Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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quite decorative—for added security, but others are left undefended and sagging. On main avenues homeowners’ battle against undesirable, and possibly dangerous, passersby intensifies—those first floor windows not fortified by wrought iron are sometimes simply boarded up, with drywall applied right over the opening on the inside.
East Camden, the section of the city where Rosedale lies, was almost exclusively white until the mid-1960s. By the time its first black residents began to appear in the early 1970s, at the tail end of the great migration of African Americans northward, the city and neighborhood were still places of promise and hope. Separated from the rest of the city by the Cooper River, East Camden was laid out in the late 1800s by developers to attract immigrants and rural dwellers with modest means. Yet some of the twins and singles were almost opulent, made not of red brick but of stone—the native mica-infused granite that made these structures literally sparkle in the sun. Evidence of that time exists even now, for if one steps off of Westfield Avenue onto Rosedale or Merrill or any of the numbered streets, some of these distinctive structures still stand. In this residential area bordering an agricultural zone, one was more likely to hear a rooster’s crow than a factory’s whistle a hundred years ago. Even now, the neighborhood families sometimes raise chickens, so it is not unusual to hear the crow of a rooster.
If one walked the length of Westfield Avenue in 1950, its golden age, there were literally hundreds of shops.20 On the 2600 block alone, where the avenue began, one could while away a Saturday afternoon browsing the Father & Son Shoe Store, Walen’s Men’s Wear, the Clover Children’s Clothing Shop, Sun Shoe Repair, the Pastorfield Wallpaper Company, Jane Dale’s Women’s Furnishings, ABC Cleaners, the Sugar Bowl Confectioners, Devoe and Reynolds Artist’s Materials, Westview Hardware, the New York Fashion Shop, Lester’s 5&10 Cent Store and more. Most exciting for the neighborhood youth of the day was the lavish Argo Movie Theatre.
Fueling this heady prosperity was the mighty industry in North and South Camden. Originally a bucolic backwater in the shadow of its more powerful neighbor across the river, Camden became an industrial powerhouse in its own right by the late nineteenth century. By the end of the 1960s city leaders still believed Camden was on the upsurge. RCA Victor was the largest producer of phonographs and phonograph records for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. New York Shipyards was the nation’s largest shipbuilder during World War II, and the Campbell Corporation was the world leader in the production of canned vegetables and condensed soup. These three industrial giants, all founded in Camden roughly a century earlier, provided enough jobs for 75 percent of the manufacturing workforce. And while none of these firms had ever hired many African Americans, for more than a century black men had found their employment in their shadow, with jobs as teamsters, stevedores, and coopers that were contingent on the city’s industrial economy.21
But just below the surface, signs of trouble were everywhere. A prime culprit was the residential trend toward suburbanization that had so many American cities in its grip. Camden’s population had peaked at 125,000 in 1950 but was down nearly 20 percent by 1970. Young couples eager to establish themselves—spurred by Federal Housing Administration policies that made it hard, if not impossible, to secure a mortgage in the city but easy to finance a home in towns with pastoral-sounding names like Mount Laurel, Cherry Hill, or Audubon—offered a ready ear to suburban real estate boosters who proclaimed, “Why live in Camden or Philadelphia when you could live here?”22
Second, though city politicians were in denial, 1960s Camden was already beginning to hemorrhage manufacturing jobs, down 45 percent in that decade alone. Some of the city’s shocking job loss was due to the abrupt closure of the New York Shipyards because of declining demand, but other, smaller manufacturers who felt pressure to modernize or expand were leaving as well.23 Meanwhile, suburban industrial employment grew by 95 percent, luring even more of the city’s younger industrial workers away from the Camden neighborhoods of their youth.
Third, businesses had already begun a slow exodus east to Cherry Hill, Morristown, Woodbury, and Voorhees, following their customer base. In the 1950s the city boasted large, prosperous department stores—nearly every major chain in the region was represented—elegant theaters, the grand 1925 Walt Whitman hotel, and hundreds of small family-owned shops along the city’s major commercial spines: Broadway, Kaighns, Haddon, and East Camden’s Federal and Westfield. Then, in 1961 the first shopping mall on the East Coast opened its doors, the Cherry Hill Mall, to a frenzy of acclaim, just a short five-mile drive from Camden’s eastern border. “Shop in Eden all Year Long,” advertisements read, referring to the mall’s air conditioning. Over the next ten years, vacancies along Camden’s commercial arteries grew rapidly.24
The year 1971, though, was when Camden exploded in racial violence, and this dealt its deathblow. The Camden Courier-Post had reported increasing racial tension in Camden during the prior decade, as Philadelphia (1964), Watts (1965), Newark (1967), Detroit (1967), Chicago (1968), Washington, DC (1968) and Baltimore (1969) had erupted, yet other than a series of civil disturbances in 1969, no major riot had occurred in Camden. Then, in the course of a routine traffic stop, a local Puerto Rican man was nearly beaten to death by two white police officers.25
By then Camden had a sizable Puerto Rican population, first initiated by Campbell’s Soup’s decision to cure their acute labor shortages during World War II by recruiting workers from Puerto Rico. Mayor Joseph M. Nardi, a Camden-born Italian American relatively new to his post, refused to suspend the officers involved. Throughout the day the crowd of Puerto Rican protesters gathered in front of city hall grew to as much as 1,200. Finally, around 8 p.m. Nardi agreed to meet with the group’s leaders. While they were laying out their demands for more Puerto Rican men on the police force and better schools, housing, and employment, a bar fight overflowed onto the street and sparked a wave of looting, burning, and rioting that lasted three days. The city’s entire 328-man police force responded, reinforced by 75 state police troopers and 70 officers from surrounding areas. By the morning of the fourth day, the Camden Courier-Post reported, “The city’s major streets were bombed-out ruins, littered with broken glass, burned trash, objects hurled by demonstrators and spent tear gas containers. Water from firefighting and from fire hydrants turned on by residents made a soggy mess of the debris.” Nearly every plate-glass window along Broadway from Federal Street to Kaighns Avenue was smashed.26 In the years immediately following, almost all major retailers left the city and so did almost every large employer.27
Four decades later fewer than twenty-five thousand households remained in the city. Half of its residents were African American and more than four in ten were Hispanic—most of them Puerto Rican—with only a smattering of elderly whites and newcomer Asians. Median household income remained abysmally low—under twenty-nine thousand dollars—and more than a third of Camden’s families lived below the official poverty line: 44 percent of families with children were poor. Unemployment between 2008 and 2010 averaged 22 percent. Roughly 15 percent of the city’s households claimed government disability payments (SSI), and about 12 percent received cash payments from the welfare system, while nearly three in ten collected Food Stamps—all very high rates as compared with the nation as a whole. Four in ten adults lacked a high school diploma or GED, and the high school dropout rate stood at 70 percent.28
From the days of the Moynihan controversy onward, academic researchers and journalists who have focused on the lives of so-called fatherless families have looked almost exclusively at African Americans, lending the impression that “fatherlessness” is a black problem. By the mid-1990s, however, black rates of unwed childbearing had leveled off, while among whites (and Hispanics) the growth was substantial. By the end of that decade 40 percent of all nonmarital births in the United States were to non-Hispanic whites, while only a third were to blacks.29 By the time we began our study, the so-called fatherless family, which Moynihan had labeled a black issue, had spread beyond America’s disadvantaged minorities.
Thus, though we started in Camden, we expanded our focus to lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, a city with minority neighborhoods with similar social ills as Camden’s but also with predominantly white neighborhoods that, while not nearly as poor as some of its black sections, still had pockets of poverty.30