Teaneck, New Jersey, was a proud suburban example of America's melting pot. Twenty-five years earlier it had been the first community to integrate its schools voluntarily. But when police officer Gary Spath shot a young black man named Phillip Pannell, the bucolic suburb found itself grappling with some of America's most explosive inner-city racial issues: from teenage gangs and charges of police harassment to multicultural schooling and strained relations between blacks and Jews.

The race riot, protests, and trial that followed the shooting commanded national attention, and attracted such lightning rods as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and Leonard Jeffries. Award-winning journalist Mike Kelly tells this emblematic story through the eyes of the residents of this typical American town. He shows how the dilemmas of race still exert a powerful, painful hold on American life - even in the best intentioned of circumstances.