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Friend,
Some mornings before she opens her eyes in the house she shares with her parents, husband and son, Carletta Davis thinks back to a sunny day when – in her memory – the city of Prichard, her hometown on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, was united in pride and hope.
It was just over three decades ago, and Davis, now 49, was a sophomore on the Vigor High School girls basketball team, making her way through a joyful crowd to a Greyhound bus to play for the state championship. The team was a powerhouse, its star one of the top players in the country. Cheering parents, community leaders and passersby thrust $10 bills at the girls, booming, “Make us proud! Buy yourself something good for lunch!” Others passed players bouquets of flowers, their jubilation palpable as the girls waved and smiled and the bus pulled away.
Then the alarm rings. Davis pulls herself out of bed and over to the bathroom sink. Sometimes she turns on the faucet and the water comes out in drops or with an acrid stench. Usually, she doesn’t turn on the faucet at all. Like everyone she knows in Prichard, Davis reaches for the bottle of clean water she buys at the store, shakes a little onto her toothbrush, pours some more into a glass and brushes her teeth.
In Prichard, a majority-Black city of about 19,000 mostly low-income residents, you can’t trust the water. It may come out murky. It may not come out at all. It may be leaking from the city’s decaying pipes into the ground to such a degree that what comes out of your faucet is just a trickle – but your water bill, when it comes, is a torrent.
In this once-thriving center of shipbuilding and paper trades that is now heavily in debt, it is not just trust in the water that is in short supply, it is trust in government. Water board authorities have been indicted in a corruption investigation. State government leaders, despite outcry from residents, have for years neglected to step in to help set things right.
“I tell people all the time, the people here in this city are the best people. I mean, hardworking – you know, just, just good people,” Davis said of her hometown about five miles west of Mobile.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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