In retrospect, I was grateful to have attended a highly disorderly majority black high school. Seeing persons of color interact in an uninhibited venue every day for 4 years taught me lessons most whites never get close to. I treasure that information - worth every bit of the stress at the time. Mostly my colleagues don’t believe my high school anecdotes, so I have stopped telling them. Let them find out for themselves why a 20 year old black man with no intention of marriage or responsibility for a child will shoot his 17 year old girlfriend to death for saying the baby might not be his in the heat of an argument. I understand it. Its scary but predictable.
It was a lesson many won’t experience; glad you came through it OK. As my children reached college age, we visited local schools with them, including a couple in nearby Newark (NJ). The campuses were very different from my time there decades ago; security had been much improved in terms of creating a compound on city blocks (whereas during my time anyone could walk off the street on to the campus), and within the campus there were “panic buttons” installed all over the place. I assumed that was to deal not just with outside intruders who had penetrated the perimeter, but also to protect female students from the predations of semi-literate “student athletes” (an underreported crime on many campuses). Two adjacent colleges had removed a major problem by buying a city high school nestled between them, a source of much of the crime; when we visited that building was being renovated but at least wasn’t serving as a home base for Simbas anymore. I really sympathized with the students dorming there (primarily foreigners); they couldn’t really do much at night as it wasn’t safe so there was nothing available. They had added parking decks, finally accepting that students were no longer willing to run the gauntlet from mass transit points to reach the stockade; the focus really seemed to be convincing the fathers who showed up with their daughters that they would be safe (another state school in a safer suburb seems to attract most of the white female students). The state seemed determined to keep the schools running because they are a key part of the pseudo economy left behind as private-sector employers abandoned the city; what is left is a transit hub (train/bus/airport), a large port (away from residential areas), a collection of schools, hospitals, and entertainment venues, and a large population of poor people. Like NYC, a ghost town during the scamdemic that will have a difficult time recovering.
All the talk of economic progress is just talk; unlike neighboring Jersey City, Newark has no wealthy areas - or even reasonably comfortable ones. While Jersey City attracted employers and workers from NYC, Newark saw no such growth - just more injections of public dollars.