The easiest death of all - poverty.

In great expectation I moved to Paducah, KY to be closer to family, history and the weather I was meant to live in - none of that 9 months of winter ever again.

Excitedly, I spent my first few months here combing through local libraries and county courthouses to fill in some of my family historical records. Trying to learn about my origins. One of the places, I was led to was the small town of Cairo, Illinois. I could not wait. It was a city I had been curious about, along with Karnak, Illinois. Karnak is the actual birthplace of my father. Southern cities named after places in Egypt had me intrigued. As it turns out, the name has little bearing on what I discovered about Cairo, Illinois. It's a complicated story - but I believe this story also underscores the very real existence of class, race and poverty in America. It also explains a lot about how one person can grow up in poverty and overcome the adversity that poverty gave him and yet another person will never move past that state because of living in place like Cairo, Illinois.

This is what I saw when I first met with Cairo, Illinois.

All of the above pictures have been resized to fit and are high resolution. If you can't see them well, then please download them and enlarge them - they are a shock and worth looking at. I only captured a few. If you Google Cairo, Illinois you'll find many more and here are the first hits of my googling:

Abandoned Town of Cairo, Illinois – Cairo, Illinois - Atlas Obscura

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cairo-illinois

Cairo, Illinois - Death by Racism - Legends of America

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/il-cairo.html

The sad story of Cairo, Illinois' abandoned downtown | Roadtrippers

https://roadtrippers.com/stories/the-sad-story-of-cairo-illinois-abandoned-downtown

Cairo, Illinois: America's Forgotten City - Antique Archaeology

www.antiquearchaeology.com/blog/cairo-illinois-americas-forgotten-city/

This Town Was Already On Life Support. Now Cairo, Ill., Finds Itself On ...

https://www.npr.org/.../saving-cairo-a-once-thriving-river-town-finds-itself-on-life-supp...

Cairo, Illinois - Abandoned by Sherman Cahal

abandonedonline.net/cairo-illinois

What the hell happened to Cairo, Illinois? : AskReddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/.../what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/

Creepy photos show abandoned town of Cairo, Illinois years after ...

www.sfgate.com/news/article/Abandoned-town-Cairo-Illinois-photos-9190935.php

Historic Illinois town tilts toward extinction amid public ... - USA Today

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/05/19/...cairo-illinois/101858928/

As several articles have pointed out - a once thriving city is all but dead. Only the hapless remain, people who still live in denial or don't have the means to get out. I called them hapless but they are also helpless. These are the kind of people who grew up in this town and know no other life. These people have no good examples to look up to - even the little bit of help they should have gotten was swindled away from them.

Ex-housing execs in Illinois face federal fraud complaint

By - Associated Press - Tuesday, November 28, 2017

CAIRO, Ill. (AP) - The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Tuesday it has filed a fraud complaint against two former officials of a troubled southern Illinois housing authority.

HUD is seeking 125 civil penalties against Wilson and Franklin totaling $720,000 and another $188,000 in assessments based upon false claims the two made with respect to funds provided by HUD.

“Every dollar misspent on personal travel and other expenses is a dollar that could support the individuals and families we serve,” said HUD Associate General Counsel Dane Narode. “Taxpayers deserve to know that the public programs they support are helping to meet the needs of the many, not the few.”

The complaint against former Alexander County Housing Authority executive directors James Wilson and Martha Franklin accuses them of using public housing money for personal use. HUD says Wilson and Franklin used the money for personal travel and gifts and submitted false documentation. The agency says Wilson and Franklin overstated travel expenses and sometimes double-charged the housing authority, including for hotel stays in Las Vegas.

Cairo was at one time a flourishing city. Built at the meeting place of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Not 30 miles away the Tennessee empties into the Ohio. This is a real strategic point for transporting goods across the water. Cairo was also chosen to be one of several locations in the US to have a US Customs building to deal with international imports coming up the Mississippi river. The building is still there today. Cairo is also the location of Fort Defiance, the fort that General U. Grant built in 1860 during the Civil War. Unfortunately, his encroachment on the city forced a lot of trade to move to Chicago and it never returned after the war. You might think that the railroad drove the steamboats out of business and that might have had something to do with the decay of Cairo but not so much. The railroad came straight to Cairo. Cairo, now a city of about 3,000 people at one time had 15,000 citizens. One of the bigger reasons people can point to for the loss of Cairo are the race riots in the 1960s. Ironic, since Cairo was also an important location for the underground railroad and freeing slaves. 

In 1967, Robert Hunt, a 19-year-old black soldier, took a leave and returned to his home in Cairo. On July 15, he was found hanged in the Cairo police station. City officials called it suicide. But protesters took to the streets and the subsequent riots lasted three days. Cairo's black community then organized a battle for economic and social justice that spanned seven years.~~Gary Hart

http://www.lib.niu.edu/1997/ii970228.html

It's really a complicated story, Cairo, Illinois one that is told on many pages on the Internet so I won't retell it all here. If you have time, this story is the most elaborate and detailed: https://www.legendsofamerica.com/il-cairo5.html

My point here is to give an example, one that can't be refuted or ignored, to those who are always harping that the poor have choices and are able to dig themselves out, but they don't want to. This is simply not the case in Cairo. Poverty is never simple, it's never cut and dried, it's never black or white. A solution is not one that will fit all people in the face of poverty because not all people who are poor have the same brick walls to hurdle. Cairo, Illinois is a place where the people who live there are rarely going to have a way of seeing a light, a truth, a saving grace and I for one intend to pray for them, not put them down for not trying hard enough.