St. Benedict's Prep reopening

St. Benedict's Prep reopening is the institutional reversal that made Rob Peace's secondary education possible. Once a predominantly white school serving the sons of Newark's affluent corporate and manufacturing class, St. Benedict's closed after the social and racial upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its reopening under Friar Edwin Leahy created a different kind of school: urban, demanding, financially precarious, and sustained by a loyal alumni network. By the time Rob arrived in 1994, the school had become a durable example of Newark's African American community taking ownership of an institution once organized around a very different social order.

A School Unmade by Newark's Crisis

St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys was founded in 1868 by Benedictine monks and gradually expanded from a church and small schoolhouse into buildings occupying a full city block. During Newark's postwar boom, its students were primarily the white sons of affluent white men who led the city's corporate and manufacturing sectors. That social identity became untenable after the 1967 riots, whose violence was concentrated in the second police precinct directly outside the school's redbrick walls. The riots damaged property, but they also destroyed trust and intensified racial tension in the city.

The surrounding crisis widened after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy in June, while the expansion of American involvement in Vietnam brought a military draft that summoned many young, uneducated Black men from Newark and its surrounding communities. St. Benedict's elderly, pacifist white faculty was not equipped for the new political and racial reality. More than a dozen teachers left for wealthier monasteries, and traditional students were increasingly unwilling to commute from suburban homes into the unrest of the city center. In 1972, the school could no longer sustain attendance and closed, without even the assurance that it would reopen as a church.

Friar Leahy's Rebuilding Project

Edwin Leahy had graduated from St. Benedict's in 1964 and left for divinity school intending to return as an English teacher. When he came back, he was only twenty-four, inexperienced, and physically unimposing, but he was also ambitious, direct, and willing to challenge the assumption that the closure reflected Newark's irreversible decline. He concluded that the school's failure had as much to do with the monks' lack of energy as with the city's altered social conditions. He recruited young, liberal divinity-school graduates and led an effort to reopen the school in 1973.

The first reopening effort did not immediately repair relations with Newark's African American community. It returned the school to operation as a smaller, religion-focused educational venture rather than fully restoring St. Benedict's Prep. At a town-hall meeting, a young Black mother pointed out the contradiction: the institution could be called St. Benedict's Prep when its leaders and students were white, but not when the surrounding community had become predominantly Black. Her challenge exposed the racial and institutional assumptions embedded in the school's attempted revival.

In 1974, Leahy reopened St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys with a new mission: to serve young men from Newark's urban districts and the communities immediately surrounding the city. The transition was neither instant nor smooth, but it accomplished what many Newark residents, Black and white, had regarded as a progressive fantasy. The African American community took ownership of the school. Reopening therefore meant more than restoring a building or preserving a religious tradition; it meant changing who the school was for, whose neighborhood it belonged to, and what kind of future it promised.

An Institution Sustained by Unequal Resources

The revived school operated under a severe financial contradiction. Tuition covered only half of the cost of educating each student, leaving Leahy to spend roughly two-thirds of his time making calls and attending meetings to raise about $1 million annually for operating expenses. The school survived because its pre-reinvention alumni network remained loyal and wealthy even after the student body became almost unrecognizable to many of those alumni.

By the time Rob and Victor Raymond arrived in 1994, Leahy was raising $5 million a year from corporate and individual donors. The result was a striking combination of economic fragility and material ambition: the school had a pool, an auditorium, a sports complex with a turf field and synthetic track, a science wing equipped for students to conduct individual chemistry and physics experiments, a computer room containing Apple IIc computers, and a library of six thousand books. Its resources did not erase Newark's inequalities, but they made the school a counterinstitution within them, converting alumni wealth and philanthropy into concrete opportunities for urban boys.

Rob Peace Enters the Reopened School

Jackie Peace initially regarded St. Benedict's as the least attractive of the schools she and Rob toured. Its compact building stood in central Newark on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, in the opposite direction from her new job, amid difficult rush-hour traffic and a neighborhood of basketball courts and fast-food restaurants. The school was also two blocks from the courthouse where Rob's father had been convicted of murder. Yet Jackie allowed Rob to choose, and he was drawn to St. Benedict's partly because it would keep him close to Victor and partly because of its racial composition and sense of connection to people who struggled as he did.

St. Benedict's was the least diverse of the four schools, with a student body that was 89 percent Black and Hispanic, but it offered unusually generous financial aid because of its successful alumni network. Annual tuition was $8,700 against an overhead cost of $16,000 per student, with additional need-based assistance. Rob was initially wait-listed, apparently after handling his own financial statements, but Jackie went personally to the headmaster's office and demanded that the school accept him. He received an offer the following week, with tuition reduced to $4,000 per year, payable through a $500 down payment and monthly installments.

Rob's first encounter with the school came during Summer Phase in July 1994. One hundred and forty incoming fourteen-year-old boys entered through the small vestibule on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, passing between automated double-locked doors controlled by a guard in a glass security station. They gathered in the gymnasium, known as the Hive after the Gray Bee mascot, with sleeping bags and duffels at their feet. The students came from forty towns and sixty middle schools, represented different economic backgrounds, and were expected to build trust and unity through a demanding communal experience.

The school announced its ethic through the words “WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME,” displayed in the lobby. Summer Phase began with the singing of the school song and presented the boys with the idea that the next four years would be decisive, with no do-overs or second chances. Rob initially passed through the program largely unnoticed, even by Victor, who had been assigned to another color group. He became memorable when he opened Chesapeake, an 888-page novel, and read quietly while other students reacted to the combined length of their summer assignments. He had already read the other assigned books for pleasure. A separate rumor identified him as the boy who knew every word of every Bone Thugs-n-Harmony song, turning his private memory and verbal command into a source of freshman awe.

Institutional Legacy and Its Limits

St. Benedict's gave Rob a structure in which intellectual ability, physical discipline, service, and collective identity could reinforce one another. Its reopened mission connected him to Newark rather than requiring him to treat the city as a past to escape. The school could mobilize money, alumni loyalty, religious purpose, and demanding routines, and it could make a boy from a poor family visible to benefactors who might otherwise never have encountered him. Charles Cawley later offered Rob an open-ended commitment to cover his college expenses after hearing about his achievements at St. Benedict's, a gesture made possible by the school's network and by the headmaster's public account of Rob's work.

Yet the reopening did not permanently dissolve the forces it was built to confront. Rob's later life moved among Newark, Yale, the drug economy, prison advocacy, airport employment, and real-estate ambitions, carrying the school's discipline and cultural capital into settings that did not necessarily recognize or reward them. St. Benedict's could create a bridge between social worlds, but it could not control what happened after its students crossed beyond the school's gates. Its significance lies precisely in that tension: the reopened institution offered real transformation, not a simple escape, and its success made visible both the power of education as social mobility and the limits imposed by poverty, racial suspicion, family imprisonment, and unstable work.