The black experience was Professor Price’s forte. In his book “Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey” (1980), he wrote that as early as 1694, the colony was prohibiting blacks from carrying guns and was setting fines for harboring runaway slaves. He noted that New Jersey was the last Northern state to ban slavery.

He rejected the canard that Newark deteriorated only after the riots of 1967. “It was actually the last gasp of decline, a decline that began after World War II,” he told The Star-Ledger in 2002.

“I was told when I came here, the blacks destroyed the city,” he said in the Esquire interview. “Part of me said, ‘I didn’t know we were that efficient.' ”

Professor Price recalled that black nationalists in the 1960s called Newark “New-Ark,” as if it were a boat to a better world. When a historic skyscraper, the National Newark Building, was restored at a cost of $55 million in 2000, he said that during its long decline the city “almost forgot what it looked like.” When the Prudential Center, an arena in central Newark, opened in 2007, he said it would help New Jersey get over “its longstanding fear and loathing of Newark.”

For all his historical knowledge, Professor Price cautioned against wallowing in memories, even memories of the long-gone Newark that Philip Roth has described in many of his books. He blamed all the people who left Newark with fixed ideas about the city and never returned.

“There’s a bittersweet sensibility about Newark because of that,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It’s the most sentimentalized city I’ve ever seen.”

Clement Alexander Price, the son of a television repairman, was born on Oct. 13, 1945, in Washington, where he grew up. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Bridgeport, he entered Rutgers-Newark shortly after the 1967 riots. He earned a Ph.D. from Rutgers in New Brunswick, and the Rutgers board of governors later named him a distinguished service professor, one of the university’s highest honors. He helped start a series of lectures by noted black scholars and in 2010 personally bequeathed $100,000 to endow it.