With a foreword by the Honorable Ras J. Baraka, 40th Mayor of Newark, NJ, The War Is Here is Life magazine photographer Bud Lees dramatic, empathetic, and still shocking record of the Newark uprising of 1967a 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 Newarkalready a tinderboxbecame 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 populationalready struggling under a corrupt local government and a vicious, authoritarian police forcetrying 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. Lees 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. Lees 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 67a summer of fire and fury, protest and rage across the country. Over half a century later, Bud Lees raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of Newark, at a turning point in the citys history, continue to resonate: a testament to their resilience and fortitude.

Photographer: Bud Lee
Introduction: Ras Baraka
Publisher: ZE Books
Page Count: 200pp
Size: 9.75 x 12
Notes: hardcover, color
Release Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 978-1736309360