THE EXODUS
IN APRIL 2017, Demarion Duncan learned he’d have to move. That in itself would not be the end of the world; the McBride public housing project in Cairo, Illinois, where the 12-year-old Duncan lived with his mom, dad, and two younger siblings, was falling apart. A complex of 19 stucco-and-brick two-story apartment buildings abutting the Mississippi River levee on the backside of town, McBride was home to 103 families, including many of Duncan’s classmates, friends, and basketball teammates. But while a few units at McBride were still well maintained, others had mold in the bathrooms and flaking lead paint on the staircases. Heat worked sporadically; during cold snaps, Duncan, like many of his neighbors, bundled up and turned on the oven for warmth. Empty units and entire buildings were infested with roaches and rats.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development had been debating what to do with public housing in Cairo for seven years and two presidential administrations, since federal inspections first uncovered grift, decay, and racial discrimination at the Alexander County Housing Authority. The mostly black residents of McBride and Elmwood, a sister project nearly two dozen blocks north that housed about 80 families, lived in squalor, while the white housing authority brass, under Executive Director James Wilson, blew public funds on boozy Vegas getaways and prioritized maintenance of the predominantly white high-rise across town. In the final year of the Obama administration, HUD placed the housing authority under receivership, but it left the future of Cairo’s public housing unresolved.
Cairo was the kind of troubled small town Donald Trump purported to champion—bypassed by the modern economy and starving for new investment. And no investment was as critical to its future as housing. Cairo’s fate would be one of the first major housing policy decisions of the Trump era, offering a glimpse of which priorities were real and which ones weren’t. So when HUD called a meeting in early April 2017, residents of Elmwood and McBride crowded into the pews at the nearby First Missionary Baptist Church, hoping for some good news.
Instead, HUD announced it was condemning the two projects. Residents would need to be out by July 2018, and HUD would give them vouchers for new apartments. The nicer high-rises across town, which had been favored with more attention and resources over the decades, would stay open, and a few residents would move into units there or find other arrangements nearby—but most of the African American families living in the segregated projects would have to leave Cairo. HUD claimed the city of 2,560 was “dying,” and that it would be pointless to replace or renovate 80-year-old buildings in a dying city. Such a sentence would be self-fulfilling—boarding up Cairo’s public housing would lead to an exodus of people, jobs, and funding.
Faced with the prospect of being scattered across the Midwest, Duncan and his classmates asked their sixth-grade teacher, Mary Beth Goff, whether there was anything they could do. With Ms. Goff’s help, they decided to write letters to the man who said their city was dying, the man with the power to make things right.
“Dear Ben Carson...”
CAIRO—RHYMES WITH “PHARAOH”—anchors a part of southern Illinois known as Egypt, not far from the past or present hamlets of Dongola, Karnak, and Thebes. Egypt is hilly to the point of mountainous, but at its bottom-most point it drops down to an alluvial plain until it is almost perfectly flat—not like a pancake, but like a waffle, with level fields of soybeans and corn bisected by a grid of levees. The city’s location on a teardrop of land where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi has bestowed on it an outsize place in American history and the annals of engineering. It is enclosed by seven miles of levees, 64 feet high, and can be entered from the rest of Illinois only by driving under an 80-ton floodgate.
Nearly 200 families were forced to move from Cairo public housing, including Demarion Duncan’s.
Generations of civic leaders have stood at the confluence and envisioned a booming port, an intermodal hub, a new New York. Early land speculators swindled investors with a dazzling prospectus depicting domed buildings and steamboats, but they neglected to account for floods, leaving one of their rumored marks, Charles Dickens, to describe his investment as “a dismal swamp, on which the half built houses rot away” and “wretched wanderers…droop and die and lay their bones.” River traffic peaked in 1880, and the 10 railroads whittled down to one. The casino went to Metropolis. The nuclear plant went to Paducah, Kentucky. Cairo has lost nearly 90 percent of its population since its 1920s peak of more than
