The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, substance use, and death.

Rob Peace’s story unfolds against the United States’s ongoing struggle with racial and social inequalities. Hobbs’s account of his friend’s life and death serves as a microcosm of the systemic challenges faced by many young Black men in America. Rob’s experiences also highlight the difficulty of overcoming cycles of disadvantage, regardless of intelligence or aspirations.

Rob was raised in East Orange, a disadvantaged suburb of Newark, New Jersey. The area is marked by economic hardship, gang activity, and gun violence. Newark and its surrounding areas are emblematic of the struggles faced by many post-industrial American cities. Once a thriving economic and cultural hub—as Rob’s grandparents mention—the region suffered a decline due to deindustrialization. By the time Rob was growing up there in the 1980s and 1990s, the area had some of the nation’s highest poverty and crime rates. The prevalence of gang activity and the underground drug economy created an environment where survival often required strategic adaptation, as Rob quickly learned. He, therefore, “Newark-proofs” himself, “talking like the people talked, quoting the lyrics they quoted, playing football the way they played” (63). He also drinks alcohol and smokes marijuana from the age of 13 as part of the neighborhood’s “stoop culture.