Illinois Poverty

Fountain was asked by Illinois Issues to write the second annual Paul Simon Essay. Fountain chose to write about poverty and the collective responsibility of the state’s citizens to the poor. His essay was the magazine’s cover story in May 2007. An accompanying multimedia presentation available on this page is a snapshot of the voices of Illinoisans Fountain interviewed in his chronicle of poverty from the state’s southern tip to Chicago. To view the multimedia presentation, please click on the Picture to the right below the heading, "Multimedia Presentation." To read Fountain's essay on Illinois Issues' Web site, please click here: POVERTY

More pictures and excerpts from the essay appear below:

Life now crawls to an almost standstill along a decimated strip of what was once a thriving downtown in the riverfront town of Cairo, Ill.

One of a few businesses on "Main Street" in troubled Ford Heights, Ill., a south Chicago suburb, advertises liquor, lottery and groceries.


A house stands abandoned in impoverished Pembroke Township, Ill., where people still live in crumbling houses with caked-dirt floors, no running water and no natural gas pipline, about an hour's drive south of Chicago.

Boxes of food and clothes stand in the Church of the Cross in Pembroke Township, Ill., donated by middle class families in New York in a program called Family To Family, a grassroots non-profit group that aims to heal poverty.

There is poverty of the pocket.
And poverty of the soul.
Poverty of the spirit.
And poverty easy to behold.
Poverty that runs and festers
Like Langston’s Raisin in the Sun.
And poverty that lingers—
A brand of which the sum is
Only more poverty.

-John Wesley Fountain-

...I stand with one foot in each of two worlds. One in poverty, the other planted firmly in the American Dream. One man with one soul and one dream borne in two Americas. I stand forever—at least in the scenes that play over and over in my mind, like a grainy, black-and-white silent movie—on the impoverished block of 16th Street and Komensky Avenue, in a community called North Lawndale, still among the nation’s poorest, on Chicago’s West Side, in a place affectionately called K-Town...

The corner of 16th Street and Komensky Avenue on Chicago's West Side where Fountain grew up.

A police camera atop a light pole flashes on a street corner on in North Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago where crime, drugs and violence are perennial problems.

A church in North Lawndale on West 16th Street that was once Fountain's barbershop as a child.