The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

son forward.
    She didn’t know that Rob hadn’t told his friends anything about his father. As far as any of them knew, the man had simply never been around, a typical enough story that Rob could wholly elude their attention and whatever support they might have given.

    A SIGNAL EVENT in Newark history had occurred four years earlier, in 1986, when Sharpe James had been elected mayor. A former alderman, he’d campaigned on a platform of jobs, improved low-income housing, and attracting development money back to downtown Newark. Over the next twenty years, Mayor James would govern a generation of Newarkers. He presented himself as a different sort of politician, who had lived his whole life among residents, who wore jogging suits in public, and who knew and cared about the people on the individual level. At the time of his election, Newark proper was 52 percent African American,and the African American community for the most part adored Sharpe James. Skeet Douglas, in the eight months between James’s inauguration and his own arrest, was one of those people, and the mayor had been a fixture in Skeet’s neighborhood conversational rounds.
    At the time, more than one in three people in Newark lived below the poverty line. The violent crime rate was so consistently high that a 1996 Time magazine article dubbed Newark the most dangerous city in America. The public high school graduation rate was below 60 percent, and in some outlying areas, such as East Orange, less than 10 percent of residents held a college degree. The city had lost 130,000 residents since the 1967 riots. The Ironbound District, once a busy, ethnically diverse commercial center northeast of the train station, was now a seedy stretch of shuttered storefronts inhabited by squatters. Some of the oldest companies in the city’s downtown, such as Prudential Insurance, were trying to move; attracting workers had become too difficult. The city had gone so far as to construct enclosed “skyways” two stories above the ground, so that employees in the city center could walk from building to building without having to set foot on the street.
    These larger socioeconomic problems persisted through Mayor James’s first term, while he sorted through the complicated, land mine–laden pathways toward revitalization. His primary goals were to raze the project towers built by Mayor Addonizio’s administration in the ’50s and replace them with small-scale public housing and middle-income units, and to bring a performing arts center and sports arena downtown. But as he worked toward these and other aims (while also committing the first of more than fifty fraudulent acts that would lead to his own indictment years later, in 2007), he offered many of his residents a symbol. Here was a dignified black man of resonant conviction, born and bred here, who’d gone to college and worked his whole life and now, in his early fifties, had entered public service to serve the public . In fact, an acquaintance of Jackie’s had asked Mayor James for a job during one of his rallies downtown, and a week later she was hired as a school crossing guard.
    Rob heard this and other stories, and in his own ten-year-old waycame to worship James, who in 1990—while Rob began private school and Skeet began his lifetime prison sentence—easily won a second term in office. His face brightened when he or Horace or one of the nuns at Mt. Carmel spoke of the mayor. The Oranges were their own townships with their own city halls and did not fall under James’s jurisdiction. But Newark cast a long shadow. To a boy like Rob, growing up on Chapman Street and never attending a school beyond walking distance, that cluster of earth-toned towers a mile and a half to the east, surrounded by a network of tall steel cantilever bridges spanning the Passaic River, represented a beacon, a diverse population center where commerce, education, and potential