The Prize (12 page)

A boy slouched so far down in his desk that he was almost supine said he felt sure they didn't. This is what Harris was hoping to hear. That should raise a question, she said with excitement. If people opposed the mass killing of Jews, why didn't they stop it?

No one answered.

“Were they getting accurate information about Jews?” Harris asked. “What's the word for a message being sent over and over and over again to influence how you think?”

“Publicity?” one boy asked more than answered.

“That's a kind of message, but the word I'm looking for is ‘propa
ganda,'” she said. “Does anyone know the word ‘propaganda'?” There was no answer from the students. She defined the word and explained how the Nazis used propaganda to blame Jews for Germany's ills.

She asked if they knew the word “stereotype.” Again, no one answered. She explained that Hitler stereotyped Jews as less than human.

“Indifference is the enemy,” she said. “There might have been Germans opposed to Hitler, but because it didn't affect them, or because they thought Jews' lives didn't matter, they didn't do anything.” The students looked puzzled. Harris asked if they knew the word “indifference.” They didn't. “Break it down,” she encouraged them. “
In
difference. You don't see a difference. It doesn't matter to you, so you don't get involved.”

Several students became animated, eager to be heard on the subject of how decent people could have remained passive in the face of evil.

“Nobody in Newark is happy about gangs, but we don't try to stop them. You could get killed,” said a boy in the back of the room.

“Ain't nobody always gonna put themselves in the middle of someone else's mess,” a boy across the room responded. “That's a good way to get shot in Newark, New Jersey.”

As often happened in Milagros Harris's classroom, a lesson about history and war veered inexorably forward, into Newark's permeating present of gangs and violence. Central was a comprehensive high school, meaning everyone got in, unlike at magnet schools and charters. Based on their eighth-grade standardized test scores, almost three-quarters of freshmen were at risk of never graduating from high school.
Harris was a popular teacher at Central, a former hairdresser whose clients recognized how smart she was, persuaded her to go to college, and helped her get scholarships. She majored in history and became a teacher in her mid-forties. Puerto Rican, short and fiery, with ever-changing hairstyles, she had a daughter at Columbia University and another in fifth grade who was reading at a high school level. Her students told her everything—about baby daddies
and baby mamas, shooting deaths of parents, dreams of leaving the ghetto. “It must be the hairdresser in me,” she said. “Everybody talks to me.” The students said she was one of the only teachers who made school interesting, who explained material until they understood it, who made them feel smart.

While Harris's students struggled with words like “stereotype” and “propaganda,” they were brilliant at navigating life in a war zone, because many grew up in one. On a bulletin board behind them hung a recent class project. They had created Google Maps of the routes they all walked to school, with labels of everything they passed. One student identified a single commercial establishment—a Domino's Pizza—while all other labels said “Danger Zone,” “Killing Zone,” or “Robberies.” Territory controlled by the Crips gang was colored blue; the turf of the Bloods gang was in red. There were danger ratings for each block, ranging from three to five stars. Atop the scene was a sun, half smiling, half frowning, and the warning “Watch Your Surroundings.”

Ever prospecting for hope in dark places, Harris posed the questions, “What can you do to not fall victim to propaganda and stereotypes? What about activism?” On this November day in 2011, she had invited Central High's principal, Ras Baraka, as a guest speaker, because he had been an activist much of his life. Baraka, then forty-two, grew up in Newark, a son of the renowned poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, the most prominent radical voice in Newark's recent history. Amiri Baraka was known for declaring that black leadership in the city had failed the people, ultimately serving the same power structure as their white predecessors. “What we got was Black Dude Number One, Black Dude Number Two and Black Dude Number Three,” said the senior Baraka, reflecting on Newark history one Saturday morning at an empowerment class for public school parents. In more hopeful times, Amiri Baraka led the unity movement of blacks and Puerto Ricans that elected Newark's first black mayor in 1970. Ras Baraka, bearing a striking resemblance to his father—the same deep-set eyes, penetrating gaze, and naturally furrowed brow—doubled
as a first-term city councilman and was also a slam-poetry enthusiast whose verses were posted in the atrium at Central. He represented the South Ward, where he was born and raised; it now was the largest and poorest jurisdiction in Newark, with the highest concentration of black residents.

In his role as councilman, Baraka positioned himself as the anti-Booker, deeming the mayor, with his Stanford-Oxford-Yale pedigree, a servant of the rich. He delivered speeches in the style of a charismatic street preacher, rousing Newark's dispossessed as forcefully as Booker inspired more affluent audiences.

Baraka, like Booker, was born in 1969, in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution. While Booker was raised in the suburbs, acutely aware of his generation's promise and obligation to “give back,” Baraka grew up focused on the movement's unfinished business. “I was in my mother's stomach during the eve of the election of Ken Gibson,” he said of the man his father now called Black Dude Number One. “I was raised in the heat of transformation.” On his visit to Milagros Harris's class, he told students about attending protests with his father in the 1980s against disparities between the jail sentences of white and black males. As a junior at Howard University, he recounted, he led a student occupation of the administration building that resulted in the resignation of Lee Atwater, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Republican National Committee, from Howard's board of trustees. He paused in midsentence to define “trustees,” for those unfamiliar with the word, then went on, “We protested that he was racist.”

Harris asked Baraka when he became an activist. “At about seventeen or eighteen, it began to trigger,” he said. “People said something about my community, I spoke out.”

“Boy, I don't feel I have a role in my community,” a boy said to no one in particular, as if thinking out loud.

Harris asked the student if he knew of people who had made a positive impact on the community. After thinking a long time, he said he
had a kind of role model in a cousin who was a gang leader. The boy said he knew gangs were bad for the community, but he admired his cousin because he discouraged younger children from gravitating to gangs. “When little kids try to hang out with him on corners, he'll say, ‘Get out of this area. You don't want to be here.'”

Harris commended the boy for ingenuity: life hadn't handed him role models, so he was constructing a composite, finding admirable qualities in flawed people.

“We don't have anyone to look up to because the whole generation ahead of us is messed up,” a girl in blue and white, one of the few wearing the school uniform, said matter-of-factly.

“Is not having great role models an excuse for bad behavior?” Harris countered, pacing the room, looking into her students' faces. A few of them shook their heads no. “Can we be a role model without having one ourselves? You need to set criteria for yourself. Do you know what that is? Keep your standards high, learn from your mistakes, keep it moving.”

Baraka told the class that he turned to teaching as a form of activism. When he boarded a bus to attend college at Howard two decades earlier, he said, his best friend was on a bus to prison.

“I became a teacher to counter that conspiracy,” Baraka told them. “I want to prevent more of my friends—to prevent many kids—from taking that bus ride. I want them going to college, not to jail.” He had been a Newark teacher, coach, assistant principal, and principal for twenty years.

But the schools in Newark hadn't turned the tide. Harris asked how many students had friends or family members in prison. Half the class raised their hands. How many had friends or relatives who had fallen victim to violence? Again, half the students' hands went up. How did this make them feel, she asked.

“Thank God it's not me,” said a boy in a red sweater and white baggy pants.

Harris announced an impromptu homework assignment: Google “indifference” and “Martin Luther King.” She was hoping someone
would return with King's ringing quote: “It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.'” Just then, strains of instrumental music filtered through the classroom speakers, signaling the end of the period. This hour's offering was “Didn't We Almost Have It All?” made famous by Newark's own Whitney Houston.

Ras Baraka was a cult figure at Central High. Students called him B-Rak, as if he were a rap star. They said he understood where they came from, what they faced. They knew that he had a famous father—Nina Simone played the piano in his boyhood home and Maya Angelou read poetry there. But they knew, too, that his tirades against violence and poverty were personal, that his father was brutally beaten by white police officers in the 1960s, a sister was murdered, and a brother was shot in the head and permanently disabled. He was invariably late for public events, often explaining that he was attending to grieving families—at a wake for a former student, a vigil in memory of the latest murder victim.

Before his arrival in 2008, Central was infamous for raucous fights; Harris's students remembered racing there from elementary and middle school every afternoon to watch the slugfests. A former principal once publicly declared the violence unstoppable, spillover from the larger society. Baraka called in gang members and declared Central High a sacred space, off-limits to rivalries. If your anger feels uncontrollable, he told them, report to my office and I'll find a place for you to cool off. In time, he prevailed. He met regularly with a group of fatherless boys, giving them books to read, hosting discussions over pizza (his treat), insisting they keep pushing to make it to college. Every day after school, dressed in his dark blue Central High School sweater or windbreaker and, in winter, his wool-knit Central hat, he led students through gang-ruled territory around the building, chest thrust forward, face in a scowl, to help them get home safely.

Shortly after Baraka became principal, a sixteen-year-old junior named Hakir Greene was shot and critically injured near Central in a street fight over a jacket, one of five drive-by shootings in Newark that day. A distraught Baraka called everyone to the gym and let loose a primal scream against the “sickness” life was teaching children. “This is not normal. I want you to know it's not normal,” he cried out, pacing the floor with tears in his eyes. “You living this life like it's normal. It is
ab
-normal.” He reeled off a litany of abnormalities—“to go to school, to talk about your friends dying, to not be able to walk home safely from school, to be jumped every other day, to fail everything, to live in squalor, to have people's parents coming outside fighting with them in the middle of the street. This is not normal—to be going to the hospital every other week, to be wearing T-shirts that say ‘Rest in Peace,' to be writing ‘Rest in Peace' on the wall. This is not normal. It's not normal. Nobody else's children do this . . . And don't take it like because it's happening, that mean you tough. It only mean you oppressed.” He ended with a grim aside about the burden on inner-city schools: “And our job? Override oppression? Huh!”

Central High's students sat in the bleachers, looking more depressed and shamed than galvanized. A camera crew from
Brick City
, the popular Sundance Channel reality show featuring Cory Booker, arrived just in time to capture the speech. It was one of the most talked-about scenes of the program's first season.

“I made him famous, you know,” Booker said ruefully of Baraka's star turn.

The undisputed star of
Brick City
was Booker, who to the outside world was the heroic, crime-fighting mayor of Newark, although at home his reputation was decidedly mixed. Unmentioned on the
Oprah
show or any of the follow-up national coverage of the Zuckerberg gift, the “rock star mayor,” as Winfrey introduced him, was facing a catastrophic financial crisis. It was evident to anyone who entered the monumentally bedraggled Beaux Arts city hall, a remnant of Newark's glory days. A huge net stretched from wall to wall under
the building's gold dome, visible from all three floors of the rotunda, to catch falling plaster and flaking paint the local government couldn't afford to repair. At the time, Booker was laying off almost a quarter of the city's four thousand employees, and the government was now closed one day a week, when lights and heat were turned off in much of the building to save money. Skeleton crews of essential workers shivered at their desks, some in jackets and scarves. A sign posted beside the main elevator announced that all employees were subject to transfers as budget cuts shredded the workforce.

Atop all that, six months after he was reelected in May 2010, with sixty percent of the vote, Booker was in political trouble. The city council was in open revolt, accusing him of having hidden the epic fiscal crisis from them and the voters in his recent reelection campaign. Following a nationally heralded drop in violent crime in his first term—showcased on
Brick City
—murder and mayhem were again on the rise. The summer of 2010 was the bloodiest in twenty years, with thirty-four homicides, many carried out execution-style by gangs. Making matters worse, on this day, November 9, 2010, Booker was about to lay off 167 police officers, including every recruit hired during his first term, as union leaders stiffed his demand for concessions. Grabbing one of his three BlackBerrys, he speed-dialed his chief labor negotiator from the back seat of his Chevy Tahoe SUV and shouted what seemed obvious: “We have a crisis on our hands!”