Half a century ago, Newark’s Weequahic High School was an academically distinguished, mostly Jewish enclave that graduated the novelist Philip Roth and a steady stream of future PhDs. Starting in the 1960s, however, the city’s race riots, white flight, and the rise of drug-dealing gangs transformed the school into just another urban battleground with low morale and a high dropout rate. more

Forty years after the riots that ripped Newark apart, a city scarred by violence and neglect tries to make peace with its past and plant hope for its future. more