Gun violence in Philadelphia has defined and diminished its Black community

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

On a frigid winter morning, just steps away from his North Philadelphia school, Faheem Thomas-Childs didn’t stand a chance against the nearly 100 bullets two warring drug gangs fired in his direction. Struck in the face and rendered unconscious, 10-year-old Faheem, who went by “Poppy,” died five days later, on Feb. 16, 2004.

By the time Faheem was born in 1993, criminologists had already flagged Philadelphia as one of the nation’s homicide capitals, with the city averaging more than 400 slayings a year that decade. But the impact of Faheem’s death reverberated across the City of Brotherly Love like few others before or since.

Calls to crack down on violent offenders and their guns grew louder. Instead of holding a candlelight vigil and balloon release, nearly 10,000 people staged the March to Save the Children. They hoisted signs reading “Bury Guns, Not Children.” Marchers told reporters they were fed up with guns, with gangs, with murders. At long last, many believed, Philadelphia had reached the tipping point with gun violence — especially Black residents in high-crime areas like the one where Faheem lived and died. But more than 20 years later, such resolve and enthusiasm is hard to find.

Even as Faheem’s story opened Philadelphia’s modern-day chapter on gun violence, it was, in fact, just a link in a chain of harms that has wounded Philadelphia’s Black community for centuries. Its legacy can be traced from W.E.B. Du Bois’ crucial study of Philadelphia in 1899 to the recent spike in homicides during the COVID-19 pandemic to the 2023 election of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, a Black woman who ran on a platform of being aggressive about reducing gun crimes.

What has remained consistent, even as Philadelphia experiences a record drop in gun violence, is that Black people are dying from it at rates that far exceed those of other Philadelphians. Since 2015, more than 80% of victims and 79% of people arrested for gun violence have been Black. That concentration, concluded a report from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, “means that the vast majority of those arrested for gun violence have themselves been previously traumatized, often as a witness to previous violent acts.”

Academics have attributed that enduring cycle of violence, in part, to institutional racism. “Folks who have studied the issue of violence in those kinds of communities all the way back to W.E.B. Du Bois … have pointed out the importance of this problem,” said Elliott Currie, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of numerous books on crime and social policy. “Not just the high levels of deprivation of the various measures of inequality, unemployment, and poverty, but also the particular sting of the realization that this is unjust.”

Research has consistently shown, Currie said, that “the stifling of opportunity, the various deprivations that one faces, are things that are imposed by other folks.” Currie’s 2020 book, A Peculiar Indifference, argues that pervasive violence results directly from the social and economic marginalization of many Black communities.

“This goes beyond the fact that a lot of those places are poor, a lot of those places don’t have extensive opportunities for moving up the ladder. They’re very unequal places,” he said. “They usually do have generations-long histories of segregation. But beyond that, there’s this withdrawal of even the most basic levels of support.”

It is against that backdrop that Faheem’s mother, Patricia Arnold, asks why, every time it feels like something is progressing, the needle drops. “I thought his death would have made a change,” Arnold said. “It did for a while. For a while. But that was it.”

» READ MORE: Exploring Philly’s Seventh Ward through the eyes of W.E.B. Du Bois

In 1896, a year after he became the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, W.E.B. Du Bois came to Philadelphia to conduct the nation’s first sociological case study of a Black community. The Philadelphia Negro names the vestiges of slavery and the racial discrimination that followed as the key culprits responsible for many Black people being subject to disproportionate levels of vice and violence.

Du Bois was hired to investigate the area then known as the Seventh Ward — from Seventh Street to the Schuylkill, and from Spruce Street to South Street — to determine the “present actual conditions” of its residents. After interviewing more than 5,000 of the 9,700 residents, he found that Black people there represented a multitiered class structure, in which people living in poverty regularly interacted with wealthy people. Still, all of them were negatively affected by social problems rooted in rigid racial discrimination enforced by white people. That conclusion challenged the accepted ideas of the day, which suggested that problems in the Black community stemmed from pathology. Regardless of which economic tier a Black Philadelphian was in, Du Bois wrote, the prospects for advancement were made “doubly difficult, if not wholly shut off, by his color.”

The Seventh Ward of Du Bois’ days is now part of Center City, a majority-white gentrified community where less than 10% of the residents are Black. Among Philadelphia’s 48 zip codes, the deadliest this decade have been those clustered in the central north and the lower northeast, in the communities of Strawberry Mansion, Juniata, Frankford, Kensington, Fairhill, and Nicetown-Tioga. There were 903, 736, and 669 fatal and nonfatal shootings in zip codes 19134, 19140, and 19132, respectively, in the last 10 years.

These are among the neighborhoods that Currie and other criminologists refer to as abandoned by the larger community and its sustaining institutions. “The same spaces that were segregated with redlining tend to be the same spots where there is gun violence at a high rate today,” said Menika Dirkson, an assistant professor of African American history at Morgan State University and author of Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: The Rise of Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia.

In her book, Dirkson, a native Philadelphian, writes about life in 1920s north-central Philadelphia, where violence was so prevalent that news reports dubbed it “Blood Hill.” The poverty-driven despair and violence in such communities, and the tradition of residents arming themselves for self-protection in the absence of adequate policing, persist to this day, Dirkson said. “The structural problems are not being fixed,” she said.

Five months before Faheem was shot, Arnold, his mother, moved her family into one of the redlined blocks in zip code 19132, into a Philadelphia Housing Authority-owned rowhouse on Lehigh Avenue. She still lives there.

Faheem’s likeness, painted by a prison inmate touched by his tragic death, is framed and mounted on a wall. The house is “falling apart,” Arnold says. Next to her recliner in the dimly lit living room sits an overstuffed tote bag that holds paperwork and news articles related to Faheem’s life, death, funeral, fundraisers, and more.

The morning he was shot, Faheem had a stomachache, so she told him he didn’t have to go to school. But after lying down, Faheem announced that he felt better and decided to walk the two blocks to T.M. Peirce School.

“I love you,” Faheem said.

“I love you, too,” his mother remembers responding, before she issued a warning: “There’s been shooting out there and stuff. You know what to do. You know how to duck.”

Faheem’s two younger sisters followed him out the door, but minutes later returned shouting that a crossing guard told them to go back home because a little boy had been shot in the head. Arnold heard the buzz of news helicopters.

“I’m looking out the window, and people are just running and running. Then I see a cop walking up to the door. He’s crying, trying to get himself together. I said, ‘Don’t tell me that’s my son.’”

To this day, Arnold is bitter that the outpouring of emotion and support that her family received when Faheem died quickly evaporated and the killings continue. “If another kid gets killed around a school, they’ll do another march, everybody will act like they’re concerned and care, then they’ll disappear,” she said. “It was a moment. That’s all that it was — a moment.”

In 2004, the year Faheem was killed, there were 330 homicides in Philadelphia, a steep drop from the highs of the crack cocaine era of the early 1990s, but still alarmingly high by national standards. Former Mayor Michael Nutter, who took office in 2008, brought in Charles Ramsey, who was credited with helping to drive down serious crime by 40% during his time as chief of police in Washington. As Nutter stepped down and Mayor Jim Kenney took office in 2016, the new administration inherited a city where shootings were on the decline.

Even so, the Kenney administration was pushing up against a stubborn historical pattern. “What most people don’t understand is that, that real serious problem of marginalization and disconnection among the folks who have the least has persisted in good economic times and bad,” Currie said.

As the pandemic hit, there was a run on gun shops, with lines flooding sidewalks. The George Floyd protests worsened a tenuous situation, and shootings continued to rise, with the city reaching over 500 homicides in 2021 and 2022. In 2023, there were 410. As the pandemic spike tapered, Parker was elected, largely based on her position that there is too much gun violence, and buoyed by her support of stop-and-frisk. Even with the shootings starting to decrease, 2024 started with an increase of serious violent crimes on public transit that resulted in 15 people being shot on or near city buses during four days in March.

All told, since Faheem’s death, more than 6,500 Philadelphians have fallen victim to homicide, and more than 80% of them were shot to death. In a city where Black people account for 40% of the population, about 80% of homicide victims were Black.

With the constant scourge of gun violence, the effort to reduce it has become a de facto industry, with dozens of organizations providing mentoring, counseling, job training, tutoring, mental health care, or spiritual guidance. Most of these enterprises get funding from the city and state.

Many on the front line of violence prevention concur that the roots of the problem run far deeper than drug dealing and the violence generated by hip-hop music, video games, and social media platforms. Some, echoing the distant thoughts of Du Bois, point to the cumulative effects of poverty, anger, trauma, and failing schools combined with the availability of guns.

“There’s not just one answer. There are so many contributory factors,” said Dorothy Johnson-Speight, who in 2003 founded her violence-prevention organization, Mothers In Charge, in honor of her son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson, who was killed in 2001 during a dispute over a parking space. “But I’m not one to make excuses for anyone who picks up a gun, because I had trauma in my life, and I didn’t go kill somebody.”

In January, even as the city’s gun violence began to decrease significantly, Faheem’s mother heard gunfire pierce a neighbor’s front window. She fears for her seven surviving children, ages 22 to 36.

“It’s sad my sons don’t have a life,” Arnold said of her two youngest, 22-year-old twins Shaiheem and Rasheem Lewis, who were toddlers when Faheem was killed. “They don’t go nowhere but to the store and back. They’re so scared.”

» READ MORE: Both bitter and sweet: Mothers In Charge celebrates 20 years of helping those who have lost a child to gun violence