IN COLOR LINES: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony in an American Town, journalist Mike Kelly documents one suburban community's -- my hometown's -- nightmarish realization that it is fractured along racial lines. The crisis that literally brought this home was set off by a white police officer's fatal shooting of a black teenager. That all this happened in progressive Teaneck, New Jersey, the first town in the country to vote to integrate its school system, bodes ill for race relations nationwide.

The shooting and its tumultuous aftermath make for a gripping story, encompassing a race riot, two grand juries, protest marches, and a trial acquitting the officer. The tragedy's dramatis personae include Jesse Jackson, then-governor Jim Florio, and controversial black activist Al Sharpton. There is even a (thankfully) brief appearance by Louis Farrakhan. It is an important story, which Kelly, a Teaneck resident, tells with impressive thoroughness and objectivity.

Just five miles west of Manhattan, Teaneck has often been called a model American town, with its manicured middle-class lawns and first-rate high school. In the 1950s, the township was among the first northern New Jersey suburbs to welcome Jews and blacks.

By the end of the 1980s, though, life for some blacks in Teaneck had come to resemble the disturbing film Boyz 'n the Hood. In Teaneck, it was as if New York City's woes had crossed the Hudson and traveled up Route 4 to the town -- as Sharpton and his bused-in protesters were to do later.

In 1989 over 30 percent of black students eligible to enroll at Teaneck High School were attending private schools instead, their parents often citing concerns about black-on-black violence in the high school and peer pressure to eschew academic success. Fifty percent of eligible whites had similarly opted out of the public school. In 1989 Phillip Pannell, the young man at the center of Color Lines, belonged to a Teaneck High gang calling themselves "the Baddy Boys," later renamed "the Violators." Pannell and his friends defended their Teaneck turf -- "the Neck," they called it -- against incursions by other black gangs from neighboring towns. At 15, Pannell possessed an arrest record that had already gone beyond vandalism and theft to include aggravated assault.

Despite attempts by Pannell's mother and high school administrators to intervene, Pannell continued his antisocial ways -- until, on April 10, 1990, a black homeowner reported him to the police for brandishing a pistol. After a chase on foot, a young police officer named Gary Spath shot Pannell -- in the back. Spath and his partner claimed that Pannell had been reaching in his pocket for the gun he was carrying. Other witnesses maintained that Pannell had his hands raised in surrender.

The day after the shooting, a rally in front of the town hall erupted into a riot. Disregarding appeals against violence by Pannell's father, black teens overturned police cars, smashed windows of the municipal building, police station, and public library, and assaulted white bystanders. (While covering the rally, Kelly himself was hit in the back of the head by a thrown stone.) Several kids also looted nearby stores. When the police responded by blocking the entrance to the town's main shopping district, one young African-American complained to a white Lutheran minister that the police were only interested in "protecting the Jews in this town," shocking the already dismayed clergyman.

Kelly vividly recreates such scenes, basing his richly detailed account on court transcripts, his own contemporaneous reporting, and extensive interviews with the friends and family of Spath and Pannell, as well as with other important participants.

The author also succeeds in bringing out the motivations of those involved. For instance, to help explain why teenagers would throw an oil drum through the window of a mom-and-pop Greek delicatessen, Kelly provides this April 1990 interview with a black teen who went by the street name of "O. J.":

"This place shouldn't have gotten trashed," he said. "These people are cool here. They're nice. But how do you feel about justice for the black man? Why does a cop go shooting a person in the back? That's the reason this place was trashed. If we could have gotten to the cop, this place wouldn't have been damaged. There's no justice, no peace."

The author offers no grand judgments. While, for example, he spends much time discussing the numerous problems that Pannell's father himself had with the law, it is up to the reader to decide what to make of this information. Does it absolve Pannell of responsibility for his own violent behavior? Or does it suggest that the young man's family life was such that increased recreational activities and other measures demanded by some Teaneck residents would likely not have been enough to save him? Kelly does not pose such questions, much less answer them.

As Kelly notes in his prologue, to write about race in America today is to navigate minefields. Still, he manages to write with unflinching candor about the sensitive subjects of black crime, white flight, and police harassment. Kelly pulls this off, I think, by being scrupulously honest. If he shows us rampaging black teenagers, he also stops to show us a black couple that offered to help a white female reporter during the disturbance, and he reports the couple's own fear that they would be mistaken by the police for rioters.

It also helps that Kelly writes with obvious admiration for persons of goodwill on both sides of the Teaneck color line, those who tried to unite -- or at least calm -- a tense, angry, and racially divided community in the two years following the shooting, up through Spath's 1992 manslaughter trial.

In his epilogue, Kelly notes that much has changed in the past five years, with some now questioning whether Teaneck's integrationist dream died with Pannell. In 1983, whites accounted for 53 percent of the students at Teaneck High School. By 1995, this number had dropped to 35 percent, even though whites constituted over two-thirds of the town's population.

-- who only five years ago was depicted as following Sharptons lead, and whom a local NAACP official actually tried to bar from the wake for Pannell. (Sharpton and Farrakhan barreled their way in over the local man's objection.)

Trying to find some good news with which to end this case study of seemingly intractable polarization, Kelly notes that Pannell's best friend, Batron Johnson, turned away from violence and graduated from Teaneck High School in 1992, proceeding on to college despite his upset at the all-white jury's acquittal of Spath. The author also notes that the Teaneck Police Department had made significant progress by 1995 in diversifying the composition of its force.