• Sociologist Kathryn Edin lived in Camden for 2-1/2 years to find out first-hand why so many young, poor, single women have children out of wedlock and choose to raise a family alone: They become pregnant not because they lack contraception or access to abortion or even access to jobs, though economic deprivation does play a role. They don't give birth simply for a larger welfare check. They have children to give meaning, structure, purpose, and love to their lives, in the only way they know how. Marriage is revered but rarely attained and largely irrelevant. Men are untrustworthy and more trouble than they're worth. Edin and colleague Maria Kefalas showed that the decoupling of marriage and child-rearing, decades in the making, is nearly complete in these neighborhoods. The economic and relational poverty around them makes marriage seem as unattainable as the rest of the American dream. Not only has the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock disappeared, but pregnancy, even when the mother is still a child herself, is cause for communal celebration. A sullen, rebellious teen will be welcomed back into the fold when she presents a new baby, with motherhood becoming her one ticket to maturity, competence and acceptance. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• Last June, the Legislature gave final approval to a new rental assistance program to help low-income working families pay the rent for decent housing. In September, then-Gov. James E. McGreevey signed it into law. A total of $25 million has been appropriated to fund the program. But not a single family has been helped yet, and none is likely to be helped until summer -- a full year or more after the Legislature acted. Implementation of the program is delayed because the Department of Community Affairs still hasn't adopted the necessary regulations. The state currently provides emergency housing to the homeless in motels at a monthly cost of about $2,300 per family. A housing voucher might cost about $600 a month and put the same family in a far safer and healthier full apartment. (Trenton Times)

• Dealing with prostitution as a quality-of-life issue, the Camden County Prosecutor's Office and the New Jersey State Police are trying a new tactic: A woman arrested on a second prostitution offense will be taken to jail until she can post bail. Her probation will include attending counseling sessions with the Center for Family Services, and the Camden Area Health Education Center. According to Willie Mahan of the Prosecutor's Office, the initiative puts an end to the idea that those arrested and charged with prostitution are back on the street ten minutes later. "It's going to take a while for some of them to realize it," said Mahan. "We really think this program can make a difference." (Courier-Post)

• Lower-income families in Philadelphia pay more for basic goods and services than do their middle-class counterparts -- and government ought to try to do something about it. That's the conclusion of a report published Monday by the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution. Researchers found that working-class households in the city pay higher prices for groceries, home and car loans, insurance, appliances, furniture and check-cashing, among other things. Two of the researchers most involved in the report say the gap could be as much as $1,000 per family -- a big bite out of a $25,000 income. Those prices make it harder for families to reshape their own lives in ways that would let them join the ranks of the city's dwindling middle-class. The authors offer a list of policy options, for example:
  • Reduce the risk of doing business in low-income areas.
  • Take steps to boost the financial literacy of residents.
  • Eliminate abusive practices such as predatory lending.
  (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• Osam "Sam" Altaee a.k.a. Truth Warrior is an Iraqi refugee living in Lebanon at the moment; he has spent the last 10 years of his life as a refugee registered with the UN High Commission for Refugees in Beirut. The last 4 years he has spent as an activist for peace and human rights (especially for refugees and asylum seekers) on the Internet. His latest campaign seeks a clear public apology from the UNHCR for its "illegal and humiliating" use of photos of refugees as "banners and human buttons" for collecting money. Wishing to support and improve the UNHCR, Sam asks you to do some reading and see the human buttons for yourself at http://un.all-global.com (Club LIFENET)

"There was certainly a black presence in Burlington City as far back as the late 1650s, and there may have been a black presence at a Dutch fort near (present-day) Gloucester City in the 1620s, but we don't know for sure," says Wright, who lives in Willingboro. South Jersey's earliest black residents generally were not slaves arriving directly from Africa, but from the Caribbean or elsewhere in what is now the United States, according to Wright.

Although Camden, Burlington and Gloucester counties are rich in sites that were important on the Underground Railroad, the role the "railroad" played in black settlement patterns in South Jersey has been exaggerated, says Jeffery Dorwart, a professor of history at Rutgers-Camden and author of Camden County, New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan Community 1626-2000. Instead, Dorwart contends, blacks often settled on the "wrong side" of the tracks of early rail lines, including the Camden and Amboy, which began operations in the 1830s. Blacks who labored on this and other railroads put down roots in places such as Homesteadville (now Jordantown, in Pennsauken) and in sections of Palmyra, Moorestown and other South Jersey communities.

Blacks tended to settle in wooded or waterfront areas that were "tucked away -- that no one else wanted," Dorwart says. For example, black fishing settlements sprung up along the Pennsauken, Timber and Mantua creeks in such places as present-day Maple Shade, Gloucester Township and Paulsboro. Similarly, blacks who were freed by their Quaker owners sometimes were given, or allowed to squat on, less desirable land on the farms of their emancipators. And itinerant preachers associated with the Rev. Richard Allen of Philadelphia sometimes sparked the establishment of African Methodist Episcopal churches in South Jersey, which would then give rise to surrounding black communities, as was true in Swedesboro.

While many of these settlements were rural, black communities also were an urban phenomenon. Early on, Burlington City had a significant black population, and in Camden, six communities, among them Kaighnton (possibly the earliest), Belltown and Ham Shore existed before 1830.

Whatever the role railroads, literal and figurative, had in the early black settlement patterns in South Jersey, a key element was racial solidarity. "From the outset, a certain segment of black people felt that the best way to deal with the violence and hostility (from whites) was voluntary segregation," Wright says.