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