Nicky Dawidoff ’81 Talks of New Haven and His Latest Book

Author, Trustee and Alum Nicky Dawidoff '81 visited Hopkins on Friday, Dec. 9. In his recently published book, The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice and The American City, Dawidoff reports on a New Haven shooting to better understand how “injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations.” 
 
Dawidoff spoke to the entire school at assembly before leading two Q&A sessions in the Calarco Library. Throughout the morning, Dawidoff shared stories of his own family history living in New Haven, what lead him  to shed light on this murder case for his latest written work, as well as the challenges of researching such a complex story. 
 
Watch a video of Dawidoff’s full assembly presentation below. 
 
 
One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity.
 
In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy—victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby—Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Foremost are the unique challenges confronted by children like Major and Bobby coming of age in their “forgotten” neighborhood, steps from Yale University. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. 
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