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Date Posted: Friday, March27, 08:55:am
Author: exposed
Subject: a must read (part 2)

(part 2)

Councilmember Shakur has asserted, more than once, that criticism of the council-manager structure is a proxy for opposition to Black leadership — that calls for charter reform are, at bottom, an attempt to remove Black people from positions of power. He made this assertion again last night … after I had presented two charts documenting a strong correlation between council-manager government structure and higher rates of urban renewal displacement during the 1960s, a new finding that if it holds up, will have implications across the country for this debate.⁸


I understand why the Councilmember’s assertion has traction. Newburgh’s history with white political and economic power is not abstract. The city was systematically disinvested, its neighborhoods demolished, its residents displaced, across decades of policy choices made by people who did not look like most of Newburgh’s current residents. Suspicion of reform initiatives with predominantly white citizen backing is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.


But the argument, in this case, has the structure of the problem backwards.


The charts I presented — drawn from the University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality dataset, overlaid with municipal government form data I compiled from the ICMA for 179 cities — document a finding that is not peripheral. It is a pattern that holds across multiple analytical approaches.


The council-manager form did not protect Black communities from urban renewal. In city after city, the administrative insulation it provided — the removal of executive power from direct electoral accountability — made it easier to execute displacement programs over the objections of affected residents. The professional city manager, accountable to no ward, beholden to no ethnic constituency, credentialed in the ICMA tradition of technocratic neutrality, was structurally better positioned to process those programs than an elected mayor whose voters lived in the neighborhoods being demolished.


If Newburgh had a mayor-ward council system in the 1960s, the hillside-waterfront might have had two council members defending it, instead of at-large council members with a city manager exercising “professional expertise”. And if that were the case, would we today have a vibrantly restored hillside-waterfront with an African American community that would now be holding generational wealth, or would we still have a lawn in need of mowing?


We will never know. What is likely true:


At-large members would have sympathized.


Ward members would have fought.


This is what the structure does. It does not do it differently because a Black professional is operating it. The accountability deficit is in the architecture, not in the individual.


To defend the council-manager form in the name of Black political power is to defend the instrument that has most efficiently processed the removal of Black political power from consequential decisions. The Councilmember is protecting the machine that ran over his constituents’ predecessors, because the machine now has a Black operator.


I don’t say this to impugn this councilperson’s motives. He means well. I say it because the empirical record and the historical record speaks loudly and the conflation of structural critique with racial attack has to be named and refused, or it will continue to function as a shield for a governance form that has not earned protection.

………………….


I shouted in a city council meeting last night.


In seven years, I have never done that.


What came out of me last night was not anger at the Mayor. It was something more specific: the particular intolerance that accumulates when you watch an ideology defend itself with the story it wrote about itself, using someone in a position of authority as a vehicle, in a room full of people who have been damaged by that ideology and don’t have access to the counter-history that would let them name what is happening to them.


The mayor’s history lesson was not malicious. It was something more durable than malicious. It was sincere. He believes it. The structure produced a defender who would never need to be asked.


The Mayor teaches Social Studies at Newburgh Free Academy. Civics. History. Government. He sat at the center of that dais and taught his students’ city the wrong lesson, and he believed every word of it. This mayor, a Democrat, gaveled the person who actually knows the history into silence, and threatened to have him removed from the room, in front of an audience with a need to know.


That is what hegemony looks like from the inside of a city council chamber in Newburgh, New York, in 2026.
The Mayor and His Gavel.


And that is what THIS historical record says.

© March 25, 2026 Michael Lebron

Michael Lebron is the founder of Newburgh Is America, an investigative journalism and civic advocacy platform.

NEXT: PART 2 — EVERYONE IS RUNNING ON GRAMSCI

FOOTNOTES


¹ The council-manager form of government was first adopted in Sumter, South Carolina in 1912 and Dayton, Ohio in 1914. The International City/County Management Association (ICMA), founded in 1914, became the primary professional body promoting and standardizing the model nationally. By 1920 it had spread to dozens of cities; by mid-century it was the dominant form of government in American municipalities. Newburgh, New York adopted its council-manager charter in 1915.


² Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55, no. 4 (October 1964): 157–169. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Both works document the business-elite leadership of Progressive Era municipal reform and its function as a response to working-class and immigrant political power rather than a neutral improvement in governance.


³ Socialist Party electoral victories in this period are documented in James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). Debs received 901,551 votes in 1912, approximately 6% of the popular vote, while campaigning from outside active political life. The trajectory of socialist municipal victories was a primary driver of elite reform anxiety in precisely the years the council-manager movement gained momentum.


⁴ David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). Tyack’s analysis of administrative progressivism in education runs in precise parallel to Hays’s analysis of municipal reform: the same class project, the same period, the same goal of replacing constituent-accountable local institutions with professionally administered centralized ones. Tyack’s conclusion that structural reformers sought to replace “illegitimate” lay influence with a streamlined professional bureaucracy is directly applicable to the municipal government reform movement documented by Hays and Weinstein.


⁵ Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, written 1929–1935, first published in Italian 1948–1951; English translation by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Gramsci’s concept of hegemony — the process by which ruling class interests become naturalized as common sense — is the theoretical framework underlying the argument of this series. For Gramsci, hegemony is most effective when its beneficiaries are not cynical operators but sincere believers; the intellectual who reproduces ruling class ideology without awareness of doing so is more useful to that ideology than the paid advocate.


⁶ The Kenney Apartments and The Warden Circle situations have been documented in previous NIA reporting. https://newburghisamerica.com/2026/03/01/two-crises-a-city-manager-one-way-forward/


⁷ NIA has previously documented the IDA conflicts of interest in detail, including the formal complaint filed with the New York State Comptroller. https://newburghisamerica.com/2026/02/07/the-man-who-stayed-for-the-show/ SEDAC — the Sustainable Economic Development Advisory Committee — operates under rules limiting public access to its deliberations, making the developer’s regular presence there a matter of particular concern given his positions on the IDA and assessment review board.


⁸ The full methodology and findings of this analysis will be published as part of the ongoing NIA series “What They Called Good Government.” The dataset draws on the University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality project (Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, eds., Renewing Inequality: Family Displacements through Urban Renewal, 1950–1966, in American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers), overlaid with municipal government form data hand-coded by the author for 179 cities. The finding of a consistent council-manager displacement premium across multiple analytical approaches is original to this research. Publication of the author’s analysis establishes priority.

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