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At 1:27 on the morning of August 4, 2005, Herbert Manes stabbed Robert Monroe—known as Shorty—to death on the 1400 block of West Oakland Street in North Philadelphia. No newspaper reported the incident. Arrested and charged with homicide, Manes spent the next ten months incarcerated until his trial, which ended on June 8, 2006. After deliberating less than ninety minutes, the jury concluded that he had acted in self-defense and found him not guilty on all charges. I served as juror number three.¹

This Prologue is the story of the trial, what it meant for me, and what it signifies about marginalization, social isolation, and indifference in American cities. It distills the essential themes of this book into an incident at once mundane and horrific. It is also the story of what I learned from Herbert Manes. It is not a neat story. Ambiguities remain unresolved, contradictions abound, ends dangle. It begins with the two main characters and where they lived.

Herbert Manes was born on June 29, 1938. His family lived south of Gerard Street, around Ninth Street, in what he says is now “upper Society Hill.” His parents had migrated from South Carolina before World War II but met in Philadelphia, where, after knowing each other for only two weeks, they married. Their marriage lasted more than sixty years until their deaths in their seventies. Herbert has two brothers, one of whom has died and one who works for Blue Cross and Blue Shield. He also has a sister who works for the Youth Study Center, a secure facility for youths age 13 to 18 considered a risk to the safety of the community or at risk for flight while awating their hearing before the Juvenile Court. When Herbert’s parents died, an aunt who lived to be 104 years old managed the family. Everyone referred to her as “the boss.” Herbert spent his entire early life in the neighborhood in which he was born, attending Jefferson School and then Benjamin Franklin High School. He left school to make money at age eighteen without graduating. Money became important, because after a shotgun wedding, which he claims was common at the time, his first child was born when he was twenty. In all, Herbert has eight sons, one daughter, and many grandchildren. His former wife, from whom he was divorced in the 1990s, lives in Cheltenham, a heavily African American suburb on the edge of Philadelphia. Until her retirement, she ran the dialysis unit at a local hospital. Herbert speaks of her fondly, describing her as a “lovely lady” with whom he stays in touch. Most of his children live in the Philadelphia area, some in Willingboro (formerly Levittown, New Jersey, and currently home to many African Americans), and three or four in the South. Herbert sees his children and grandchildren only at family reunions.

For thirty-five years, Herbert’s father worked for a moving company from which he received a pension. Herbert describes him as a good father and has warm memories of both parents. Herbert drove a furniture truck for the same firm for many years until, like most of the city’s manufacturers, it went out of business. He then worked in steel mills, which he described as “brutal work.” He retired after an injury and survives on social insurance. “Uncle Sam takes care of me,” he told the jury. He also drove a gypsy cab.

Herbert looks older than his years. At 6 feet tall and 170 pounds, he stands slightly stooped; his close-cropped hair is a grizzled gray; his large lips protrude on one side of his face, almost as though he had experienced a stroke. Round, dark-framed glasses give him a quizzical look. For his trial, he wore an open-neck, long-sleeved light gray shirt, blue trousers buttoned at the top with no belt, and light tan workingmen’s boots.

Shorty remains more mysterious. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, birth and death certificates remain closed to all but relatives and their attorneys. As one of the jurors who had acquitted Shorty’s killer, I could not just show up on his brother’s or sister’s doorstep asking for biographical information. Nor would it be safe for me to roam his neighborhood’s streets in search of friends and acquaintances to interview. A friend offered to help by contacting two people with local networks. But the unpredictability that disorganizes lives on the city’s mean streets intervened. One man was arrested and jailed before he could cooperate. Another potential informant was shot in the head and killed on a violent Saturday night when three other men also met their deaths between midnight and three in the morning.

This much is known: Shorty was born on August 26, 1964, in Neptune, New Jersey, where he lived until at least age ten. His brother and sister still live there. Like Herbert with his gypsy cab, Shorty was part of the informal economy found everywhere in America’s inner cities. Shorty worked on the street as a freelance mechanic. In Philadelphia, many street mechanics work near auto supply stores. Customers purchase parts in the stores and bring them to the mechanics. The activity violates a city ordinance, but no one seems to care. Although only 5 feet 2 inches tall and 147 pounds, Shorty was expert in martial arts. Herbert described Shorty’s strength and powerful build; he was, said Herbert, impossible to fight in any straightforward way.

Shorty was well known to the police. Between July 23, 2001, and January 29, 2003, he was charged with offenses ten times. His alleged crimes ranged from unauthorized use of an automobile and other vehicles to theft by receiving stolen property, criminal trespass, burglary, retail theft, and drug-related offenses. Remarkably, each charge was either withdrawn or dismissed. For a long time I was puzzled by Shorty’s ability to escape criminal charges unindicted; he truly seemed to be a Teflon man. His history began to make sense in December 2009 when the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a series of articles under the banner “Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied.” “In America’s most violent big city,” the investigation discovered, “people accused of serious crimes are escaping conviction with stunning regularity.” The statistics told a depressing story of administrative incompetence. “Only one in 10 people charged with gun assaults is convicted of that charge. . . . Only two in 10 accused armed robbers are found guilty. . . . Only one in four accused rapists is found guilty of rape.” In most big cities prosecutors win about half their cases; in Philadelphia they win 20 percent. “It is a system that all too often fails to punish violent criminals, fails to protect witnesses, fails to catch thousands of fugitives, fails to decide cases on their merits—fails to provide justice.” ² In Philadelphia, Shorty’s ability to walk away from arrests now appeared more the norm than the exception.

Despite Shorty’s record, police sergeant Troy Lovell, who patrolled the area, described Shorty as pleasant, friendly, and “respectful.” At the time of his death, Shorty’s blood alcohol level was just shy of legal intoxication and showed that he had recently ingested a substantial amount of cocaine, which had mixed with the alcohol to form a potent new compound. One man, intimately familiar with the Philadelphia street scene, claimed that street mechanics generally were addicted to drugs. Whether or not this claim is accurate, Shorty surely did not spend much of his income on rent. He lived near the scene of his death on a tiny, desolate street of rundown row houses that angled alongside railroad tracks. Even by the standards of the neighborhood, his room rent must have been low.

West Oakland Street, where Herbert lived in a first-floor room and Shorty died, is a narrow, one-way street of small, poorly kept row houses, perhaps a slight step up from where Shorty had lived. Everyone acknowledged the neighborhood to be dangerous. It embodied the decline, decay, and abandonment that scarred much of North Philadelphia.

The house in which Herbert lived was owned by the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, which had purchased it for $1; its certified market value for 2007 was $8,300. Of the 6,947 people who lived in the census tract in which West Oakland Street was located, only 45 were white; the rest were largely African American; only 118 had been born outside the United States—compared to 9 percent of the city’s population—and more than three of four had been born in Pennsylvania. More than two of five house holds consisted of women with no husband present. Nearly a third were house holders living alone, with 16 percent of women and men over age sixty-five living by themselves.

Just 60 percent of house holds had incomes from earnings, and these averaged only $24,859 in 1999; a third had income from Social Security; 11 percent from Supplemental Security Income (SSI); 19 percent from public assistance; and 17 percent from pensions. Median house hold income was $16,367, and 41 percent of families fell below the poverty line. It was a neighborhood that had seen much better days.

Although in 1936 the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) slammed it for its “Negro concentration,” until the 1950s the neighborhood remained more than half white with roughly half of families owning their own homes. Clothing and furniture factories, long since gone in the early twenty-first century, were nearby, as were railroad yards and other businesses. The proximity of the subway connected the neighborhood easily with the rest of the city. Mansions even lined a nearby major street. Today, abandoned houses and vacant lots appear to easily outnumber the mostly small businesses—fast food restaurants, an auto supply dealer—that remain.

Herbert’s fatal encounter with Shorty began sometime during the evening of August 3, 2005. Herbert, hungry and without money, borrowed five dollars from Shorty, promising to pay him back that night or the next day. He was expecting a government check. With the money, he says, he went to a local restaurant to buy some chicken. Later, still hungry and without money, Herbert went to a friend’s house where he unsuccessfully tried to borrow more money. On his way home, he ran into Shorty, who was working on a car on West Oakland Street. Shorty demanded his money on the spot. When Herbert told him he did not have any money, Shorty struck him. In the fight that followed, Shorty knocked Herbert to the ground and was punching him when two passersby intervened, pulling him off. Herbert immediately went home where, he claims, fearful for his safety, he retreated to the second floor. Shorty appeared in front of his house with a pipe three feet seven inches long. He started knocking out windows, yelling, “I want my money!”

Henry Fairlee, who lived on the second floor of Herbert’s house, entered the unlocked front door—unlocked because the lock always was broken—and told Herbert to go out to talk with Shorty so he would stop breaking windows. This is Herbert’s version. Fairlee tells a different story. He claims to have been one of the people originally pulling Shorty off of Herbert. He claims, too, that Herbert came tearing out of the house with a knife in hand, swinging his arms and lunging at Shorty, who had not yet picked up the pipe. At this point, according to Fairlee, Herbert stabbed Shorty, who then went to his toolbox for a pipe before returning to the house into which Herbert had retreated.

Fairlee was the only civilian witness for the prosecution, and he lacked credibility. He was in custody for two parole violations. He had a record of felonies—breaking and entering, burglary, receiving stolen goods. On the witness stand, he had trouble staying awake, his head periodically lolling against the side of the dais. Contradictions riddled his testimony, and he even contradicted his testimony at the preliminary hearing. He either erred or lied about the length of the pipe, claiming under repeated questioning that it could not have been between three and a half or four feet long. For Fairlee’s version to be valid, moreover, Shorty, who had just sustained a mortal wound to his heart, would have to have been able to locate and wield the pipe. The medical examiner reported that only three inches of the six-inch knife blade had penetrated Shorty’s chest, an outcome unlikely if a six-inch blade had been thrust into him with great force, as Fairlee claimed. Another witness, interviewed by the police, was waiting outside the courtroom. He had told the police he had seen Herbert run from the house with a knife that he plunged into Shorty. The prosecuting attorney, however, did not call him to the stand.

Herbert, of course, tells a different story. He denies, first of all, that Fair-lee was one of the people who pulled Shorty off him at their first encounter. Herbert said he wanted to go to his brother’s to borrow some money but was frightened. He could not exit the back door because the yard was so full of debris that it was impassable, and he did not have a telephone with which to call the police. Because the neighborhood was so dangerous and he feared intruders, Herbert kept a knife—an ordinary kitchen knife with a six-inch blade—above his doorway. He pocketed the knife and went outside onto the stoop. Shorty immediately knocked him down, whether with a blow from the pipe or by leaping and kicking is not clear. Herbert ended up on the ground, underneath Shorty. This was the moment when Herbert pulled the knife from his pocket and stabbed him. On the witness stand, Herbert often appeared confused; he tried to answer the questions put to him, but he seemed not always to understand them. Yet, when his attorney asked, “Did you intend to kill Shorty?” Herbert unhesitatingly responded with force, “As God is my witness, I did not.”

When Sergeant Lovell—a twenty-year veteran of the Highway Patrol, six feet four inches tall, African American, handsome, and articulate—arrived, he first noticed Herbert sitting on his stoop drenched in blood. Herbert complained of his cut hand and pain in his ribs. As Lovell was tending to him, Fairlee came up behind him and told him an injured man was lying on the ground across the street. Lovell moved to Shorty and asked what had happened; all Shorty could manage was to point at Herbert. Assessing Shorty’s condition as grave, Powell instructed the two officers just arrived on the scene to take him to the hospital. They drove Shorty to Temple University Hospital, a trip of perhaps a minute and a half, where he was soon pronounced dead.

Sergeant Lovell allowed Herbert to go into his house to clean up a bit. Then he placed him under arrest and ordered him taken to Temple University Hospital, where his hand was stitched. From the hospital he was brought to police headquarters at Eighth and Race, where detectives questioned him. He was, he stressed, trying to protect himself. Several people witnessed the events on West Oakland, but only Fairlee, and later the one other witness, agreed to speak with the police. Fairlee also went to the police station, where he told police his version of the story, casting Herbert as the aggressor. Herbert was charged with murder and incarcerated.

The crime scene investigating unit found no fingerprints on the knife, the pipe, or a pair of scissors of unknown provenance found under Shorty. At the trial, the police were unable to produce the knife, pipe, or scissors, which, apparently, had been lost. (I was told by an attorney that evidence often is lost.) It appears doubtful that detectives returned to West Oakland to try to persuade other witnesses to speak with them. After all, the case was about two poor black men arguing over five dollars, and they had closed it.

In 2005, 375 homicides occurred in Philadelphia, most in poor, heavily African American neighborhoods. Of the victims, 339 were men, and 308 were black. Many of the killings resulted from arguments, and most victims died of gunshot wounds. Most were younger than Shorty. On the week of Shorty’s death, eleven homicides took place in the city. Only four of these made either of the major newspapers, and of these, three were odd cases: a white girl shot in a drive-by shooting; a promising young man about to start college gunned down; a white man shot by a friend while sleeping on a sofa. Only in the use of a knife rather than a gun was Shorty’s death exceptional.³

Why was Herbert charged with first-degree murder when the evidence for murder was virtually nonexistent? Why was he incarcerated for so long? Why did the district attorney’s office go to trial with so little evidence and only one witness, who lacked credibility? Why was the police work so inadequate? Was Herbert’s real offense being a poor, uneducated black man living in Philadelphia’s badlands? If Herbert had been a middle-class white man, I thought, he would not have spent the last ten months in jail or find himself tried for first-degree murder. Still, looked at another way, for Herbert the American judicial system worked. He had an excellent attorney, a fair-minded jury, and an exemplary judge. Was his situation unusual, I wondered. Not long after the trial, I read Steve Bogira’s Courtroom 302, a devastating account of how criminal justice is dispensed in Chicago.⁴ By the standards of Bogira’s account, Herbert was lucky. These were among the questions that lingered in my mind after the trial was over. We had found Herbert not guilty, but by no means did we know or understand all that had happened.

Herbert, Shorty, and the trial haunted me. Why was I so interested in this ordinary murder case? Why did I want to know more about Herbert, Shorty, and their neighborhood? Why did the men and the trial matter? At first, these seemed easy questions, but they were not. The best I could do was to try to put myself at the center and reconstruct the trial through my own eyes and then to probe my reactions.

The jury selection had proved a bit weird. Both the DA and defense attorney were interested in my background. The DA wanted to know my children’s education, where I was educated, and whether I taught undergraduates. My degrees from Harvard seemed unduly important to them—making the DA somewhat ill at ease. The defense attorney, a man, as I later learned, seventy-nine years old with years of experience defending indigent clients, asked the subject of my doctoral dissertation. I thought it a peculiar question, but I answered politely. Later, when we met (he took a shine to me and invited me to lunch) he explained that if I had answered the question in a surly or impatient manner, he would have removed me. He could not understand why the DA let me on the jury. The defendant, Herbert Manes, was of course present during the questioning. So I had my first look at him. He looked so old, sad, and beaten down that my sympathies were on his side, and I had to tell myself to try to contain my emotional reaction.

The process of jury selection seemed to drag on for hours. It was the first taste of one of the two emotions that dominated my responses through the next few days, namely, boredom. We spent hours and hours just sitting in the jury room. We were given a time to be present, and the jurors were prompt, but for reasons rarely explained to us, we had to wait. The whole process could have been completed in one solid working day.

The other emotion was responsibility. I could not escape the weight of making a decision that would determine the rest of a man’s life. As a result, I found myself able to focus intensely on the proceedings. I don’t have a particularly sharp memory—age is having its effect that way—but my ability to remember details was far better than I expected, far better than usual, undoubtedly a sign of motivation.

The jurors were a cross section of Philadelphia. I was the only one with a postgraduate degree. One other man was a translator who also did some adjunct teaching. None of the others had professional jobs. Two were nineteen years old—one of them immature, unable to stop babbling about his life. I worried about him. (When we went into deliberations, he shut up and said almost nothing.) One woman may have been older than I; gray, quiet, and withdrawn, she said almost nothing and conveyed an impression of not wanting to be there. The most interesting and impressive juror was a large, burly man—a mechanic with a two- day growth of red stubble who wore shorts, spoke with a tough Philly accent, and had served jail time for contempt in his divorce trial. When we were deliberating, he said, “I’m not smart, but I’m street smart.” In fact, he was smart, period. He picked up important details that the rest of us had missed, and, from tending bar in the projects, he knew about street life in a way the rest of us did not. The woman who volunteered to serve as foreperson was in her thirties, a paralegal, attractive, a single mother who lived with her mother—bright, quick, and appealing. I stayed quiet in the jury room, revealing nothing about myself. I did not want them to know I was a professor at Penn. I did not want to intimidate them or have them react to me as other than someone ordinary. My cover was blown at the end when the judge, in delivering his instructions to the jury, mentioned, for some reason, that there was a professor among the jury. (When he was interviewing me and found I was a history professor, he asked me my opinion of the greatest president in U.S. history. My answer—Lincoln—pleased him; he’s a Lincoln fan.)

The jury was serious. We were instructed not to discuss the case among ourselves while the trial was ongoing. And few jurors made any remarks about it. I sensed, however, that they were following it intently, an assumption supported by their recall and comments in our deliberations. As the case unfolded, I had little idea of how they were reacting. After the first day, I knew that I could not find the defendant guilty on the evidence presented and would not be swayed. So I feared we might be in for a long session in our little room. Happily, that was not the outcome.

Judge Lockwood introduced the case well. He’s a friendly-looking but firm man who radiates fairness. I thought his conduct of the trial exemplary and his rulings correct. The DA, a slim, intense, expensively dressed and made- up woman, told us that it was a simple, straightforward case and not to expect it to be like murder trials on TV. I did not know exactly what she meant. It was, in fact, rather like TV, except that the police work did not seem as thorough and the one civilian witness wouldn’t have made the cut. I think she meant that the real-life case was a lot messier and that we would have to reach a decision with less conclusive evidence. The other jurors did not like her. They thought she was smart, but several said she frightened them. They found her cold and hard. On the last day, when she had to deliver her closing statement, she dressed all in black, which seemed overkill. I learned much later that she erupted after the jury had left the courtroom, calling Herbert a killer and a liar, berating the defense attorney, and shouting angrily at Shorty’s relatives who had criticized her handling of the case.

The defense attorney, William Gray, was, as noted earlier, nearly eighty. He has a fascinating background, having turned to the defense of indigent criminals for personal reasons partway through a successful career as a business attorney. He likes to talk (and knows it). His verbosity irritated the jurors somewhat, but they thought he was good. He sometimes uses literary allusions, and his language can be flowery. Early in the trial, he made an allusion to Lincoln, and he began his closing argument with a quote from Emerson. But he had prepared carefully and had a clear, effective strategy, at the heart of which was his daring decision to put Herbert on the stand. It turned out to be a brilliant move, for the reasons I have already explained.

Listening to the evidence, I could not fathom why Herbert was on trial for first-degree murder or why he had been held for ten months. The evidence just was not there. In fact, the witnesses, all for the prosecution, introduced more and more ambiguity and doubt. The one civilian witness, Henry Fairlee, startled me. I could not believe he had been put on the stand for the prosecution. Watching his head loll and his eyes shut, hearing his contradictions and his outright misstatement about the length of the pipe, I thought he was the least credible witness imaginable.

When the jurors finally found themselves alone, the first task was choosing a foreperson. One or two suggested me, but I deferred to the woman who had volunteered. She seemed a little less certain than she was earlier. Shorty’s relatives had been watching the trial and clearly were upset and angry. But she was gutsy, and I supported her as foreperson and sat next to her in order to give her a hand if needed. We went quickly around the room to gauge opinion. Not one juror hesitated to dismiss the charge of murder one. No one found any of the evidence credible.

The next question was manslaughter. After a brief discussion, we agreed that there was no way Herbert could have avoided the confrontation. He could not have left his house through the back because the rear was blocked by trash. Because he did not have a telephone, he could not have called the police (the defense attorney probably should have brought this out). We did not believe he had used the borrowed money for food, but that was immaterial. We also thought that if he had a serious criminal record, the DA would have highlighted it at the trial. Only one juror, the sharper of the nineteen-year-olds, wanted to discuss the manslaughter possibility. But he quickly agreed that no evidence supported it. We all thought it most likely that Herbert had acted in self- defense, not intending to kill Shorty. This discussion took less than an hour and a half, which amazed the attorneys. Watching Herbert’s face relax, seeing him embrace his lawyer as the decision was read, moved me deeply. After we returned to the jury room, Judge Lockwood came in to thank us. He praised our attentiveness and said we had acted correctly.

In one way, I found the trial experience frustrating. I wanted to interrupt and ask questions. As someone who makes part of his living teaching seminars, this is something I expect to do. Obviously, I could not. But at a number of points along the way, I wanted to probe more or bring up something it seemed to me the attorneys had missed. I was also frustrated by what we did not know about Herbert and Shorty. Who were these men? Only a piece of their lives was laid in front of us. What had brought them to the streets of North Philadelphia? Why were two grown men willing to kill each other over five dollars? What had made West Oakland Street a place where freelance mechanics fixed cars on the street, aging men lived in rooms with knives stashed over the door for protection, and most residents would refuse to bear witness to the killing of a likable and familiar figure?

I suppose that the law would say these questions are irrelevant. They are immaterial to what happened, and the only intent that counted was what lay in Herbert’s mind at the moment his knife penetrated Shorty’s chest. The only geography that mattered was the detail necessary to choreograph Herbert’s and Shorty’s movements. But that was not enough for me. I wanted to understand, as fully as possible, the situation and the men about whose lives and death the state required me to decide. I think like a historian or a social scientist, not a lawyer. In my world, where the goal is to comprehend rather than to judge, context matters greatly.

For decades I have tried to write about poverty, its contexts, and the ideas and policies used to explain or ameliorate it. I also have written, read, and thought a great deal about cities, especially the transformations that have produced the North Philadelphias of America. (Even here I fall into stereotypes: North Philadelphia is a complex and varied place that belies its reputation for blight and social disorganization, just as West Philadelphia, beyond Fortieth Street, belies the image of a dangerous urban frontier so prominent in the minds of a great many Penn students and maddening to its residents.) But there is an abstraction in most of the literature and in most of what I have written. This abstraction confronted me in the early 1990s, when for about five years I served as archivist to an ex officio member of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Committee for Research on the Urban Underclass (a title originally insisted on by the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the committee’s work), later renamed, more softly, as a committee on concentrated and persistent urban poverty. The SSRC committee brought together the leading social scientists working on poverty. It focused primarily, with few exceptions, on quantitative data.

Members were serious, responsible social scientists; for the most part, they cared about poverty. But the research, of necessity, given its method, transmuted the Herberts and Shortys of America into statistics, their characteristics the variables in equations. To have talked of their lived experience, to have allowed hearts to show on sleeves, would have been seen as violating objectivity. To have sat down with them for an evening’s talk would have been unscientific and useless. There is, of course, a long history of social scientists and observers who have tried to find and reveal the lives beyond the abstractions. Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth in England come immediately to mind. In the United States, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives remained an iconic text that was unmatched in its popular impact until Michael Harrington’s The Other America in the 1960s. Within the social sciences, anthropologists and ethnographers such as Eliot Liebow in Tally’s Corner, Robert Fairbanks, II in The Way Things Work, and Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg in Righteous Dopefiend have opened windows on lives never seen before by most Americans.⁵ Even in reading the best ethnographies, however, a layer of experience separates me from the day-to- day reality of lives spent on West Oakland Street and thousands of streets like it. This is so even though I have lived for nearly thirty years in West Philadelphia, where diversity is the only thread uniting the individuals who pass our house every day. I have tried to enter the lives of extremely poor people in the past, reconstructing histories of the poorest New Yorkers of the early twentieth century from charity records and complementary sources. By piecing together these life stories, I have unraveled the complexity and strength, as well as the pathos and sometimes disorganization, in the lives of desperately poor women. ⁶ But I have never done the same for their counterparts today.

Occasionally, though, an incident concretizes what I have been writing and thinking about. It braids together strands often examined separately by social science, exemplifying the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces at play in the most ordinary lives and how powerful structural forces transforming cities, social structure, and national economies play themselves out in individual experience.

One of these moments happened a year or two after my family and I moved from Toronto to Philadelphia. It was the late spring or early summer of 1979 or 1980. I was mowing our small front lawn, which is raised a few feet above the sidewalk. Brick walls, punctuated by concrete front steps, line the block. A few yards down the street, an African American man whom I guessed to be in his thirties leaned against a car, occasionally walking up and down the block and resting on a wall. He was clearly disoriented. I watched him for some time, wondering what to do. Should I call the police? No, they might beat him up (Philadelphia police were reputedly tough on black men). Should I go in the house and get my dog and then go talk to him? After about half an hour, I was disgusted with myself. This was a fellow human being in trouble on a bright, warm afternoon. Why was I so hesitant—even afraid?

I approached and asked if he needed help. He asked for a glass of water, which I fetched. Then he said he was trying to reach his brother’s apartment; the address belonged to a building around the corner. He was a Vietnam vet. He had been to the nearby VA Hospital, where he had been given either the wrong amount of medication or the wrong medication, which had left him disoriented. He had stopped in the bathroom of a church but forgot to retrieve his bag, which held his wallet. He did not know where he was. I took him to his brother’s apartment; later that evening he rang our doorbell to thank me. For what did I merit thanks, I wondered.

The most disheartening part of the episode followed when I told friends and neighbors about it. Their response—that I deserved praise—seemed exactly wrong, given my long hesitation, and only underscored the distance, fear, and ignorance underlying the response of even liberal professionals and the separation of Philadelphians by class and race. So much had come together in the incident that I did not understand, but I could not find a single book that offered a comprehensive history of post–World War II American cities and explained what was then called the urban crisis. The issue was much on my mind; it was one of the factors that influenced me to take on the directorship of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at Penn shortly thereafter and create a course that would look holistically at modern American cities. Over more than twenty years, I have taught the course many times, understanding more at each iteration, but never really the whole story.

Herbert’s trial, which took place more than two decades after the incident on my street, also encapsulated what I had been struggling to understand and write about. Converging on the histories of Herbert and Shorty, although I was missing many details, were deindustrialization, white flight, racial segregation and concentrated poverty, the failures of urban education, a job market that excluded an extraordinary share of black men, the ravages of drugs, the importance of the informal economy, and a criminal justice system that in practice values the lives of black men less than mine or those of my family and friends. If I could gather more details, I thought, perhaps I could make real—more concrete—the subjects of my research.

But it is more than a matter of making experience concrete. Most research and writing plucks a thread from the fabric of experience. Historians and social scientists write about the welfare state, unemployment, single-parent families. They focus on particular problems and policies. When looked at from the experience of men like Herbert and Shorty, however, the borders of these distinctions melt into one another. Real lives do not divide into neat compartments. How to capture that lived reality is the challenge. I hoped that learning and thinking more about the men and the trial would bring me closer to an understanding.

Urbanist Mike Davis, in his book Planet of Slums, talks about the dramatic growth of social isolation in cities around the globe, most notable in Third World cities but clearly visible in the United States as well.⁷ I had been reading Davis’s book before the trial. With it in mind, the events laid before the jury brought powerful confirmation of its thesis. The events took place a few miles from my home. Similar confrontations, hardly meriting notice in the press, happen all the time even closer. Other than the frisson of fear they occasionally engender in respectable citizens, they might as well be in another city. An invisible veil reinforced in suburbs by gated communities, in cities by security systems, police, and segregation, separates comfortable Americans from what happens on West Oakland Street. They don’t know, and they don’t really want to. But they should. That is why the story of this mundane trial matters.

Ignorance results in stereotypes, which in turn breed contempt and easy dismissal of “the undeserving poor.” It reinforces the racial and economic segregation that turn far too many Americans into second-class citizens. It lets us celebrate an alleged renaissance of American cities, con ve niently forgetting vast swatches of empty factories, sites of buildings returned to fields of weeds, boarded-up houses, and lives stunted by poverty right in the shadow of shiny new office towers. The attempt to expand the meaning of Herbert’s trial and to reconstruct its context is, therefore, not an academic exercise or merely a quest for personal understanding. It radiates outward, provoking questions that should trouble all Americans. We owe ourselves—not to mention Herbert and the memory of Shorty—nothing less.

I needed to talk to Herbert. I had to know more about at least one of the men cast as leads in this awful story. His attorney kindly contacted him to ask if he would talk with me. He agreed.

I had arranged to meet Herbert on Friday, June 8, 2007, at 12:30 where he lived on Hartshorn Street. I arrived early and drove around the neighborhood, both to get a sense of it and to locate some places for lunch. It is a North Philadelphia neighborhood just a few blocks south of Temple University Hospital. Hartshorn is a narrow street (about the width of one car) of old row houses. A number of vacant lots dot the neighborhood where houses have been torn down on adjacent streets. A small convenience store stands on the corner of Hartshorn and Grove. It was doing a brisk trade. The day was hot, and lots of people were hanging out on stoops and in the street. I had more than a little trepidation after parking the car on Grove Street and realizing I had to get out and walk to Herbert’s front door with all eyes on me, this strange white guy with a blue short-sleeve button-down shirt and a backpack over a shoulder. It felt like walking into a scene from The Wire.

A small iron gate blocked the steps of Herbert’s house from the street. I unlatched it and rang the bell. A woman, probably in her sixties, answered and asked me in. Herbert was in the living room; he had forgotten it was Friday. But he remembered I’d called, and he put on a shirt. The room was small, cluttered with overstuffed furniture, lived in. When I asked Herbert where he would like to eat, he said let’s just go for a ride. Later he told me that his landlady, who wanted to be more than a landlady, stuffed him with food and gave him a hard time if he didn’t return hungry. But once in the car he wanted to head to Fifth and Spring Garden, the neighborhood where he had grown up. He had in mind a diner that had closed some months prior—I had forgotten it was no longer open. As we headed south and east, my cell phone rang. It was William Gray, Herbert’s attorney, who wanted to make sure we had met and were getting along. We ended up at Fifth and Girard at a small restaurant on the corner. I took pleasure when Herbert, a professional driver, praised my parallel parking. The restaurant worked well—cool, with a corner booth, vacant, quiet, and clean. Herbert said he had been eating there for fifty years, although not recently.

Herbert ran into trouble with the law in New Jersey. For about twelve years since retiring, he had been running an informal hack business based at the corner of Grove and Hartshorn. One day before his fatal encounter with Shorty, he drove a woman to New Jersey thinking she was going for a job interview. She turned out to be a pickpocket and was nabbed by the police. He was also blamed, although he had not left the car. To make matters worse, he made an illegal U-turn and got caught by the police. The New Jersey parole authorities confiscated his license and were holding it until he paid his fine, which was about three thousand dollars—an im mense sum for him. He hoped to have it paid off by the end of the year. In the meantime, he felt bereft, trapped in the house with nothing to do. He paid the landlady three hundred dollars a month for a room, three meals, and laundry. I could not tell if they had a romantic relationship, or if she just wanted to marry him. He described her as a good woman, extremely devout, who dragged him to church every week. He did not want to incur her wrath by not going. She sang in the choir and had, he claimed, a beautiful voice. One of his dilemmas was how far to take the relationship with his landlady. He did not live with her before his trial, even though she wanted him to, because he wasn’t ready to accept her domination and intense religiosity. She suffocated him sometimes, he said, and seemed more like his mother. But he liked her very much.

Herbert remained obsessed with his arrest, imprisonment, and trial. Over and over again he wanted to justify his action. He claimed to have liked Shorty and to have never seen him so completely wild. He could not believe Shorty went berserk over five dollars, and he attributed it to drugs. Shorty, he said, claimed he was going to kill him. Herbert thought he was going to die and began to resign himself, until the thought that it was a ridiculous way to die snapped him out of his resignation.

For Herbert, taking action proved a matter of self-respect as well as survival even though the arrest, incarceration, and trial proved a nightmare. He said he always believed in God, but that his acquittal had intensified his faith. When the verdict was announced, he recalled, he could have died at peace on the spot.

Faith, he asserted, is a central element of his life, and he does not take drugs or drink alcohol. His only vice is smoking. To save money for his fine, he had cut back to ten cigarettes a day. People in the neighborhood tell him he did what he had to do, but they are wary of him. Killing Shorty has given him a helpful reputation. He described the neighborhood as a “jungle” where people concerned only with pursuing money could earn tens of thousands of dollars a day. He wouldn’t say exactly what people did to survive, and I did not push him. I asked him if he was safe in the neighborhood. He said yes, that because of his reputation, nobody bothered him.

He was happy to talk with me. For a long time he had wanted a chance to talk about the events and his feelings. So, as useful as the interview was for me, for him it was cathartic. He proved more articulate, with a broader vocabulary, than I had anticipated. He asked about my interest, and I explained as best I could. My sense is that he understood perfectly and sympathized. He repeated over and over again that one can’t understand what it is/was like unless one has lived it. I am sure he is right about this. Yet, an implicit tension ran through our conversation. Herbert did not seem uneasy, but he was wary, willing to give information about himself, but with limits I could sense. I wanted to press him for more details or to expand on what appeared to be contradictions or improbabilities. But I knew that to press too hard would violate his boundaries and end our relationship.

After lunch—I found out that Herbert likes to eat turkey and to fish—during which he sketched his life story, we drove around the neighborhood in which Herbert had grown up. By now, he had loosened up and, I think, had begun to trust me. He enjoyed being the teacher, my shepherd through a Philadelphia I did not know. He pointed out to me where friends had lived, where local stores and bars had stood, and the former locations of small manufacturing firms. The area is a mixture of expensive gentrification and unrenovated row houses. Herbert claimed that the gentrified houses are mostly occupied by unmarried teachers, principals, and social workers. He said the neighborhood is so safe, still, that he would sleep with his windows open. He attributes the safety to the presence of the police who are responsive to the wealthy new homeowners. We encountered a street mechanic, an obviously strong man and friend, whom Herbert claims has been working at the same locale for thirty years. Herbert, like Sudhir Venkatesh in Off the Books, described an informal economy, a world in which people scratched out a living, doing whatever it took to make some money and survive.⁸

The tour went through the Richard Allen Homes, formerly a high-rise public housing project, now an attractive town-house development, still public housing. Herbert talked about how awful the projects were when he was growing up, with fights going on 24/7. Everyone had to join a gang to survive. Only then there were no guns; all the guys went to gyms to learn to box.

I liked Herbert a lot. I enjoyed his sly, deadpan humor. He seemed to find it increasingly easy to talk with me, and, as noted earlier, thanked me for the chance to talk. I was going to give him twenty dollars—it was in an envelope with his name on it in my pocket—but I didn’t. By the end of our time together, it felt inappropriate, as though it would turn what was almost a budding friendship into something else and might violate his sense of self-respect, which clearly remains crucial to him. Herbert did not want me to drive him within sight of his street and the crowd on the corner. So I dropped him off some blocks away.

How much could I believe Herbert? He seemed immensely credible. But, then, he wanted to give me a best impression. Why, I wondered, was he hungry and in need of five dollars for food when his lady friend lived a ten-minute walk away? Why did he not ask her for the money to repay Shorty? With so many children and grandchildren, why had he remained in prison—was he denied bail? Why was he alone at his trial? Clearly, there is a lot more to his story. But it does not take away from his special charm or the urgency of his need for exculpation.

When we sat in the restaurant, across a table in a corner booth from each other, I could not help but think, “Here we are, two sixty-eight-year-old men, residents of the same city, with life histories that could not be more different” (although in one way they weren’t different; we both married young and had our first child at age twenty). How, really, to explain why I live a comfortable, rewarding life as a university professor while he scrapes by on SSI on a dangerous block of North Philadelphia? It is not because I had two loving parents and he did not. So cancel that ste reotype. It is not because he lacks intelligence, because he doesn’t. If he is to be believed, it is not because he was unwilling to work hard. To say that he is black and I am white is not enough, although it is important. I suspect that part of the answer does lie in the barriers facing black men, especially men of his generation and older. But part, too, lies in the history of the city, whose inequalities, indifference, segregation, and economic devastation are traced in the lives of Herbert and his contemporaries. As we drove through his old neighborhood, Herbert remarked that his large circle of boyhood friends was gone. “Do you mean that they left?” I asked. “No,” he answered. “They’re dead.”

* * *

The rest of this book opens up some of the themes condensed into this one story of murder and marginalization in an old American city. It is a story that cannot be interpreted apart from the transformation of American cities in the late twentieth century and the emergence of new urban forms unlike any others in history. Nor can it be understood apart from the trajectory of African American social structure, which opened up class and gender divisions among blacks, leaving men like Herbert and Shorty outside the regular labor market, relegated to semi-licit work and the charity of the state or prison, while others, like Barack Obama, ascended to heights unimaginable only a few decades earlier. It provokes an uncomfortable confrontation with questions of authority and legitimation. Why is it that black men who are unable to leave bleak inner-city neighborhoods have turned their rage inward on one another and not, as they did forty and fifty years ago, on the agents and symbols of a politics, culture, and economy that exclude them from first-class citizenship? For centuries, American discourse about poverty has divided poor people into categories based on their assumed moral worth. Herbert and Shorty belonged to the long line of the “undeserving poor.” They epitomized the urban “underclass” that terrified Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. By the early twenty-first century, however, cutting-edge technologies of poverty were jettisoning pathological constructions of poor people. As new poverty warriors tossed the “underclass” on the trash heap of intellectual history, where were Herbert and Shorty left standing? Did they join the new world of the entrepreneurial poor, or did they find themselves in a no-man’s-land, for all practical purposes (and except for prison) abandoned by the state and philanthropy but not invited to shop in the new store stocked with market-based plans for reducing poverty? In the end, Herbert and Shorty found themselves caught in the collision between urban transformation and rightward- moving social politics. It is this collision that underlies my attempt to expand the story of Herbert and Shorty’s fatal encounter beyond the badlands of North Philadelphia.