the 1970s

the 1970s are not merely a date range in the story of Robert DeShaun Peace; they are the decade in which the social landscape of Newark and the Oranges was reshaped around his birth. The period links the aftermath of the 1967 Newark riots to white flight, highway construction, factory closures, demographic change, and the spread of concentrated poverty and violence into the neighborhoods where Jackie Peace raised her son.

Historical Setting

the 1970s followed the five days of burning, looting, sniper fire, and rage that had convulsed Newark in July 1967. Twenty-six people died, more than seven hundred were injured, and fifteen hundred were arrested. Jackie Peace and her girlfriends had tried to see the unrest for themselves but were turned away by National Guardsmen at a checkpoint. In the decade that followed, communities were increasingly understood through racial categories rather than through the factories where residents worked or the countries from which earlier generations had immigrated.

The decade also made racial separation easier to travel through and harder to escape. In 1973, the western spur of Interstate 280 was completed only four blocks north of Chapman Street, connecting downtown Newark with suburban areas in Morris County and the Watchung Mountains. Journeys that had taken more than an hour along Central Avenue could now be completed in fifteen minutes. The freeway offered people who felt threatened or uncomfortable near impoverished urban neighborhoods a rapid corridor across them, allowing them to pass through at sixty miles per hour without sharing the slower life of the streets below.

Demographic and Urban Change

Jackie Peace witnessed the effects of white flight while riding the bus to her first job after high school in the mail room of Orange City Hall. For-sale signs appeared three or four to a block. Her father, Horace Peace, spoke contemptuously of realtors who used racial fear to persuade white homeowners that one Black family would bring many others and cause property values to fall. The book presents this process as both a market strategy and a mechanism by which racial change was converted into neighborhood abandonment.

The demographic transformation was measurable. When Jackie’s family moved from Elizabeth in 1960, East Orange was 39 percent Black and 53 percent white. By 1980, the year Robert DeShaun Peace was born, it was 89 percent Black and 4 percent white, and the area was known colloquially as Illtown. During the 1970s, Jackie did not experience these statistics as an abstract historical process; she noticed neighborhoods such as Vailsburg, Irvington, and East Orange becoming Blacker house by house and block by block, moving westward from downtown Newark over decades.

The same decade altered the physical texture of the Peace family’s surroundings. The Peace home stood just beyond the boundary between Orange and the traditionally more dangerous East Orange, while affluent areas such as Tuxedo Park and the Seton Hall campus still allowed Orange to appear, on paper, more diverse and desirable. Yet the distinction could not halt the spread of blight. Ethnic grocers on Central Avenue were eventually replaced by liquor stores and check-cashing centers; houses on Chapman Street were abandoned and boarded up; nearby gunfire interrupted dinner-table conversation. The town lines drawn in City Hall became a weak retaining wall against changes that had already been moving through the streets.

Industrial Collapse and Poverty

The decade’s racial changes were inseparable from its economic ones. Across the United States, and especially in port cities such as Newark, St. Louis, and Chicago, improved transportation encouraged manufacturers to move toward cheaper land outside urban centers. Japan and China exported less expensive goods, American companies outsourced labor overseas, and the service economy expanded as the industrial economy contracted. Between 1970 and 1980, more than six hundred factories in and around Newark closed, including tanneries, glass plants, plastics manufacturers, and industrial-machine-parts facilities.

Those closures produced massive layoffs at the same moment that public housing had reached capacity. As working-class residents fled and industrial employment disappeared, the dangerous side of urban life spilled outward from project towers into vacant spaces across Newark’s north and west wards, then into East Orange and beyond. Horace Peace was fortunate to retain his job, and the family remained in the Chapman Street house, which continued to shelter relatives whenever they needed a place to stay. That stability was real, but it existed inside a larger economy that was steadily removing the supports on which neighborhood life had depended.

The Decade’s Consequences

By Robert DeShaun Peace’s early childhood, East Orange had the second-highest concentration of African Americans living below the poverty line in the United States, behind East St. Louis. Its violent-crime rate reached 3,500 per 100,000 people, nearly six times the national rate of 600 and eight times the rate in adjacent South Orange, where the figure was 400. The contrast made geography an immediate measure of risk: a person in East Orange faced roughly a one-in-thirty chance of being violently robbed, assaulted, raped, or killed in a given year, while the comparable chance in South Orange was less than one in two hundred.

Robert was born into this transformed landscape on a dark, swampy late-June night in 1980, after the decade’s forces had already remade the neighborhood into which he was carried. He was a day and a half old, weighing eight pounds ten ounces, when Jackie brought him from St. Mary’s Hospital to 181 Chapman Street. The hospital was less than half a mile away, but the short trip crossed a social world governed at night by hustlers and protected at home by Frances Peace, who would march outside to drive dealers away from the family’s hundred-yard block.

The 1970s therefore function as a period of slow accumulation rather than a single decisive incident. The riots, the freeway, the real-estate manipulation, white flight, factory closures, unemployment, demographic change, and spreading violence form a connected historical pressure system. Robert DeShaun Peace’s later movement between East Orange, St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, Yale University, prison visits, and adult work cannot be separated from the decade that established the stark inequalities between neighboring communities and made education, family endurance, and personal mobility carry such extraordinary weight.