MP: You’ve made many trips back to both Pin Point and Savannah. When you return, do you reflect on your life? Do you reflect on how it is now?

CT: I don’t reflect a lot about these sorts of things. A lot of this is depressing, and it didn’t have to happen. The Savannah that I return to is not the Savannah I grew up in. There are good parts, you’re free to move about. You don’t have the segregation, but you’ve got pathologies that we didn’t have before. You’ve got the crime we didn’t have before. You’ve got the disintegration of families that you didn’t have before, disorder you didn’t have before. And they were things that were avoidable. You didn’t have to do that to poor people, and it’s just heartbreaking. Something has changed, so it’s kind of hard to go back.

My grandfather would always talk about: How do you help people without turning them into wards of the state, turning them into people who don’t help themselves? He would have this line, “You help people help themselves.” And there was a difference between helping or helping to help themselves. Now we could do it individually because we did it all the time. It was not only our Christian obligation; it was the way we lived. That’s the way our community lived. You have fish and somebody else has beans, they bring you beans, you give them fish, or vice versa. But what happens with people who can’t help themselves? And my grandfather’s line was, “There are people who won’t help themselves and the people who can’t help themselves.” And he wanted to help people who couldn’t help themselves versus those who wouldn’t. And how do you make that distinction? Well, you live there. It’s a part of your community; it’s family, it’s your neighbor. You know that this person refuses to work, versus that person who’s disabled or that person had just had another kid and can’t go to work right now. But you don’t know that from a distance.

When people have these sort of macro policies and they have unintended consequences, they don’t fess up to it. When you tear down a neighborhood in order to replace the housing, you have changed the neighborhood. That little church that used to be there that people went to on Sundays, that little community house or whatever, is suddenly gone.