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

by Jeff Hobbs

The first time the one hundred members of the Pierson Class of ’02 congregated together, we were on the slate patio outside the dining hall. Rob stood on the fringe, wearing baggy jeans, Timberland boots, and a “skully,” a tight, thin piece of black nylon fabric in the shape of a stingray, the wing tips of which he bound at the base of his cranium. He was smoking a cigarette, his back turned to us. The classmates who hadn’t met him yet clearly figured him to be a dining hall worker or part of the maintenance staff. He did nothing to dispel this notion. In fact, he seemed to take pride in it. Like his mother on move-in day, he harbored little interest in interacting with the rest of us. Though I’d made an effort to be friendly enough, I kept my distance in those moments. An uncle had advised me not to get too chummy with my roommates early on, because it was easier to become better friends than to extricate yourself from someone you didn’t like. In a way that at the time felt natural but perhaps a bit too deliberate, I thought having a black roommate was fortunate. Though my high school was demographically the opposite of Rob’s—90 percent white—I was a national-caliber hurdler and had spent my summers traveling and rooming with mostly black runners at Junior Olympic meets. As a result of many long, cramped van rides, I had a familiarity with popular hip-hop artists of the day, I was conversant in certain strands of street lingo (“That’s tight!”), and I knew how to play spad...