Walter Palmer, 90, vividly recalls how poverty stalked him — first, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he was born, and then in Philadelphia, where his family moved to escape the low-wage, seasonal work many Black people were relegated to in the oceanside city. It pushed him into the juvenile delinquency that brought him in contact with a firearm.
Born in North Philly nearly 40 years after Palmer, Donnell Drinks, 51, grew up in similar circumstances. As a result, he became homeless, the parental figure to his two younger brothers, and a drug dealer. He also became a gunshot victim, and a convicted first-degree murderer on death row — all before his 18th birthday.
[This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America, as the last of a three-part series. Sign up for its newsletters here.]
Like so many other Black Philadelphians across the decades, Palmer and Drinks grew up in grinding poverty, their lives punctuated by gun violence. Their experiences speak to a long-running truth: Across the country, poverty drives people to commit violence — and in no big city is that connection as acute as it is in Philadelphia.
Gun violence and poverty in Philadelphia remain inextricably linked, with Black citizens at the highest risk of experiencing both. This fact has been documented in government, academic, and press reports for more than a century — from W.E.B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking work in “The Philadelphia Negro” to Philadelphia Police Department data that recorded unprecedented killings during the Covid pandemic. The twin evils remain deadly even as tens of millions in public and private funding are spent in attempts to address their root causes.
“Racism and poverty have played a major role in helping to perpetuate a lot of the crime that takes place in our society,” Palmer, now an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said matter of factly. “How do you account for 250 years of chattel slavery? The burnings, the lynchings, the castrations? How can you just dismiss that and think that some of that stuff doesn’t get carried forward?”
‘Being a professor doesn’t protect you’
Palmer bristles when he speaks of growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1940s, of living with his parents and 11 siblings in a two-room apartment near 36th and Market streets. The family, headed by his mother who left school in the fourth grade and his father who dropped out in the eighth, was so poor it received free food and coal from the Catholic church.
“I had a mother who I loved dearly, who would have given her life for her children,” he said between sips of coffee in a South Broad Street shop.
But by age 12, Palmer was arrested for the first of many times, for burglarizing a building on Penn’s campus. He got shot in the arm at 14 by a rival teen because he was outside his neighborhood, he suspects.
“My response was to go back to the neighborhood and get guys to try to look for him. An eye-for-an-eye, a tooth-for-a tooth is embedded in a lot of the culture,” said Palmer, who was also stabbed four times and arrested for attempted murder, rioting, and assault and battery in his teens.
His mother, father, and later a stepfather, were “people who had a moral compass and who were proud,” Palmer said. But he believes he struggled because of the swirl of crime, poverty and despair that characterized the racially segregated Black Bottom, now part of University City.
Still, he managed to graduate from high school in 1953, then moved through a series of jobs at city hospitals. He started to get his life together, earning a teaching degree from Cheyney State University and a law degree from Howard University. Since 1990, Palmer has been a lecturer at Penn, teaching courses on American racism, institutional racism, and social change.
Decades after he survived being shot, gun violence found its way back into Palmer’s life. Ten years ago, robbers shot his son, Marcus, multiple times while he worked as a security guard at a 7-Eleven. Though Marcus survived, bullets damaged his stomach, kidney, liver, and bladder.
Palmer was so angered by the attack that it triggered him to seek vigilante justice, he recalled. “I went looking for the guys who did it. I took 5,000 flyers and took 20 guys with me and went all through the neighborhood putting flyers in doors and offering a reward. I went on TV and said, ‘Read my lips. I’m coming after you,’” said Palmer, who didn’t get to the two gunmen before they were arrested.
“Being a professor doesn’t protect you.”
Philly’s poverty
Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has found, the disparity between Black and White wealth at the median in the city is as big as it was in the 1960s. Twenty-seven percent of the city’s Black families live below the poverty line, on less than $26,000 a year, while about half as many white families do. Overall, the city’s poverty rate stands at 21.7 percent, the lowest level in more than 20 years, due in part to some federal assistance programs launched during the pandemic, according to the Pew Charitable Trust’s report “Philadelphia 2024: The State of the City.”
With the Covid pandemic over and fatalities trending down, Philly still remains in the throes of a deep poverty and gun violence crisis. While the 410 homicides recorded in the city during 2023 represented a 20 percent decline from 2022, that number was still higher than the 386 slayings in New York and the 327 in Los Angeles, cities with populations five and two-and-a-half times larger, respectively.
As of November 5, homicides were down 48 percent compared to the same time last year — from 360 to 216, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. Through the first 10 months of 2024, the number of people shot was down 37 percent, from 1,480 to 931.
A visit to communities like Strawberry Mansion, Allegheny West, Kensington, and Kingsessing — where crime rates are high and median incomes are low — shows just how much work remains to be done. A higher number of homes here are in disrepair and abandoned, fallout from the factory jobs that began disappearing from these communities in the 1960s and 1970s.
‘Rich enough to eat every night’
The city’s social safety net also missed Donnell Drinks. Even though he was 15 at the time, law enforcement officers, he said, treated him like an adult when they evicted his family in the 1980s. No one asked his age nor where he and his brothers would be sleeping that night. So he became a robber and drug dealer to support himself and his two younger brothers in place of their absentee father and drug-addicted mother.
“I wasn’t a bad person, nor was I dumb,” Drinks said. “It fell on me to keep the family together. At that age, and with my lack of skills, my options were minimal. If everyone on my block was going to work on Wall Street, I would have done that. If everyone on my block were building buildings, I’d be doing that. It was convenient, and there was the opportunity to do negative things.”
“So I sold drugs.”
Amid the dealing and dysfunction, school was not a priority. “School was pie-in-the-sky down the line,” he said. “It wasn’t immediate. You’re telling me to get this education, and just maybe, in four more years of education, I can have a good life. But I didn’t eat last night. I didn’t finish my homework because the daylight went out and we didn’t have no lights in the house. Do you really think school was important to me?”
It was 1991, the year after Philadelphia first recorded 500 murders, when Drinks, 17, and his 22-year-old police officer girlfriend broke into a home and killed a man during a botched robbery.
The facts of the crime he committed are part of the open book that is his life: The couple targeted a man named Darryl Huntley for a home-invasion robbery. Huntley fought back and shot Drinks, who in turn stabbed him to death. Drinks was arrested while hospitalized, recovering from his gunshot wound.
During his 27 years behind bars, Drinks’ parents died. He started living anew, earning his GED, college credits, and becoming conscious of the societal currents that derailed him and so many other Black Philadelphians. His then-girlfriend is still in prison, serving a life sentence without parole.
Drinks fears for young people who are growing up in the same places and conditions that harmed him. He recalled a boy in his mentoring program who was so much like himself. “He just kept saying, ‘I want to be rich. I want to be rich.’ So, I asked him, how rich does he want to be? He looked me in the eyes and said he wants to be rich enough to eat every night. This is in Philadelphia! In America! A 15-year-old boy saying he wants to be rich enough to eat,” Drinks said, in disbelief.
“I don’t want to get on a soap box, but we can’t speak on gun violence when we don’t speak on poverty,” he said.
In 2018, in response to a Supreme Court ruling, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner offered Drinks a time-served resentencing deal. He’s been free for six years, but state law requires that he remain on parole for life.
Freedom has enabled a whirlwind life: He got married in 2021, co-founded a nonprofit mentoring program for at-risk teens and young adults called G.R.O.W.N (Gaining Respect Over Our Worst Night), and was hired as a coordinator with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.
A different approach
Robert Woodson, 87, also has stories to tell about growing up poor in South Philadelphia, but his are, by-and-large, fond memories of Black people owning small businesses that catered to the Black community. The son of a Virginia-born World War I veteran and a mother from South Carolina with a fifth-grade education, Woodson dropped out of high school in 1954 to join the Air Force.
For the better part of the last 50 years, he’s been pushing the philosophy that low-income Black people can help themselves. He believes that a lack of personal responsibility — not racism — drives crime and poverty in cities like his hometown and his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C. He knows that belief puts him at odds with many others. Government has a bad track record of addressing poverty and violence, he says, so community members should be encouraged and assisted to take on the task.
“A lot of what grassroots people do, they do instinctively,” Woodson said. “But scholars never go and ask or study them.” As a result, he believes, success stories — like the work of the House of Umoja in Philadelphia, which was credited with quelling street gang warfare in the early through mid-1970s — are not being replicated.
Woodson embedded with the West Philly organization for two years after earning a math degree from Cheyney University and a master of social work from the University of Pennsylvania. Now, he runs the Woodson Center on K Street in Washington, DC. The center studies “low-income, high-crime, toxic neighborhoods” to learn how leaders and groups succeeded in those environments, then provides assistance, money, and promotions. “The answers exist among the people who are suffering the problems,” he said. “The biggest barrier isn’t racism, it’s elitism.”
But Woodson’s life hasn’t been directly touched by gun violence. Palmer, who is still living with its aftershocks, knew and worked with Woodson on various community initiatives in the 1960s and, while he says he understands Woodson’s embrace of a conservative ideology, he disagrees with his old friend about gun violence’s causes and remedies.
“The whole idea of saying racism is not institutional is absurd,” Palmer said. “Racism, discrimination, colorism, were all used to prevent Blacks from getting jobs, from getting education. These are institutions, and institutions do not exist in a vacuum.”
“But Black people are not monolithic. People have choices. Freedom is the ability to make choices,” Palmer added. “He’s on his trajectory, I’m on mine.”
MORE SOLUTIONS TO THE POVERTY PROBLEM