لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
came into town on a highway from Atlanta, the shining symbol of a young and prosperous and growing New South. It was February 2013 and I was making the first of several trips to Albany, Georgia, in the southwestern part of the state, sixty miles from the Alabama border. Jimmy Carter’s evangelism took root here. It is the home Ray Charles evokes when he says Georgia’s on his mind. Stately antebellum plantations line the highway into town, rare historic gems that still stand because this area avoided direct fire during the Civil War.
Today, millionaires and billionaires host lavish retreats in the mansions and hunt quail on the former farmland that surrounds them. The celebrity chef Paula Deen is one of Albany’s most famous daughters; when she got herself into trouble waxing nostalgic about plantation-style dinners with black servants, she was probably talking about her experiences in these houses. To be fair, jobs on the plantations are coveted by some of Albany’s black residents. Ask around and some people will tell you that they pay better than most other businesses in the area.
As the Great Recession came to a close, the roll call of the nation’s poorest cities was topped by familiar Rust Belt names — Reading, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; Bloomington, Indiana. Most of these cities had been intensely poor for decades, but Albany, which tied Bloomington for third place on the list in 2010, was different. Its collapse was recent — and fast. Between 2007 and 2010, Albany’s poverty rate jumped 12 points, to a record high of 39.9 percent. More than two thirds of Albany’s 76,000 residents are black, and since 2010, their poverty rate has climbed even higher, to nearly 42 percent.
Albany is, of course, only a more extreme example of something that’s happening across the country. Not counting the elderly, among whom Social Security has driven a sharp and lasting decline in poverty, a greater share of Americans are poor today than at any time since the 1960s. In the United States in 2013, 45.3 million people lived below the official poverty line, with incomes of less than $12,000 a year for a two-adult, two-child family.[*] A third of them were children. Twenty million people live in what economists call deep poverty, with incomes of less than half the official poverty line. That’s almost three times the number of people who lived in deep poverty in 1976.
Historically, the poverty rate has tracked the overall economy, but that’s no longer true. The period between the 2001 and 2007 recessions was the first expansionary business cycle on record in which the poverty rate increased, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Census Bureau data. It’s also the first expansionary cycle on record during which incomes in the middle quintile fell. A return to the prerecession economy won’t alter the trend because, as Albany’s story shows, the problems began with the boom, not the bust.
Even if the economy continues to grow, the effects of the past decade will linger. “While the poverty rate changes, the rate of escaping from poverty doesn’t,” says Austin Nichols, formerly a labor economist at the Urban Institute. “When you have a shock of poverty, because of recessions, say, and poverty goes up, it has a very long-term impact.” Absent a significant intervention, the 14.7 million kids who live in poverty today are extremely likely to become poor adults.
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But if you scratch the surface of even the relatively well-off areas, you begin to see how a town in which four out of ten people are poor can collapse in on itself. It’s a process defined not by big, dramatic moments of pain but by a quiet, steady throb — a pain you can manage, until you can’t. It manifests in people like Floyd Faulk, a white, fifty-two-year-old lifelong resident who’s gone from operating a thriving drapery-design business to clambering around rooftops to install satellite dishes. He keeps the design business open only to stave off formal bankruptcy.
Downtown, near an eighty-five-year-old railway bridge that spans the river, there’s a small park with live oaks covered in Spanish moss. On Broad Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, the shops stand empty, their windows bearing seemingly permanent for rent signs. The few tenants that remain are bottom-feeding ventures such as personal-finance shops and rapid-refund outfits. LaNicia Hart’s storefront is one of the exceptions: the display window is filled with meticulously arranged sportswear decked out with fraternity symbols. Hart, who grew up in Albany, is a young entrepreneur who in many ways embodies the New South, in which a black middle class is said to thrive. She returned to her hometown after college to open an embroidery business. But even her store offers evidence of Albany’s weak economy: most days, she keeps the front door locked while she fulfills online orders in the back.
Faulk and Hart represent the 60 percent of Albany residents, black and white, who are keeping themselves above the poverty line. They are notable for having remained despite possessing the resources to leave. If there’s one simple explanation for the area’s spike in poverty, it’s that when thousands of jobs left, the middle-class workers who once held them left, too, creating a more densely poor city. “We had a functioning school, we really did,” said Cindy Towns, who teaches civics at Dougherty Comprehensive High School and sent her three daughters there. “But families started moving, looking for opportunity elsewhere. And those families that left and moved were the ones who were more involved. They were the ones who couldmove.”
We were sitting in the classroom of Ashley Mitchell, one of Towns’s colleagues, at the end of a long school day. Mitchell, who graduated from Dougherty High herself, ticked off the challenges that have accompanied the city’s increasing poverty. “Low test scores, lack of literacy, a lot more children being diagnosed with ADHD, learning disabilities. The school pride, the school culture goes down. Nobody wants to send their kids to school where the school is struggling. So when we lost that pool of kids” — she finally took a breath — “it really affected the school.”
It’s well known to Albany’s black residents that whites are fleeing to neighboring Lee County, taking tax dollars with them. The county’s name is often invoked as a slur:Well, she lives out in Lee County now, you know. People in Albany accuse white real-estate brokers of steering buyers away from the city. On one of my earliest visits to Albany, I sat in on a meeting of the Economic Development Commission that addressed race relations in town. During the discussion, an officer at the Marine Corps logistics base, the largest employer in town, described the challenges that mixed-race couples on his base have had in Albany. Integrated relationships are “just not normal here,” he said, twisting his face in frustration.
Near Dougherty High, at a food bank in a mostly black area on the east side of town, I met Juanita Nixon, who works for her church’s family-resource center, which provides emergency meals to the poor. When I asked her what Albany’s recession had meant for the people she served, she echoed an answer I heard all over the city: they’ve lost hope. She turned to Eliza McCall, the food bank’s spokesperson, and joked, “If you put hope on the inventory, I’d order it all.”
McCall estimated that the food bank would have to give out more than 11 million pounds of food this year to get just one meal a day to every person in the county who is in crisis. The bank can meet only a third of that demand. Nixon has worked for her church for twenty-five years but has never seen anything like the situation today. “When I leave here,” she said, waving toward the loading dock, “I’ll come in contact with six or seven families that need help.”
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Jones grew up sixty miles away, in Fort Gaines, Georgia, and moved to Albany in 1978. “Right out of high school,” he recalled. “There was a lot of work here. Firestone was here. Textile was here. Miller Brewing was coming here. You had Procter and Gamble. You had Georgia-Pacific.”
Shortly after arriving in Albany, he went to work at the Bobs Candies factory, where he stayed for more than twenty-five years. “I never got laid off from there, and I liked that. It wasn’t a lot of money. I was just old-fashioned and dedicated to what I was doing,” he said. He started at $5.45 an hour and worked his way up to $19, with health insurance, retirement, and, most important, guaranteed work. “We worked a lot of overtime, so I got the hours. And that was great.”
As Albany’s manufacturing sector developed in the 1920s, many plants settled in poor, black neighborhoods, but they gave their best jobs to white residents. Bobs Candies was notable for hiring black workers who lived in the neighborhood.
Bob McCormack founded the company in 1919. It was run by three generations of McCormacks and weathered the Depression, the sugar rationing that accompanied World War II, and a tornado that flattened its facilities. In 1950, Gregory Harding Keller, Bob McCormack’s brother-in-law, invented a machine to twist soft candy into spiral stripes, which allowed the mass production of candy canes for the first time. “We were the largest peppermint-candy maker in the world,” Jones bragged.
“We had a wonderful workforce, and it was predominantly African Americans,” said Greg McCormack, who was the last in his family to run the business. “As many African Americans went into the workforce, there was a lot of discrimination, and Bobs was one of the only places that paid the same for blacks and whites.” It was an attractive place for black workers trying to get in on the midcentury economic boom, and its reputation still held when Jones came looking for work.
“Major would be a great example, I think, of someone that might not have been employable today in most industries,” McCormack said. “He was young, and I think one of the hardest things when you’re young is just to get work. And you learned job skills at Bobs that would help you later on. Major really embraced that.” Jones said that he twice turned down promotions to supervisor at Bobs — “You’ve got to constantly mentor people,” he explained — before finally accepting the position for the night shift. He prospered.
Candymakers have long fought Congress over sugar prices, which they say are inflated because of U.S. sugar policy. Sugar producers, of course, argue that the candymakers are crying wolf in order to gain access to subsidized Brazilian and Chinese sugar. Whatever the cause, candymakers have spent decades watching their supply costs gain ground on their revenues. To compensate, they’ve begun taking advantage of free-trade agreements such as NAFTA. In 2001, Bobs opened a plant in Reynosa, a Mexican border town. For McCormack, that was the beginning of the end. “There’s not a single red-and-white candy cane packed in a twelve-cane box made in the United States anymore,” he complained. “And it’s a shame. And part of the issue we had in the family is, I just didn’t want to do that.”
McCormack still complains about sugar prices, but he also criticizes the company’s largest customer: Walmart. For candymakers, sugar prices are so critical because doing business with Walmart demands cutting costs to the bone. Suppliers compete fiercely to remain in the retail behemoth’s favor. “You wake up one day and you lose thirty percent of your business because you didn’t your cut your price by a penny,” McCormack said.
At Bobs, these pressures led to unprecedented rounds of layoffs. Jones was surprised when they kept him on as a supervisor even as people with college degrees were laid off. “I remember that day like it was yesterday,” he said, his voice catching.
In 2005, the McCormacks sold Bobs to Catterton, a private-equity firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, that manages more than $4 billion. It’s a midsize player in the overall market, but it’s one of the largest private-equity firms that focuses on the consumer sector. In 2002, Catterton began buying up candymakers. It acquired several flagging divisions from Kraft Foods and pulled them together under the umbrella of Farley’s and Sathers Candy Company. It grabbed Jujyfruits and Chuckles from Hershey’s. Later it bought Brach’s Confections. In 2012, it merged these companies with Ferrara Pan, which makes Red Hots and Lemonheads, to create the third-largest candymaker in the country, with annual sales of $1 billion. Catterton continues to hold a majority stake.
Catterton closed Bobs Albany plant within months of buying the company. “I think they gave the workers thirty days’ notice or something,” Jones said. Nobody saw it coming. “You’re just thinking, That won’t happen with this company.” Even with his severance — a relatively generous year’s pay — and the savings he’d managed over twenty-five years, Jones still needed to cut lawns to make ends meet. He wasn’t officially poor. He had his savings, and his wife, Vieliene, had a teaching job. But their years of economic security were over.
