senseless community violence to make peace an option as a way of life for Black and Brown lives to matter. Imam Al Amin famously said it best while he was in the streets fighting for Black liberation from a violent oppressive U.S. government. He said, "violence is as American as cherry pie.”

-Bashir Muhammad Ptah Akinyele is a community activist, a member of the Muslim community in New Jersey, and a member of ASCAC (the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations). He is also a history and Africana Studies (Black Studies ) teacher at Weequahic High School in Newark, NJ.

As Salaamu Alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakaatuh (Arabic for May the peace, mercy, and blessings of God be upon you)! Hotep (an ancient African Kemetic / Egyptian word for Peace)! P.E.A.C.E. (Proper Education Always Corrects Errors)!