cover image Color Lines: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony in an American Town

Color Lines: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony in an American Town

Mike Kelly. William Morrow & Company, $25 (532pp) ISBN 978-0-688-11795-5

This is a thoughtful and dramatic reconstruction of a crisis and its context: the April 1990 shooting of black teenager Phillip Pannell by white police officer Gary Spath, which exposed racial tensions in Teaneck, N.J., a town previously seen as a model of suburban integration. Kelly, a resident of Teaneck and a columnist at the Bergen Record, has dug beneath the headlines, explaining how polarization begat distortion: in their effort to portray Pannell as an innocent martyr, black activists ignored his juvenile crime record, while Spath's fierce defenders ignored his troubling pattern of firing his gun. Spath was acquitted of reckless manslaughter two years later, but the injury to Teaneck lingers. In an ambitious attempt to portray Teaneck's racial texture, Kelly mostly succeeds, profiling individuals like the white Teaneck resident who marched alone with black protesters and observing how municipal policy (e.g., the low number of minority cops) does not always keep pace with official rhetoric. He also does a good job of portraying the sometimes ham-fisted intervention of figures like then-Governor Jim Florio, Congressman Robert Torricelli and Jesse Jackson. (Aug.)