Racial segregation

Racial segregation is one of the governing conditions of Rob Peace’s world. In Orange and Newark, it organizes housing, labor, transportation, and public fear; at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School for Boys, it becomes part of an institutional history shaped by the 1967 riots and the school’s attempt to rebuild itself; at Yale, it reappears as social self-separation that white students observe without fully understanding. The book presents segregation not as a finished relic but as a structure that changes form while continuing to influence movement, trust, education, and the boundaries of belonging.

Segregated Neighborhoods and the Changing Oranges

Jackie Peace’s childhood on Chapman Street initially offered a local version of interracial stability. When her family moved there in 1960, the block contained only two black families among mostly Italian European immigrants, yet race was not discussed openly as a source of conflict. Work, family, and property supplied the neighborhood’s organizing principles. Men left for factory jobs, women raised children, neighbors watched one another’s houses, and the narrow clapboard homes felt spacious inside, with high ceilings, broad doorways, and long backyards. Police officers patrolled regularly and were known by name. The arrangement was not racially equal in any larger sense, but it gave Jackie a concrete experience of proximity and everyday order.

That world stood beside a much more visibly segregated urban landscape. Looking east along Central Avenue, Jackie could see the brick towers that the book calls “slums in the sky.” The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development had built sixteen such projects in the 1950s to house an influx of mostly poor, mostly black Southern migrants seeking industrial work. Urban planners treated racial stacking as a form of comfort, but the towers also concentrated drugs, violence, and extreme poverty behind walls and barred windows. Families like Jackie’s could avoid them by driving around with the windows up and the doors locked. Physical distance therefore became a way of managing racialized fear while leaving the underlying inequalities intact.

The 1967 Newark riots made the transformation impossible to ignore. The uprising followed the alleged police brutality inflicted on a black cabdriver and lasted five days, producing twenty-six deaths, more than seven hundred injuries, and fifteen hundred arrests. Jackie and her girlfriends tried to approach the city to see the turmoil for themselves but were stopped at a National Guard checkpoint. In the years that followed, communities became increasingly described by skin color rather than by the factories where residents worked or the countries from which earlier generations had immigrated. Jackie witnessed teenagers throwing stones at police cars, young people escaping through Chapman Street backyards, and interracial fistfights that left teeth and bloody gum tissue on sidewalks.

White flight altered the geography further. On Jackie’s bus ride to her first job in the Orange City Hall mail room, she noticed blocks marked by repeated FOR SALE signs. The completion of the western spur of Interstate 280 in 1973 intensified the separation: the freeway ran only four blocks north of Chapman Street and reduced trips from downtown Newark toward Morris County and the Watchung Mountains from more than an hour to fifteen minutes. It offered residents who felt threatened or uncomfortable near impoverished city districts a fast route through them rather than a reason to remain connected to them.

Real-estate practices converted racial anxiety into financial pressure. Horace Peace condemned realtors who told white homeowners that one black family would bring more black families and cause property values to fall. Jackie observed the demographic shift moving westward from Newark through Vailsburg, Irvington, and East Orange, block by block. East Orange was 39 percent black and 53 percent white in 1960; by 1980, when Rob was born, it was 89 percent black and 4 percent white, and residents called it “Illtown.” At the same time, factories were closing throughout Newark and other port cities as manufacturing moved toward cheaper land, foreign goods displaced domestic production, and companies outsourced labor. Segregation thus intersected with deindustrialization: racialized neighborhoods lost the industrial economy that had once made their residents feel central to the city’s life.

Family, Schooling, and Unequal Opportunity

Rob encountered the consequences of segregation through education as well as geography. At Oakdale Elementary School, he led the math league and spelling-bee teams into area competitions, where more affluent schools in South Orange and Montclair usually defeated them. He responded with visible frustration, scowling and stomping around the house for days. The defeats taught Rob and his motivated classmates that desire and effort did not place them on equal footing with children only a few miles away. They concluded that the missing resource was money.

His family situation made that inequality more consequential. In late-1980s East Orange, about 67 percent of children lived in single-parent homes, but Rob’s experience differed from that of children who had never known an involved father. He had loved and been loved by Skeet Douglas before incarceration removed his father from daily life. Racialized criminal justice and family separation therefore became part of Rob’s educational and emotional environment. The surrounding community did not exclude him because he was the son of a man convicted of murdering women; crime was common enough that the case did not produce widespread shock or gossip. Yet older boys and men sometimes praised Skeet as a rebel-warrior and urged Rob to carry his father’s name proudly, turning a legal stigma into a local identity that Rob had to interpret.

St. Benedict’s Preparatory School for Boys offered an alternative to the educational limits of the neighborhood, but it did not erase segregation. Rob chose the school partly because Victor Raymond was already committed to attending and partly because of its racial composition. Among the four schools he and Jackie considered, St. Benedict’s was the least diverse, with a student body that was 89 percent black and Hispanic. Its tuition was $8,700 against an overhead cost of $16,000 per student, while its alumni network made more generous financial aid possible. Rob was initially wait-listed, and after Jackie’s intervention he was admitted with tuition reduced to $4,000 per year. The school’s opportunity depended on an institutional network capable of converting educational support into access for a poor black student.

The school’s location carried the history of racial conflict directly into Rob’s daily life. St. Benedict’s stood in central Newark on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, near basketball courts and fast-food restaurants, two blocks from the courthouse where Skeet had been convicted. Its compact urban setting contrasted with the more expansive suburban campuses of Seton Hall Preparatory School and Immaculate Heart of Mary School. Jackie worried about the commute and the neighborhood, but she allowed Rob to choose.

St. Benedict’s also developed a deliberate method for preventing the forms of disorder associated with urban marginalization. During Summer Phase, students endured full academic days, sports, evening activities, and nights sleeping in a poorly renovated gym where the bowed, splintered court and mice in the walls testified to the school’s limited resources. The boys were divided into eighteen color groups and required to attend classes, eat, brush their teeth, memorize school songs, and learn every classmate’s name together. Their belongings remained exposed because locks were forbidden. At week’s end, they had to identify every classmate and recite the names and dates of all headmasters across the school’s 126-year history.

These practices cultivated discipline, loyalty, trust, and shared identity, but they also represented an institutional response to segregation’s likely effects. Friar Edwin Leahy and the Benedictine monks understood that many students had minimal family guidance and might be vulnerable to fighting, theft, emotional abuse, drug use, or dropping out. Their solution was to occupy the boys’ time almost completely while building school pride. The school sought to interrupt the pathways through which racialized poverty and urban instability could become permanent, not through abstract integration alone but through schedules, repetition, collective membership, and close supervision.

St. Benedict’s and the History of Newark

St. Benedict’s had once served a very different social order. Founded in 1868 by Benedictine monks, it expanded from a church and small schoolhouse into buildings occupying a full city block. During Newark’s postwar boom, its students were primarily affluent white boys whose fathers led the city’s corporate and manufacturing sectors. The school’s identity was therefore tied to the industrial elite and to a city where race and class were already embedded in access to institutions.

The 1967 riots struck directly outside the school’s redbrick walls, in the second police precinct. The live-in monks fortified themselves inside while the surrounding city suffered the destruction of property and trust. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June, and the Vietnam draft intensified the racial and political crisis. The school’s elderly, pacifist white faculty was poorly equipped for the new tension, and its traditional students were increasingly unwilling to travel from suburban homes into Newark’s unrest. More than a dozen teachers left for wealthier monasteries, and in 1972 St. Benedict’s closed without a promise of reopening.

Friar Leahy returned at twenty-four, young, ambitious, direct, and convinced that the closure reflected the monks’ lack of energy as much as any change in the city. He recruited young liberal divinity-school graduates and led a reopening effort in 1973. At first, the project abandoned the name “Prep” and adopted a smaller, religion-focused form, but that decision aggravated anger in the African American community. A black mother at a town-hall meeting challenged the school’s terminology, asking why it could be called St. Benedict’s Prep when the community around it was white, but not when the community around it was black. The question exposed the racial history concealed inside the school’s institutional name and mission.

By Rob’s time, St. Benedict’s had become a predominantly black and Hispanic institution with an ethos built around collective discipline and mobility. Its students came from forty towns and sixty middle schools, across a range of economic backgrounds but with a heavy concentration in lower and lower-middle-class families. The school did not simply offer Rob an escape from a segregated neighborhood; it gave him a demanding community in which urban students were expected to become men without abandoning the social realities from which they came. His academic ability and cultural fluency made him visible there: he read an 888-page novel while classmates reacted to the summer reading assignments, and a rumor that he knew every Bone Thugs-n-Harmony lyric made him known as the “Bone Thugs kid.”

Yale and Social Self-Segregation

At Yale, racial separation changed from a visibly segregated urban geography into a subtler social practice. Black students often ate and socialized together, forming groups around shared backgrounds and interests. White students interpreted these groups as exclusive, while the narrator recognizes that black students were navigating a complicated and largely invisible process of situating themselves within their own race before they could simply participate in the broader Yale world.

The dining hall became the clearest scene of this divide. Yale’s long tables were designed to encourage conversation, but when black students joined one another at a table, their conversations could appear loud and culturally unfamiliar to white observers. A white student who sat down among them could seem to be publicly performing his progressiveness. The same pattern extended into classrooms, libraries, and weekend parties. White students went to fraternity houses, popular bars, and outdoor quad parties; black students participated in social worlds that white classmates knew little about beyond the likelihood that rap music was playing loudly.

This was not a simple opposition between black solidarity and white exclusion. Black students differed by region, nationality, class, and upbringing, and they were sometimes accused of “acting white” when they pursued majority-centered opportunities such as the humanities curriculum, a cappella groups, or, in Rob’s case, the Yale University water polo team. Only 12 percent of Rob’s class was black, and roughly 20 percent of those black students had grown up at or below the poverty line—about thirty classmates who could directly relate to his background. Rob was therefore black and poor within an institution where blackness itself was a minority position, and he had come from a city where black people had been the majority. The transition was not merely racial; it was also socioeconomic and cultural.

Rob managed this tension through discretion. He concealed his reactions, moved quietly through campus with the scuffed canvas bag Skeet had bought him for Oakdale, and often sat alone near the dining-hall entrance with a textbook open while speaking with Jacinta Johnson, a dining-hall employee who made him laugh. His apparent ease did not mean that Yale had dissolved the boundaries he carried with him. It meant that he had become adept at moving among institutions without allowing any one group to see the whole of him.

Institutional Critique and the Politics of Belonging

The Af-Am House and Af-Am Week became focal points for Yale’s racial politics. The Af-Am House was hidden on a small footpath behind the Art & Architecture building on York Street and was smaller and more remote than cultural centers for Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish students. Yale declined to give official sponsorship to Af-Am Week, an annual gathering that brought black students from across New England for lectures and parties. In the Weed Shack, Rob and other students interpreted these arrangements as evidence that the university was racist.

Their criticism included both ordinary class resentment and historically grounded institutional objections. Students complained that Yale catered to wealthy students, legacies, and phonies; that financial aid generated extensive paperwork; that the social hierarchy was more vapid than high school; and that professors left much teaching to slightly older teaching assistants while concentrating on research. Rob’s response differed from the anger of some of his friends. He thought about race intellectually, comparing the vulnerability of a white student who wandered into his neighborhood with the experience of black students who arrived at Yale and no longer had to spend their energy protecting themselves. For Rob, Yale’s failures were real, but they could also be converted into usable opportunity if students stopped treating the institution only as an enemy.

That position revealed the ambivalence of integration. Yale gave Rob access to extraordinary education, social capital, laboratories, and elite recognition, yet it also placed him among only a small number of black students and an even smaller number of students from poverty. St. Benedict’s had attempted to build solidarity by controlling time and weakening cliques; Yale’s formal ideals of cosmopolitan exchange coexisted with informal racial and class sorting. The result was not the end of segregation but its institutional refinement.

The contrast also helps explain why Rob could be both a beneficiary and a critic of elite education. Charles Cawley’s sponsorship had enabled his path to college, and Yale represented a rare form of social mobility. At the same time, Rob remained sensitive to the ways that a Yale degree could distance him from his neighborhood without making him fully accepted within the university’s dominant culture. His later return to manual airport labor sharpened that contradiction: his mother saw a Yale graduate and scientist performing work that required no diploma, while Rob defended a simpler form of self-provision and resisted the expectations attached to his educational achievements.

Racial Segregation as a Continuing Structure

The book’s account of racial segregation moves across homes, housing projects, freeways, schools, prisons, dining halls, cultural centers, and workplaces. In East Orange, segregation is visible in demographic change and in the towers that concentrate poverty. In Newark, it is preserved through the movement of white residents toward suburban enclaves and through the collapse of factories that once connected urban workers to a common economy. In St. Benedict’s, it appears as institutional history and as a challenge that the school attempts to answer through collective discipline. At Yale, it becomes a set of social boundaries that many white students notice only from the outside.

Its force is therefore both material and interpretive. It determines where people live, which schools can be reached, what kinds of public danger are associated with black neighborhoods, and how much economic and cultural capital a student must acquire to cross institutional thresholds. It also shapes the stories people tell about themselves and others. Rob’s father could be understood as a criminal, a wrongly convicted victim, or a local rebel-warrior; Rob could be understood as a poor black student, a Yale intellectual, a drug seller, or a man carrying the expectations of his family. None of these labels alone explains him, because each belongs to a different racialized and classed setting.

Racial segregation finally matters because it survives formal movement. Rob travels from Chapman Street to St. Benedict’s and then to Yale, crossing distances that appear to promise transformation. Yet the old divisions reappear as unequal schools, guarded institutions, self-segregated social spaces, and conflicting judgments about ambition and belonging. The narrative does not treat his movement as proof that segregation has disappeared. Instead, his mobility demonstrates how much effort is required to cross boundaries that remain embedded in property, education, labor, memory, and social expectation.