Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, made no arrests and reported only minimal property damage during a weekend march.

By Tracey Tulley & Kevin Armstrong @ NYTimes.com, June 1

[....] The 12,000-person protest on Saturday afternoon brimmed with rage at the death of Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who died in Minneapolis after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground at the neck by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer.

But there were no protest-related arrests during the weekend. Tires were slashed on squad cars, but none were set ablaze and no storefronts were smashed. The most prominent graffiti, a message scrawled on a courthouse in spray paint — “WE LOVE U GEORGE” — had been power-washed clean by Sunday afternoon. “A lot of tension. A lot of anxiety,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said Sunday in an interview. “But the community held the line.”[....]

Newark is not the only community that, so far, has remained relatively calm. Protesters in other cities, including Camden, N.J., and Flint, Mich., held similarly peaceful rallies, and Newark’s march was not without moments of confrontation [....]

But the simmering tension never reached a flash point — a victory that city officials and residents attributed to a combination of tactical decisions, community and political leadership and the still-raw memory of 1967.

Mr. Baraka, an African-American former high school principal whose father, the poet Amiri Baraka, was brutalized by the police in July 1967, invoked those dark days during a speech before the march as he urged only peaceful protest.

The director of the Newark Police Department, Anthony F. Ambrose, who is white, made a tactical decision not to position police officers in military-style gear along the route.

And members of the Newark Community Street Team, an entity formed six years ago to de-escalate violence in the city, and other community groups were deployed throughout the crowd to try to isolate those intent on destruction.

But in more than a dozen interviews, protesters and city leaders said it was the potent determination of predominantly young African-American members of the Newark community — many of whom have had past run-ins with the police — who stood in the way of widespread destruction.“It was a combination of anarchists and opportunists waiting for a window to be broken so they could go in and grab something,” said Aqeela Sherrills, the director of the 50-person street team. “But I tell you: The community wasn’t having it.” [....]