Pervasive wrongdoing can activate community ‘antibodies,’ local leaders and groups that tackle local problems.

By Robert L. Woodson Sr.

I was born in segregated Philadelphia in 1937. When I was growing up amid ruthless discrimination, the young and elderly could still walk the streets safely without fear of being attacked. We were denied civil rights that we later fought to be rightfully given to us. But we also enjoyed a relative standard of safety.

From Emancipation on, peaceful black cities were the norm, not the exception, in America. Yes, there were places where black prosperity provoked envy: In Oklahoma in 1921, a white mob set fire to the Black Wall Street area in the Greenwood district of Tulsa. But peaceful black cities existed across the country, including in Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Illinois and Mississippi.

My hometown of long ago was a completely different place from the Philadelphia of the post-civil-rights era. It became plagued by crime, poverty and feuding gangs. By the early 1990s, such cities as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were each reporting between 900 and 2,200 homicides a year and homicide rates that exceeded 30 per 100,000 residents. People who could afford to flee to the suburbs vanished, taking tax revenue with them.

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