Interview by Robert S. Griffin, American Renaissance, June 2004
Denis Ruiz is a 50-year-old computer programmer who lives with his wife and daughter near Philadelphia. A short time before I interviewed him, he learned he had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a form of cancer. He was in significant pain at the start of our conversation, and I wasn’t sure he could complete it, but as the interview progressed his voice grew stronger, and his manner became that of a healthy man.
I grew up in the 1950s in a little town called Fairview Village in south Jersey. It was a planned community designed by a fellow named Litchfield, and offered a pleasant environment for people who worked in the shipyard in nearby Camden. Fairview Village had what you could call garden community architecture. Brick houses were attached to each other in clusters of four, and sometimes two, so the houses were in rows, but the rows were broken up. The houses all had yards, and there were common areas on every block where they didn’t build houses. Some blocks had no houses at all; there was just grass and trees. Neighbors would walk their dogs, and kids would play football.
People planted lovely oak trees, so by the time I lived there the trees were mature, maybe sixteen to eighteen inches in diameter. There was a town square with park benches, and people would sit and talk and get to know each other, and there were stores and businesses. It was a socially and economically self-contained unit. Looking back on it, the neighborhood where I grew up seems idyllic, with its parks and shaded streets. In fact, one fellow who had lived in England remarked that Fairview Village was like a little English town.
In the late 1950s, economic changes had a big effect on my hometown. The shipyard folded, as did an iron and forge plant where a lot of people worked. So the town was weakened. But I think it would have rebounded by the end of the 1970s as other businesses reflecting the change away from industrialization came into that area—like the business I am in, the computer business. But that never happened because a second process was at work: the integration of non-whites.
Before it became illegal, realtors in Fairview Village showed houses only to white families. Although this has been painted as unfair, it reflected the desires of the people who lived there. They wanted to live among their own people. They wanted to live in a white community. Now, I see this as the highest form of self-determination: people defining their own community, deciding what comes into their collective lives, determining their own standards.
It doesn’t matter if their standards don’t seem rational or moral to someone else. People have a right to decide who they will live with. This is not a matter of rationality or of morality. It is simply human. It’s not that they have ill will toward anyone; it’s just that they know what atmosphere they like. When realtors screened people and showed houses only to whites, it wasn’t a dark conspiracy. They were being true to the community, part of the community. But, of course, the issue was never defined this way, and in the late ’60s–early ’70s lawsuits forced realtors to sell houses to blacks and anyone else who wanted to move in.
A lot of the blacks who moved in have been “section eights.” Section eight is part of a law according to which the government helps pay the rent for poor minorities, so they can afford to move into white areas. “Section eight” has turned out to be deadly poison for the Fairview Village of my youth.
The neighborhood where I grew up is now a wasteland. Whites are still a majority—55 percent—but Fairview Village has gone the way of a typical urban black area. When I was living there, when a tree died, an Irish guy named Fred Fagan would plant a new one. Now, those saplings are mighty trees. When a tree dies these days, no one plants a new one. There is broken glass everywhere, and things like busted up shopping carts block the alleys. Many of the old brick houses are covered with some kind of awful siding. When I was a kid, people made repairs and restorations in the mode of the architecture of the town. Now, the houses are all different, from one to the next, and there is no common thread to their appearance. There used to be hedges and white picket fences that lent a common feel to the area—no more.
My mother still lives there. When I get out of my car I wonder, “Is this an ambush? Is someone going to jump me?” Recently, a black teenager knocked my mother to the ground injuring her, and took her purse. This sort of thing was unheard of in the old neighborhood, but it is common now. The black woman across the street was just arrested for robbing 7-Eleven stores.
When I was growing up, kids could go anywhere in town. We could go in the woods and explore down by the creek. Now, you would never allow your child even to walk around the block. Just this year, two black men abducted a young white woman, took her where we used to play ball, and raped, and murdered her. Heinous crimes happen regularly there.
There is no sense of connectedness among the people in my old hometown. A white teenager hanged himself in his bedroom. The word is he spent a lot of time alone, listening to rap music. So much popular music these days is dark and sinister, and for someone already on the edge, as I assume this kid was, that can be deadly. In the old days, the risk of a terrible thing like this was much less. Back then, this boy would have had a supportive white community and way of life.
Back in 1967 or so, I listened to Jim Morrison—he was the lead singer of the Doors—and took what he sang very seriously, as if he were Keats or Walt Whitman or somebody like that. I remember one Morrison song—I think it was “Alabama.” The message was, “I must have whiskey or your wife.” It was about drunks going from house to house looking for alcohol and sex, and there is Morrison recasting it in a way that glamorized and legitimized scum of the earth. That was what I was taking in. But I lived in a place that counteracted that poison. I had something the boy down the street didn’t have. I had a community.
The place I live in now, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, was clean and safe when my wife and I moved here 15 years ago, but the pattern of my childhood home has been repeated. Non-whites have moved in, and the neighborhood has deteriorated drastically. Before, there was a fair number of poor white people, but they were never a problem.
We have problems now, and I increasingly find this isn’t a suitable place for my family. It doesn’t reflect our heritage and values. The Catholic school here pushes multiracialism and doesn’t emphasize academic excellence. My daughter, who went there for a time, told us the black boys were aggressive, and that she didn’t like them. That didn’t come from us; we hadn’t said a word to her about race. We learned first hand, and the hard way, that these liberal, multicultural schools don’t work. We realized that we wanted a school of our own flavor. The school that provides the closest thing to a European-type education is unfortunately 35 miles from where we live. So, every day, either my wife or I drive 35 miles there and back. At the same time, because of the expansion of office parks, what used to be a nine-mile drive to my work is now a 25-mile drive.
What this means is that there is no neighborhood here for me at all. A neighborhood is where your friends are, and where your kids go to school, and where you work—that’s what makes a neighborhood. Our people like to be bound to the earth. I need to belong to a certain soil, to a certain locality, and I need to stay in that locality, and for that process to go on for generations. I really believe that my desire to be grounded—literally—is a basic white or European impulse. There are cultural factors working against us, like increased consumerism and individualism, and there’s the globalization of the economy. But whatever is going on, I have to go to some other part of the region to find work. I feel like a migrant worker.
A lot of whites have been building gigantic houses on three-quarter-acre lots in the far reaches of the suburbs, and this makes them pretty much impervious to encroachment; blacks are not going to go there. But these white people lose in the process, too, because they have to own a $350,000 house, and they are paying out of their ears to keep up with the mortgage. All that money could be used to have a richer life on another level with their children and family. If they lived in an old-style house, they could get by on one salary. They wouldn’t have to work two jobs. If they could build a simple three bedroom semi-detached house in a town like the one I grew up in, where the lots are small and there are little gardens and walkways and so on, they could have something affordable, and experience something really worthwhile: living in a tight-knit community of white people.
Because of what has happened to the neighborhood, if my wife and I move we won’t get more than we paid for our house fifteen years ago. Without those changes, I would be in much better financial shape. At one time, my mother’s house was a desirable property, but it is worth very little now. I don’t want to end up like my mother, or in a situation like the one I’m in now, where the neighborhood is declining, and I have to either stay and feel trapped or get out.
I’d like to grow apple trees, and it takes years to do that, and you can’t take trees with you when you move. So we are probably going to rent near where I work, and also buy a rural place and go there on the weekends and fix it up. When I retire in fifteen years we’ll move there.
What I would really like to do is turn back the clock 50 years. I have been going to homesteading sites on the Internet, and reading homesteading magazines to get guidance and inspiration. I’m reading about people who are forming small communities in places like Kentucky, and I correspond with people who are actually doing this, to get a sense of what homesteading entails and what their lives are like. They are all white, and though they don’t talk about race, I suspect there is a racial impulse behind what they are doing, at least to some extent. Some homesteaders in rural Pennsylvania have invited me to visit, which I plan to do when I get over my current health problem.
It saddens me to think that I can no longer live where my mother lives and where I grew up. There would be nothing more rewarding than to have a property like that passed down to me in the condition it was once in. Everywhere my family has lived in, we made improvements, such as putting in a nice garden or gutting the walls and putting in new sheet rock, and improving the drainage. Over decades, these changes add up to significant improvements: a better garden, a vineyard, fruit trees, a nice deck. By staying in one place, your property improves and you improve the community, and you form deep, lasting connections with people. That is the way our ancestors in Europe lived. They were tied to a place. I feel that I am all the time planting and that I am never going to get the harvest; that I am never going to live in a true community.
I talked with my daughter about the country place I’m thinking about buying or building. I asked her, “If Mom and I build a place like that, would you like to stay there, live there after we are gone?” She said yes, she would. She is only seventeen years old, but I think she understands the costs of having to pick up and start over, and she doesn’t want to get into that pattern. That house will reflect 20 years of our labor. We will plant gardens and fruit trees and a vineyard, and make improvements. And we will be in a community where we are with people who see the world as we do, and we will know people and they will know us. And then we will give the house to our daughter. I’ll bet when my wife and I pass on she won’t just sell it and move. She will consider it the place where she should live, and she’ll build on it herself. My sickness has come out of nowhere, but once I get over this, I’m going to get that house.
Denis didn’t get the house. He died a few months after telling me this.
Original article
(Posted on November 14, 2008)
Comments
This article reflects exactly what happened to millions of us, to our communities. It is a perfect before and after picture and better gets to the heart of what we are losing as a nation and as a race than any reciting of statistics. Someone should go across the country collecting old pictures and films of our places before the invasion and then go back and film them as they are now, from the same camera angles if possible. Put it on a series of DVDs and distribute them to places that are still white and ask them again why they think diversity would be a good idea for their town.
Posted by Mike from not-Queens at 6:14 PM on November 14
A lot of whites have been building gigantic houses on three-quarter-acre lots in the far reaches of the suburbs, and this makes them pretty much impervious to encroachment; blacks are not going to go there. But these white people lose in the process, too, because they have to own a $350,000 house, and they are paying out of their ears to keep up with the mortgage. All that money could be used to have a richer life on another level with their children and family.
Or they could give it to organizations like the CofCC and publications like AR who are trying to do something about this sort of tragedy.
I keep hearing over and over again that blacks don’t succeed because they live in bad environments. Read this story closely — Denis Ruiz’s environment was good when it was all white, and became bad when it became majority black. Same area, same economic opportunity (affirmative action and welfare notwithstanding), but far different results. Snooty lib can’t blame environment in this case.
Posted by Question Diversity at 6:16 PM on November 14
Not to take anything away from what this poor deceased gentleman had to say — I found his account of urban decay very sad and disturbing — but I’m afraid he must have misheard those Doors lyrics. The song in question is called “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)” and was not written by Jim Morrison or any other members of The Doors, but is in fact an English translation of a number from a 1920s German musical by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the (Communist) songwriting team of “Threepenny Opera” and “Mack the Knife” fame.
Here, for the record, are the complete English “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)” lyrics. In the original musical, they are sung by sailors in a bar. Although I would never try to argue that they promote good morals, they are not actually about cuckolding other men’s wives. As you will see, there is no mention of “wife” or “wives” at all:
Well, show me the way
To the next whisky bar
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
Show me the way
To the next whisky bar
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
For if we don’t find
The next whisky bar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you
I tell you we must die
Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We’ve lost our good old mama
And must have whisky, oh, you know why
Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We’ve lost our good old mama
And must have whisky, oh, you know why
Well, show me the way
To the next little girl
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
Show me the way
To the next little girl
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
For if we don’t find
The next little girl
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you
I tell you we must die
Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We’ve lost our good old mama
And must have whisky, oh, you know why
Posted by at 6:31 PM on November 14
We ran and ran from the blacks. They followed us to the suburbs.
So we ran and ran to rural areas. And what happened? The elites built factory farms and food processing plants in the rural areas and imported illegal hispanic thugs to destroy those areas.
So where can we run? Nowhere.
It took only 20 years, 1970 to 1990 to destroy California.
Posted by at 7:05 PM on November 14
This is a beautiful and sad narrative that millions of Americans, undoubtedly, can relate to. Whenever I speak to someone who rhapsodizes about the greatness of ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-culturalism’, I ask them a very simple question that always stuns them into silence:
When has any neighborhood ever improved by minorities moving into it?
Posted by at 7:23 PM on November 14
In Europe, in White villages, and towns, some people live in 500-yr-old houses, yet these house and the neighborhood still looks nice and are safe. Compare this to anyplace where Blacks or Hispanics live — in just a few years, the houses (even relatively new houses) are all torn up and the neighborhoods are destroyed. Blacks are like a plague on civilization and society — not all Blacks, mind you, but a large enough percentage of them to assure that any place they gather will be ruined. This is why it is the number 1 goal of most Blacks to move away from Black neighborhoods, to white neighborhoods. Even Blacks are racist against their kind.
Posted by at 7:58 PM on November 14
“Although this (realitor screening) has been painted as unfair, it reflected the desires of the people who lived there. They wanted to live among their own people. They wanted to live in a white community”.
If we’re going to say common folks have nothing to do with immigration – it’s at the beheast of the elites, we should also be fair and blame the ‘elites’ for this realitor practice during the 50’s. We shouldn’t paint these 50’s people as all racists. Just, realists. lol
“The neighborhood where I grew up is now a wasteland. Whites are still a majority—55 percent—”
I wonder how many of those are young people? And if the census is accurate.
Posted by Mr. Pibb at 8:37 PM on November 14
This story is so familiar it hurts to read it. Denis wrote about his own experiences but could have included my name and millions of other white people.
I will never understand why blacks follow whites knowing they are not wanted.
Posted by Chet at 9:17 PM on November 14
An article that has hit most of us, yet Whites on the left and the right will still deny it has anything to do with the “color” of ones’s skin. It is getting harder and harder to find ANY forum that doesn’t want to ban a poster for speaking the truth about race. Listen to any “conservative” talk show and you will find that THEY defend minorities in their little ways. They will hang up or ridicule any caller who speaks the truth and says it is ALL about race.
They constantly say that it isn’t about Obama’s race that is the problem, it is his policies otherwise if it were Thomas Sowell, Condi, etc they would vote for them in a heartbeat! WHAT? They have no concept of race, period.
I listened to Billy Cunningham and Alan Hunt one night and I had to shut off the radio, they got my blood boiling so, when they started saying this very thing! These eggheads would never defend the White race and their heritage, just so they can appear non-racist and pander to the blacks and hispanics in their audiences. Christian radio does the same thing!
Posted by at 10:23 PM on November 14
Familiar story for me. I grew up in Chicago in the fifties through the late sixties. My family fled due to the black riots and threat of busing. Five years later it was a war zone thanks to the Great Society and the curse of diversity.
My family lived in a nice suburb, but that only lasted 20 years. Now it’s a ghetto. I moved to Seattle and have lived here for 30 years. Sad to say, it too is becoming a multicultural hell hole. I have one more ace in the hole and that is some land on an island in Puget Sound. I think I might be able to live out the rest of my days there while America crumbles. I have encouraged my kids to consider Australia or Ireland.
Posted by at 10:24 PM on November 14
“The neighborhood where I grew up is now a wasteland. Whites are still a majority—55 percent—”
Crime statistics show that when a formerly white neighborhood nears 50% Black, the chances of a White person in that area being a victim of crime is 100%. He’s not being paranoid or prejudiced to worry if he’ll be jumped when he visits what used to be his old neighborhood. He will be. As Thomas Wolfe said, “You can never go home again.”
Posted by at 11:20 PM on November 14
In Houston, where my kids and I live and where I make my living (in manufacturing), you find few places where Whites can live in peaceful, pleasant, and secure neighborhoods among other Whites. This is especially true for working-class folks.
Right now, we’re looking for a home to lease and almost everything available in our price range ($1250/month max.) is in an area dominated by mexicans. From Mexico mexicans. You may ask ‘so what? What’s the problem?’ and there would be no problem if these people were generally quiet, clean, friendly, law-abiding and courteous… which they are generally not.
Trashy yards, cars parked blocking the street, gang graffiti spray-painted on garage doors and fences, sullen, hateful stares, gangs of boys wandering around playing ‘chicken’ with drivers, loud, thumping ‘music’, taco stands…
The Houston my wife and I grew up in, in the ‘50’s, is dead.
My wife was talking in her sleep after a long disappointing day of house-hunting… she said “I wanna go home.”
Broke my heart.
Posted by steve at 11:55 PM on November 14
Same thing happened to Yonkers NY where my father grew up. Same thing happened to the suburban NJ town where I grew up.
And the same thing is going to happen to the town I now live in which is 99% white. The state of NJ is now forcing every town in the state to take in their ‘fair share’ of low income housing.
This will result in a 20-30% increase in population in our town – which will be mostly blacks and hispanics. Goodbye nice town, time to move again…
Posted by at 12:11 AM on November 15
“It took only twenty years to destroy California 1970-1990”
Absolutely true. Only twenty short years. It is a mindboggling thought, but what the poster said is true and I can attest to it. In fact, it is sometimes still unbelievable even to people like me who lived through it. If this isn’t a lesson and a warning to Americans in other states on how illegal immigration and mass unassimilated immigration of all kinds is capable of totally destroying traditional America in a super short time, then nothing will be. Get ready for press 2 for, bankrupt hospitals, and just plain assaults on your common sensibilities.
Posted by Bobby at 1:45 AM on November 15
I’m new on here so forgive my ignorance. I understand all of this started in the 1960s when they changed the immigration laws but I don’t understand why they did it. It’s illogical and unnatural for a race of people to allow themselves to be replaced by another. These political leaders pursuing this agenda are guaranteed to be swept from power leaving their children to live in a bleak future. Having all the money in the world won’t make a bit of difference if your a tiny minority with all sides pushing against you. It just doesn’t make any sense. We used to be the greatest nation in the world and now we are a bankrupt country facing a third world future.
Posted by Richard at 3:28 AM on November 15
“I’d like to grow apple trees, and it takes years to do that, but you can’t take trees with you when you move. So we are probably going …to buy a rural place and go there on weekends and fix it up. When I retire in fifteen years we’ll move there
“Over decades, these changes add up to significant improvements… By staying in one place, your property improves and you improve the community… That is the way our ancestors in Europe lived. They were tied to a place. I feel that I am never going to live in a true community, that I am all the time planting and that I am never going to get the harvest.”
(Denis didn’t get the house. He died a few months after telling me this.)
………………………………………
What a sad story! It left tears in my eyes. And it’s so true for so many of us.
I was prompted to look up Fairview Village. It’s part of Camden, and I came up with some interesting stuff.
“Yorkship Village (known as Fairview today) is historically the nation’s first federally-funded planned community. The concept of a planned community came from Europe in 1918. The architectural theory was to incorporate the ingredients that made the ideal self-contained community”. Subsequently, Yorkship Village was the creation of architects that resulted in a new village, reminiscent of an old English village, that appears to reach back further in history, yet utilizes the innovative planning concepts of that era.”
http://www.fairview.ws/maps/maps.html
Based on statistics reported to the FBI, Camden was the third-most dangerous city in the United States in 2002, and has been ranked the nation’s most dangerous city in 2004 and 2005.
In 2004, Camden was declared “America’s Most Dangerous City”, up from third place in 2003 and topping the 354 cities studied. The city was named “Most Dangerous” again in 2005 out of 369 cities ranked nationwide, with Detroit, Michigan and St. Louis, Missouri in second and third places. In the 2006 survey, Camden dropped down to the fifth spot — behind St. Louis, Detroit, Flint, Michigan and Compton, California. The fact is that Camden remains one of the most dangerous cities in the country.
From 1899 to 1967, Camden was the home of New York Shipbuilding Corp, which at its World War II peak was the largest and most productive shipyard in the world. In 1962, the first commercial nuclear-powered ship, the NS Savannah, was launched in Camden.
The “Fairview Village” section of Camden was a planned European-style garden village built during World War I to house New York Shipbuilding Corp. workers.
At Camden’s peak, 40,000 worked at New York Shipbuilding, and another 10,000 were employed at RCA. RCA had 23 out of 25 of its factories in Camden. Campbell Soup was a major employer. However, by 1969, Camden had been losing jobs and residents due in large part to urban decay and racial tensions.
In 1950, Camden’s population numbered 125,000. Now it iis 80,000.The population is presently 53%black, 39% Latino, and 16.8% white. In 2000, 29% of Camden residents identified themselves as being of Puerto Rican heritage. This was the third highest proportion of Puerto Ricans in a municipality on the US mainland, behind only Holyoke, Mass. and Hartford, Conn.
The population is quite young with 34.6% under the age of 18. 44% of the city’s residents live in poverty, the highest poverty rate in the nation. The city had a median household income of $18,007, the lowest of all U.S. communities over 65,000, making it America’s poorest city. [as well as the most dangerous]
[Wikipedia]
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
In other words: It is America’s poorest, youngest, and most dangerous city! And 5/6 non-white.
I’ll wager, furthermore, that if you were to break down those classified by the census as “white” (Arabs, Pakistanis, etc.) many would not be what most Amreners would consider white, thus reducing the real white American-born population to an even tinier figure. This is a microcosm of what has been happening in many American cities today, and what will be happening in other cities tomorrow.
Posted by ghw at 4:07 AM on November 15
At the large establishment where I work in NY City, there are many blacks and other so-called “minorities” (actually the majority).
Many or most of the whites there have a long commute in from the exurbs. Very few live in the city, and few even live close to it. One friend of mine drives 60 miles in to work. That’s 120 miles a day round trip! It’s nothing unusual. Others have an even longer commute. I understand there are even people who commute now from Pensylvania to NYC.
Of these co-workers, most of their parents had fled to the [still white] suburbs way back when the city started darkening in the 50s and 60s. Now, the children of those urban refugees have moved farther out into the rural exurbs as the colored tide has followed them into the nearer suburbs.
Nonetheless, race being the tabooed subject that it is, you almost never hear anyone make any reference to it. They claim they’re looking for “better schools”, “open space”, “nice neighborhoods”, “low crime”, etc. These are all code words, of course. But do they realize it? I wonder. Many of these people are (at least superficially) good liberals who conform to the official colorblind ideology; and I often wonder if they even can be honest enough with themselves – even inside their own minds!!! – to admit that race had anything to do with it at all. Are their minds so numbed by brainwashing that they can’t realize, or honestly face, WHY they keep moving farther and farther out? Oh, but it has NOTHING to do with race! Of course not. How dare you suggest it!
But going beyond that, what’s still more ironic and completely illogical is that some of them, trying to be genuinely helpful, even advise their colored co-workers on how to buy a house in the suburbs, where to look, which are “nice” neighborhoods, etc. (though maybe not in THEIR area!). They have bought the leftist notion that blacks just need to get out of the “bad” areas in order to improve their lives; and if they can just go to a “good” school [ie. white] in a “good” neighborhood [white], then everything will be fine. But if that happens, then these schools and neighborhoods won’t be white anymore!
Don’t these fools have the sense to think it through and realize that this is going to bring about the very conditions that they and their parents ran away from? Did they ever THINK about this? Do they DARE to? They seem to think that Tyrone and his wife are nice people, so Tyrone’s family wouldn’t be objectionable to have around — but just them. They limit their thinking to just one example. Sure, but it doesn’t work that way. And there’s the flaw. What about when Tyrone’s friends and relatives come around and like what they see, and then THEIR friends and relatives? When there are just two or three black families scattered thinly through the community — they’re no problem. But it never ends at that. In twenty years, the neighborhood will be shot and whites (and blacks too) will be fleeing again. We’ve all seen this happen. Do sappy well-meaning whites never learn? They foul their own nest out of their wish to be generous, but without thinking of the consequences. In another generation, THEIR children will be fleeing to the outer-outer-exurbs and driving 200 miles a day, in search of “nice” schools and “better” neighborhoods! Are they unable to see that these are just euphemisms for “white”?
Posted by at 5:42 AM on November 15
Big changes like this happened all over the country. I know of several towns that were nice places to live, until the government set about to destroy them with welfare housing and forcing lawful neighborhoods to accept lawbreakers.
The changes were intended by government. They wanted to destroy quiet American communities where people trusted each other.
Posted by at 7:43 AM on November 15
I grew up in Baltimore City in the late 50’s and 60’s. Today, growing up in a major city would be dangerous but back then, we had a neighborhood too. All the kids knew each other. Some of us went to the Public School #215 and some went to the local Catholic schools. We all rode our bikes together in the summer, skated, played dodge ball in the school yard, hopscotch and on Halloween night (the only night we were allowed out after the street lights came on), we would go all over the place. The schools I attended were all white, except for one year, 1963, when they tried to integrate our elementary school. It was a catastrophe and thankfully, they shipped the blacks back to their own neighborhood schools. When I reached high school, my school was 98% white. Today, my former high school has been renamed for a Communist – W.E.B. Du Bois. Sad because Northern High School at the time I attended there, was ranked as having one of the best high school cirriculums in the city.
Today, my old neighborhood (Highlandtown), now renamed Little Canton, is one of three neighborhoods in Baltimore City that are all white. Old row homes, with their marble steps, have been renovated and are now selling for over $200,000. My parents paid $7,800.00 for their Highlandtown house. Larger Canton and Littly Italy are the only other 2 remaining neighborhoods left to whites in Baltimore City. Even back during the 1968 riots, the people of Littly Italy, with only baseball bats to defend themselves, threatened to bash the heads in of any black who came into their neighborhood to try and destroy their homes and businesses and Little Italy, Highlandtown and Canton remained the only 3 neighborhoods not ravaged by the rioting and looting.
I think back on my old neighborhood and all the fun we had growing up. My kids got a taste of that same fun because we moved to Johnson City, Tennessee when they were very young. Today, 16 years later, I see the same things happening to JC. We get a swarm of hispanics every picking season and while the blacks still remain in their own neighborhood, there has been a steady increase of black crime and the only high school is having it’s share of increased black violence.
I feel really sad that so many kids will NEVER experience the same childhood that we did.
Posted by Gayle Sollenberger at 8:07 AM on November 15
Check out National Drug Intelligence Center maps and data about Mexican drug operations in the United States. (16 pgs.)
Last night’s news feed included an 
