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Chapter  Camden Transformed We grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, work . . . well, it was different. . . . You don’t have to revere your country, you don’t have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. —Philip Roth, American Pastoral We’re going to inherit this whole city in ten years. Because we’ll be the only ones left; we’re the only ones who can’t run away. —Robert Moore, Executive Director, Camden Council on Economic Opportunity,  At 5 a.m. on August 21, 1971, Marie Sheffield’s sleep was shattered by the harsh ring of the telephone in her otherwise peaceful suburban home. The news was devastating. Riots had broken out in Camden, some six miles away. The neighborhood where her parents, Andrew and Josephine Graziani, had bought a home for $3,900 cash in 1944 was in flames. Her mother was safe enough traveling in her native Italy, but her father was alone and vulnerable. Sheffield routed her husband out from bed. Together they sped westward toward Camden. As the sun rose behind them, they were shocked to see thick smoke billowing above the city. They made their way through the raucous crowds that filled the narrow streets to her father’s home on the 500 block of State Street. Onlookers watched without attempting to intervene as flames consumed the structure. The second floor had already burned, and the heat was so intense it had melted the glass door knob. Mr. Graziani was nowhere to be seen. After attempting unsuccessfully to enter the house, Sheffield pleaded with onlookers for news, hoping against hope that her father had escaped. Finally, a neighbor she recognized directed her to the Holy Name sanctuary around the corner. There she  Chapter  found her father, so dazed he scarcely recognized her. Together they fled to her suburban home. When Mrs. Sheffield’s mother returned to the area days later, the family withheld the news of the loss from her as long as they could. As they tarried over supper in the Sheffield home, Mrs. Graziani kept asking to go to her own home. Finally, her daughter had to tell her the news that there was no home to go back to. Neither parent returned to live in Camden again.1 The Grazianis, like their daughter and so many other neighbors before them, settled in Camden’s suburbs. They were not the only ones to leave as a result of the  riots. For three nights fires and vandalism consumed much of the city. Although no one was killed, at least forty people were injured. Rows of establishments along the Broadway commercial spine were either looted or burned. The area looked, in the words of one observer, ‘‘like bombed-out Germany.’’ Camden’s future, the Courier-Post proffered, never looked darker. For sale signs went up across the city in residential as well as commercial areas. According to Alfredo Alvarado, who operated a grocery store in South Camden for twenty-four years, ‘‘You should have seen the people flying out of here . . . there were moving trucks all over the place.’’2 The departure of the Grazianis and other white Camden residents in  extended what already had been a long and building tide. As Table  indicates, however, the pace of white departures accelerated considerably in the s, to the point that Camden shifted over the decade to a majority black city. Factors besides civil disturbances contributed to the pattern of white outmigration, not the least the loss of industrial jobs. In fact, the close association between those losses and racial turmoil had a lasting impact, one that contributed greatly to sustaining public memory in the belief that African Americans were somehow responsible for the destruction of working -class communities built up over decades. In Camden, such beliefs found expression in the readings of a play, Last Rites, as it circulated through the city in the early years of the twenty- first century. The story focused on author Joseph Paprzycki’s grandparents, Walter and Susanna Evannk, once owners of a neighborhood tavern located near the New York Ship Yard in South Camden. In the play, Walt and Sue lend sympathetic ears to their customers, who first fear and then experience unemployment with the closing of the yard in . As their customers begin to drift away...

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