the 1980s

the 1980s is the decade that frames Robert DeShaun Peace’s childhood as both a period of intimate family care and an environment structured by visible, organized violence. He was born in June 1980 at St. Mary’s Hospital and brought home to 181 Chapman Street in Orange, New Jersey, only a day and a half old. The neighborhood was already divided by the rhythms of the night: children were called indoors, hustlers governed the surrounding Newark area, and the short block’s relative seclusion offered the Peace family some protection. Frances Peace’s willingness to confront dealers helped make the hundred-yard stretch less hospitable to neighborhood commerce, while the crowded family home gave Jackie Peace and her infant son an immediate network of relatives and shelter.

Birth and Family Setting

the 1980s begin for Robert DeShaun Peace with a precise physical vulnerability: he weighed eight pounds, ten ounces, yet felt nearly weightless in Jackie Peace’s arms as she carried him from the hospital. The journey home took less than two minutes, but the movement from hospital to Chapman Street placed him inside a sharply defined social world. The family lived near St. Mary’s Hospital, in a house with a rusty fence, a weedy lawn, buckled stoop stairs, and a narrow porch, but the interior was crowded with relatives. Jackie had eight siblings, and on the night she returned from labor, her father Horace Peace and several siblings passed the baby around the parlor and dining room before Jackie reclaimed him and took him upstairs.

The domestic scene does not stand apart from the neighborhood’s danger. It contains it, manages it, and sometimes depends on the force of older relatives to keep it at a distance. The family home was open and crowded, while the street outside was empty because the local drug economy became most active after dark. Robert’s first setting therefore joins two recurring conditions: a large family capable of absorbing and protecting him, and an urban environment in which safety was never simply guaranteed by geography or law.

Childhood in Orange Park

the decade’s social landscape becomes especially clear in Orange Park, where Jackie Peace took Robert on warm weekends between night shifts and the physical strain of a six-day workweek. The park had increasingly been taken over by dealers as crack spread through the neighborhood during the 1980s. Men, women, and boys gathered around picnic tables with malt liquor in brown bags, appearing relaxed until a customer approached and the transaction changed the atmosphere. Day-Day, a smooth-faced man in his mid-thirties, supervised the operation by walking the park’s diagonal paths and observing without directly engaging the dealers.

Day-Day knew Skeet Douglas and regularly paused beside Jackie and Robert’s blanket to remark that the child looked more like his father each day. On Sundays, he moved the salesmen to the south side of the park and left the north side, with its playground, to parents and children. That arrangement illustrates the decade’s uneasy coexistence of family life and the drug economy: the dealers did not disappear, but they recognized boundaries and temporarily made room for children.

The park’s physical condition revealed the cost of that accommodation. The playground equipment was splintered and loosely held together by rusty nails, while fragments of crack pipes and vials lay embedded beneath the swings. Police rarely patrolled because officers were occupied answering 911 calls, domestic-abuse reports, and other emergencies. Orange Park was consequently both a place where Jackie could give Robert a few lazy hours and a place secured for drug use by the absence of ordinary public protection. The decade’s violence appears not only in arrests and murders but also in the gradual conversion of shared civic space into territory governed by informal authority.

The Family’s Rupture

the 1980s became decisive when Skeet Douglas was arrested for the murders of two young women, Charlene Moore and Estella Moore, his neighbors in an apartment building on Chestnut Street. Jackie Peace initially understood the danger through the ordinary question of whether Skeet had been arrested for dealing. Carl’s pause supplied the answer before he explained that the charge was not drugs but two murders. The revelation transformed the family’s already precarious world: Skeet was no longer merely a father connected to the neighborhood’s drug economy but a defendant facing the machinery of a capital murder prosecution.

The consequences extended across the rest of the decade and beyond. By September 1990, when jury selection began in State of New Jersey v. Robert Douglas, three years and one month had passed since the murders. Skeet had spent more than eleven hundred days in jail, receiving one hour of exercise and fifteen minutes of phone time each day, while Jackie took Robert to visit him for 160 weeks. During those visits, Skeet sometimes called his son to work through homework problems. Robert grew from seven to ten under the knowledge that his father could receive the death penalty and that Jackie might be called to testify.

The legal delay became part of Robert’s childhood rather than a separate adult event. The family’s time was measured through jail visits, collect calls, court dates, and the erosion of witnesses. In 1989, Irving Gaskins, whose home was the place where Skeet had been apprehended, died before giving the defense a formal statement. Skeet maintained that Gaskins would have testified that the weapon and ammunition had not been found in his belt and had instead been planted by police. The missing testimony, the long delay, and the eventual trial turned the decade into a prolonged lesson in the fragility of freedom and the power of institutions to determine a family’s future.

Education and the First Exit

the decade also contains the beginnings of Robert Peace’s intellectual identity. Jackie Peace came to think of him as “Professor” because he talked constantly and asked more questions than any child she had cared for. She believed his repeated “Why?” reflected a genuine desire to understand the world and the people in it, not merely a reflex. This early image of the questioning child later becomes continuous with his reputation as an unusually gifted student.

The strongest educational turning point arrived after the decade had ended, but its roots lie in the childhood formed during it. In 1994, Robert entered St. Benedict’s Preparatory School for Boys and encountered Summer Phase, where 140 fourteen-year-old boys from forty towns and sixty middle schools gathered beneath the school’s declaration, “WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME.” The school presented education as discipline, collective obligation, and an alternative to the street. Robert’s movement into that institution was not an escape from the 1980s so much as an attempt to convert the decade’s inherited pressures into academic and social mobility.

By the time Robert prepared to leave for Yale, his family’s economic vulnerability remained visible. He loaded a television, a large canvas duffel bag, a backpack of books, and a side table into his grandparents’ car, while Jackie watched from the porch because leaving a packed vehicle unattended was considered unsafe. She then drove him ninety miles to New Haven. The modest inventory of his departure contrasts with the scale of the opportunity, showing how the decade’s cramped domestic world stood behind his later educational ascent.

Historical Afterlife

the 1980s remain present in the book long after the decade ends. Robert later spoke for four hours at the Elihu House about his father, his mother’s care, the fire on Pierson Street, the Chestnut Street apartment, the trial, the prison visits, and the successful appeal that was later reversed. His account treated the events of August 8, 1987, as the central injustice of his life and presented Skeet’s conviction as the product of a system hostile to Black men. The childhood decade thus becomes material for adult testimony: what began as family crisis is repeatedly retold as a theory of race, class, policing, and institutional power.

The decade’s accumulated pressures also remain legible in Robert’s later reversals. Skeet’s final appeal was denied in 2006, and he died in prison soon afterward; Robert later lost his airport baggage job after refusing a post-accident drug test, and he eventually returned to large-scale marijuana dealing. In 2011, when Curtis Gamble urged him to abandon a dangerous situation, Robert asked for three days to repair what had gone wrong, still trying to control a world shaped by loyalty, risk, and informal authority. He was murdered at 34 Smith Street, where Curtis found him facedown and bleeding in the basement. The 1980s do not mechanically cause that ending, but they establish the durable conditions through which Robert learned to interpret danger, family obligation, masculine responsibility, education, and freedom. As a time period, the decade is therefore less a backdrop than the first layer of the life-course trajectory the book follows to its fatal conclusion.