Voices
Quotes
- “One of the most painful things that has happened was when Ms. Burnett took her 3 children (who are now grown) to a playground she used to play at. This happened when her children were still small. The playground was on 11th and Lombard. As her children ran ahead, she watched them approach a fenced in lot. A white man who lived there started screaming at the children to get away. She describes it as so painful because the man had no idea that the neighborhood used to be theirs. He had no idea that it had not always been like that.”
-Ingrid Burnett, long time resident of the South Street area
- “When I lived here, there wasn’t a decent supermarket around. Just a crummy market on Spruce. Everyone was excited when the Superfresh opened on South Street. It’s interesting for me as I study social work as we talk about communities in need of services and communities that have been abandoned. A simple thin like having an affordable market to shop at with a good selection of food is a very essential thing for a neighborhood. That wasn’t available here for a long time.”
-Mr. James Campbell, partner in an architectural firm at 1504 South Street and longtime South Street West resident.
- “Blacks were consigned to this neighborhood [South Street West]. This was the place where Blacks were allowed to live in Philadelphia, if you trace it back for a long time. It was the only place they could live. If a Black person moved to Columbia Avenue in North Philly seventy or eighty years ago, there would have been a riot. It was primarily White then. It’s just the way it was at that time…So now from the standpoint of the Black people that are there, it’s more like what happened to the Native American Indians, when they got moved off their land to reservations. Then when oil was discovered on the land they were forced to move again. It’s more of that kind of situation here…Just look at the western end of South Street. There have been upscale townhouses that have replaced typical Philadelphia row homes that probably were not in bad shape. So from the standpoint of the residents who were there, what they believe, whether it’s entirely true or not, was that they were displaced specifically so that the neighborhood could be turned over to another class of people.”
-Elmer Smith, Columnist with Philadelphia Daily News
- “The point is that when they come up to all the political and economic levels, African Americans, Hispanics, poor whites, and underprivileged, they wind up still behind the eight ball. It’s because most of the effort to help these people has been exploited by hustlers. Many people have gotten rich on racism. And it did great damage to our democratic government and to humanity as a whole…Integration for a job, or sitting someone place and eating someplace, to integrate that which is separate…what we should be integrating to make American life grow is integrating commercial enterprise…We should integrate on that level, on getting things done together. So today we have to go out and save democracy…”
-Mr. Samuel London Evans, founder of the American Foundation of Negro Affairs and South Philadelphia business owner.
Interviews
