Why We Fight
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
June 25, 2012

I park my car in the lot in front of the rectory of Sacred Heart in Camden, N.J., and walk through a gray drizzle to Emerald Street. My friend Lolly Davis, whose blood pressure recently shot up and whose kidneys shut down, had been taken to a hospital in an ambulance but was now home. I climb the concrete steps to her row house and ring the bell. There is an overpowering stench of garbage in the street. Her house is set amid other brick and wooden residences, some of which have been refurbished under Monsignor Michael Doyle’s Heart of Camden project at Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic parish. Other structures on Davis’ street sit derelict or bear the scars of decay and long abandonment...

Camden’s plight is worse than that of Youngstown, Ohio, or Detroit, worse than that of east New York or Watts. It is a dead city. It makes and produces nothing. It is the poorest city in the United States and is usually ranked year after year as one of the most, and often the most, dangerous. Camden is one of our many internal colonies in North America beset with the familiar corruption and brutal police repression that characterize the despotic regimes I covered as a reporter in Africa and Latin America. The per capita income in the city is $11,967, and nearly 40 percent of the residents live below the poverty line.

Large swaths of Camden lie empty and abandoned. There are more than 1,500 derelict, abandoned row houses, empty shells of windowless brick factories and gutted and abandoned gas stations. There are overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires and rusted appliances. There are neglected, weed-filled cemeteries and boarded-up storefronts. There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs such as the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha). Knots of young Hispanic or African-American men in black leather jackets, who can occasionally be seen flipping through wads of cash, sell weed, dope and crack to customers, many of whom drive in from the suburbs, in brazen defiance of the law. The drug trade is perhaps the city’s only thriving business. A weapon is never more than a few feet away from the drug set, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch, always within easy reach. Camden is a city awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Philadelphia, where Pennsylvania gun laws are lax. The guns are kept for protection from rival gangs that send out groups to prey on rival drug dealers, stealing their drugs and cash. To be poor is to face the awful fact that nonviolence is a luxury that few on the streets can afford...

Camden fell into grim decline in the 1960s as industries that had once provided employment, including a shipyard that at its height provided 36,000 jobs, packed up and left. The riots in August 1971 dealt Camden a near-fatal blow. The word spread among African-Americans as the city erupted that they should hang something red in their windows if they wanted their homes spared from arson attacks. Lolly immediately informed her white neighbors to hang red in their windows to save their homes.

“My brother came into the house, and told me, put red in the window because they’re going to firebomb the house,” Lolly says. “I said, ‘Oh my goodness! Oh, my goodness!’ I went across the street and I told my friend Gigi, ‘Look, y’all gotta put some red in the window.’ I said, ‘Y’all can’t tell nobody where you heard from, because they gonna kill me, you know.’ So they put up a red Christmas sock. I put my brother’s red underwear. I go tape it in my window, tape in my window.”

“Stores moved out” in the aftermath of the riots, Lilly says. “J.C. Penney left. … Five-and-10 closed up downtown. … All the supermarkets, we had Acme, we have an Acme no more.”

“Everything is gone,” she adds. “Camden went downhill.”