“I was the good kid, always reading, painting, quiet, never getting in trouble,” Eli Reed says of his early years. Born in 1946 in Linden, New Jersey, Reed was aged 4 or 5 when he moved with his family to Perth Amboy, a few miles south, as a result of a fire that destroyed their home. When his mother died, the family moved again: Reed, his father, and two brothers went to live in the John J. Delaney Homes, a low-income housing project on the outskirts of the city. The industrial brick buildings of the Delaney Homes, built in the 1950s and since demolished, were once home to 252 families including Reed’s friends: Bruce Taylor, who became a defensive back for the 49ers and his brother Brian, a player for the New Jersey Nets. Reed grew up playing stickball with local kids, many of whom were tagged as troublemakers from a young age. “All the tough guys were my friends because I respected them as other people. Stickball was the connecting cord.”
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As an adult, Reed would discover that Perth Amboy had long been a site of resistance, dating back to its time as one of the stops on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes and safehouses used by enslaved African-Americans to escape northward into free states and Canada (or south out of the United States altogether) during the 19th century. “In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan tried to incorporate themselves into Perth Amboy and they were kicked out, literally,” Reed says. “They made another attempt and they were greeted by six thousand Perth Amboyans, who drove them out — which made me feel pretty good. I saw Perth Amboy as a decent place and not as bad as what was going on in other parts of the country, such as the South. It was a good place to grow up.”
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