Sharpe James, the charismatic and combative mayor of Newark for 20 years who presided over a downtown resurgence and pressed to upgrade its blighted neighborhoods, but who was later convicted in a corruption scandal stemming from his time in office, died on Sunday in West Orange, N.J. He was 89.
His death, at an elder care facility, was confirmed by his son John Sharpe James, a former Newark city councilman.
In public, Sharpe James was a colorful, affable cheerleader for his city during his record five terms as mayor, from 1986 to 2006. Behind the scenes he was a cold-eyed political chief adept at punishing rivals and rewarding supporters to retain power.
Suspicions of corruption began in the 1990s with well-publicized federal investigations of allegations that he had used his office to finance an extravagant lifestyle that included a Rolls-Royce and a 54-foot-long yacht. He was not charged with crimes, however, until 2007, a year after he decided not to run for a sixth term, and was found guilty by a federal jury in 2008 of conspiring while mayor to sell city-owned properties to a former companion at a fraction of their value.
Mr. James won his fifth term in 2002 after his only tough re-election battle. He defeated Cory Booker, a fellow Democrat and a City Council member at the time, with 53 percent of the vote in a nonpartisan contest. It was by far the smallest victory margin in Mr. James’s four re-election contests.
Mr. Booker was preparing to face off against Mr. James again in 2006 when Mr. James decided against another run. Mr. Booker won the election, and then a second term, before being elected to the United States Senate in 2013.
When Mr. James announced he would not seek a sixth term, he could look at a revitalized downtown: A glittering new performing arts center had been built; construction was underway for an arena for the New Jersey Devils hockey team (it opened in 2007, after he left City Hall), and new office buildings had risen.
Across the city, new homes for thousands of families had been built, and many deteriorating high-rise public housing buildings, where thousands of families had lived amid rampant crime, had been demolished. Newark’s population, which had steadily fallen from nearly 400,000 in 1970 — three years after deadly and destructive riots — leveled off at about 275,000 during Mr. James’s administration.
But the city’s problems were still severe. The new businesses had no effect on Newark’s high poverty rate, which held at about 25 percent throughout Mr. James’s mayoralty.
As Mr. James was serving what would be his last term as mayor, Mara S. Sidney, a political scientist at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, wrote that “despite enthusiasm about the city’s revival, and the new buildings both completed and envisioned, Newark remains a deeply troubled city,” in which “many city neighborhoods, including parts of downtown, are marked by vacant lots and abandoned or deteriorated dwellings.”
One ballyhooed project, a minor league baseball stadium completed in 1999 for a new team named for the Newark Bears of an earlier era, proved a bust, drawing fewer and fewer spectators until the team folded in 2013.
Nevertheless, Clement A. Price, a history professor at Rutgers-Newark, praised Mr. James for having brought not only major redevelopment projects to Newark but also hope to its overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic population. He was, Mr. Price said, “fighting for the city when so many would-be fighters had hung up their gloves.”
Mr. James awarded himself high marks for his tenure.
“Under my leadership,” he said when announcing he would not run again, “Newark has climbed the rough side of the mountain and has become a renaissance city with pride, prosperity and progress.” Or, as he put it on another occasion, with the catchy pithiness he was known for, he had steered Newark from “urban blight to urban bright.”
There was no disputing that Mr. James had given the city entertainment. He was prone to antics like bicycling to City Hall in gym shorts and a straw hat to deliver his petitions for an election run.
Sharpe James was born on Feb. 20, 1936, in Jacksonville, Fla. His father, Louis James, died of pneumonia before Sharpe was born. His unusual first name was the family name of his mother, who, after marrying her second husband, became known as Beulah James Fluker.
Sharpe grew up in Newark, where his mother had moved. She worked in the restaurant business in the city, first as a manager and later an owner, and she struggled to raise Sharpe and his brother, Joseph, on her limited earnings. The family lived for a time in a cold-water apartment with a backyard outhouse.
Mr. James starred on track teams at South Side High School (now Malcolm X Shabazz High School) and at Montclair State College (now Montclair State University), from which he graduated in 1958. After serving in the U.S. Army, he earned a master’s degree in school administration from Springfield College in Massachusetts.
Mr. James taught in the Newark public schools during the 1960s and then, for nearly 20 years, taught physical education at Essex County College while simultaneously representing Newark’s South Ward on the City Council.
He was first elected mayor in 1986 by ousting the four-term incumbent, Kenneth A. Gibson, who had become the first Black mayor of a large northeastern city when he was elected in 1970. Mr. James had generally been an ally of the mayor while on the City Council, but by the 1980s, like many others in Newark, he argued that Mr. Gibson’s efforts to turn Newark around had fallen short and that it was time for new blood at City Hall. Mr. James won with a substantial majority.
Sixteen years later, Mr. Booker made the same argument against Mr. James in challenging him in 2002. To Mr. James’s claim that Newark was in a renaissance, Mr. Booker responded that the progress had been largely limited to the city’s downtown and declared, “It’s time for a renaissance for the rest of us.”
It was a nasty clash, one that was captured in the 2005 Oscar-nominated documentary “Street Fight.” Mr. James, an up-from-poverty, 66-year-old political veteran, took aim at Mr. Booker, a suburban-bred challenger half his age, through relentless personal attacks. Mr. James and his camp sought to undermine Mr. Booker’s authenticity as a Newarker and as a Black man, accusing him of representing white, moneyed interests from outside the city.
Mr. James won the election with 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Booker’s 47 percent.
When Mr. James pulled back from another run in 2006, he said he thought he could defeat Mr. Booker again but chose to step down as “an opponent of dual office holding.” He had simultaneously been a state senator since 1999 and, he said, he wanted to focus on state issues.
Skeptics dismissed this explanation, maintaining that Mr. James simply had come to believe that he could not win or that, at 70, he was too weary for another term or a rematch against Mr. Booker. In 2007, he said he would also not run again for the State Senate.
Weeks after that announcement, a federal indictment charged Mr. James with two schemes from his last years in office: using city credit cards to pay for nearly $60,000 in personal expenses, and conspiring to sell nine city-owned properties to a former companion, Tamika Riley, for a total of $46,000, which she resold with virtually no upgrading for a total of $665,000.
Although prosecutors did not show that Mr. James had personally profited from the resales, a jury convicted him and Ms. Riley of fraud, and Mr. James served 18 months in prison.
The charges involving the credit cards were to have been tried later, but the prosecutors did not pursue them because, they said, a conviction was unlikely to add prison time.
Mr. James flirted with a return to politics in 2022, but he abandoned plans to run for an at-large City Council seat after a judge ruled that his 2008 fraud conviction barred him from holding office.
Mr. James is survived by his wife, Mary (Mattison) James, and his sons, Elliot, John and Kevin. John Sharpe James served on the City Council from 2013 to 2022.
In 2007, after he announced that he would not seek re-election to the State Senate, Mr. James told The New York Times that he credited his longevity in politics to his ebullience, and the fact that he, like so many of his constituents, grew up poor in Newark.
Contributors paid homage, and gave generously, at his birthday bash every February. But, Mr. James said, he gave them a show in return, arriving on skis on a bed of fake snow one year and in a rented Rolls-Royce another.
“I know some of them were saluting the uniform and not the person,” he said. “But they all knew that they would have fun. It would be a party.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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