Who Is Ras Baraka?
Last Tuesday (May 6), Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility run by the Geo Group in the city. The mayor joined three congresspeople – Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver – in protesting the facility and the actions of the Trump administration. He was subsequently released, but vowed to denounce the actions of ICE at the Delaney Hall facility. The situation has elevated the current New Jersey gubernatorial candidate’s profile nationally, but there are some who aren’t fully aware of Baraka’s lengthy career as an activist, educator, and politician as he works to become the Garden State’s first-ever Black governor.
Ras Jua Baraka is the son of the renowned poet and activist Amiri Baraka and his wife, poet and educator Amina Baraka. Amiri Baraka is regarded as an architect of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which rose in tandem with the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights Era. “He was one of the foundational figures of the Black Arts movement,” poet John Keene told USA Today. “There’s that profound sense of Black pride, a sense of creating one’s own institutions and autonomy, and not looking to the white publishing world for validation.” Ras was born in April 1970, months after Newark elected its first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, to office. His father enjoyed a close relationship with Gibson, having been a significant organizer in getting him elected.
Ras Baraka followed in the senior Baraka’s footsteps, having become a notable poet in his own right as well as a rapper who toured with Sister Souljah as part of a group called G.E.T.B.U.S.Y. (General Education in Training Blacks to United and Save our Youth) at college campuses nationwide. He also a student activist at Howard University (where Amiri Baraka also studied) who took part in a major protest against former Republican strategist Lee Atwater being named to the school’s board in 1989. After occupying the administration building, the protest ended with the intervention of then-Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. Atwater would resign from the board, along with Howard’s president.
After graduating from Howard in 1991 and earning his masters from St. Peters University in 1994, Ras Baraka would become a schoolteacher. But he never lost his spirit of fighting police brutality and other systemic ills, and made his first foray into electoral politics by running for mayor in a field against the late Mayor Sharpe James. After running for Newark’s City Council in 1998 and 2002, Baraka would become a deputy mayor under James. He would be appointed to an interim council seat in 2005, but lose out in re-election shortly after. His attempts to run for mayor put him in opposition with Cory Booker, who would rise from the council to become Newark’s mayor after Sharpe James’ decision not to run in 2006.
Ras Baraka would eventually win a council seat in 2010, and four years later, he would become mayor after Booker left the office due to winning a special election for his Senate seat. Now, he’s making it a point to fight the Trump administration again over its immigration and deportation policies even after his arrest. “I know there are some protests that other people are planning, and if I feel obligated to be there, I will,” Baraka stated during an interview on Reverend Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show on Saturday (May 10). “This doesn’t stop the city’s contention with the Geo Group, and we’re going to continue in court with them.”
