Philadelphia’s Reality: Violence and Hope
Plagued by a high homicide rate, Philly residents want the candidates to hear their woes and help them turn their city around.
In the stump speeches, interviews and TV ads that accompany presidential elections, the day-to-day realities of American cities are often blurred over by catch-words and campaign slogans. To Philadelphians, rampant violence and an educational crisis are not merely abstractions in a political debate, but part of the everyday struggle in one of America’s most troubled cities.
While the Obama and Clinton campaigns have been courting Pennsylvania voters for six weeks, with the primaries scheduled for next Tuesday, and a debate underway tonight, many of those who work and live in Philadelphia’s toughest areas are still waiting to hear the candidates speak to their issues.
“Our neighborhood doesn’t really believe in politicians,” said Ryan Kellermeyer the director of development for Ayuda Community Center in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood.
Kellermeyer said the most important issue to Philadelphians is stopping the violence. In 2007 Philadelphia had 392 homicides according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Of those, 331 were killed by a gun and 310 victims were African-American. New York had only one hundred more murders and has a population roughly six times that of Philadelphia.
“Last year there was 392, the year before there was 406, and the year before that there was 380. That’s over a thousand of our people gone,” said Shirley Boggs who runs Mothers United Through Tragedy (MUTT).
Almost ten years ago her son was shot four times and killed after someone tried to rob him.
Now Boggs counsels mothers who are facing similar horrors in her neighborhood. After her own son died, she wanted to take her own life. She sought out counseling through a government agency. Her call was not returned for two weeks.
“I have a 24 hour hotline that I man myself,” she said.
Boggs doesn’t feel the question of gun control has been adequately addressed, and she has never seen a candidate or a campaign worker in her part of town.
“They’re not in the hood and they probably won’t come to the hood,” Boggs said of the campaigns. “You should meet the people where they are.”
Boggs wants the next president to send resources to her community so kids will have someplace to go to other than the street.
Reed McGowan is the director of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project. It is one of many programs in Philadelphia that help kids share a stake in their community with neighborhood beautification projects, environmental education and urban farming. Programs such as these often take up the slack where schools have failed, or parents are nowhere to be found.
“In Norris Square, the community has fought hard to lay claim to the area,” McGowan said.
The program aims to give kids an alternative to the streets and some hope to communities steeped in blight and decay.
Hope is a theme that has been sounded constantly throughout the Democratic primaries. In Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods, hope is most often found in neighborhood churches. In communities such as these, where virtually everyone has been touched by violence, hope itself risks becoming another campaign platitude.
“We’ve done too many funerals,” said Pastor Dennis Thomas of the First Corinthian Baptist Church in Southwest Philadelphia.
Thomas ministers to a congregation of nearly a thousand. In his eyes, the candidates have strayed from the important issues and have engaged in a personality contest.
“Now it’s just waiting for Clinton or Obama to say the wrong thing,” he said.
Thomas sees chronic injustice at virtually all levels of government and believes it is too often poor minorities who suffer the most.
“There is injustice in unemployment, there is injustice in African American males being incarcerated, there is injustice in the lack of education,” he said
Ministry leaders have an especially hard time reconciling the war in Iraq. As they preach peaceful coexistence to the children in their churches, they say they watch the government spend breathtaking amounts of money on an unjustified war, while those same children go without healthcare and a decent education.
“If we spent ten percent of what we’re spending in Iraq, we could turn these neighborhoods around,” Thomas said.
Reverend Raymond Williams of the Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in South Philadelphia wants more clarity from the candidates about how they will improve gun control and education. He wants to know how they will get us out of Iraq and bring resources back into his troubled neighborhood.
“I think the Obama camp has really said change, change, change, but I haven’t heard it clearly enough,” Williams said.
Despite disappointment at the hands of elected officials, many in Philadelphia look to the next president to deliver some respite from the poverty and crime that has plagued this city for so long. When looking to the future, Philadelphians see a bright patch in the end of the Bush administration and the possible election of a progressive president.
“I continue to advocate that we are seeing history in the making,” Thomas said.