For several years following that incident, Cairo was a hotbed of racial tension as African-American citizens pressed for desegregation, equal employment, adequate housing and other civil rights objectives – often with bloody results. Sometimes the city’s white leadership would act spitefully, like when it shut down the public pool and the little league baseball program to avoid integration. African-Americans organized a boycott of white-owned businesses that refused to hire them, but many businesses instead moved across the rivers to Kentucky or Missouri or shut down completely. Some undoubtedly left to spite the protesters, while others simply left to seek a more peaceful business climate without the taint of racial hatred. The boycotts didn’t cause the town’s decline – some people say it actually started when Cairo was bypassed by a railroad bridge at Thebes, Ill., in 1905 – but the racial tension accelerated the loss of population and prestige. From 1960 to 1970, the population dropped from 9,348 to 6,277, and the negative stigma of racism stays with Cairo even still.
Even after the violence and tension subsided in the late 1970s, businesses kept leaving. So many businesses have left the city in the past 40 years that the Custom House Museum keeps a collection of pencils, lighters, key chains and other promotional items given away by now-shuttered businesses. The declining importance of barges for transporting goods also starved the town of jobs and revenue, and Cairo has never recovered.
Persistent poverty
Cairo’s lack of job opportunities exacerbates its poverty rate, which has a ripple effect on other economic indicators. Median income is $30,729 in the northern half of Cairo, which constitutes one of the city’s two census tracts. In the southern half, median income is a mere $11,923, a decrease of 38 percent just since 2000. Fifty percent of Cairo citizens in the northern census tract earn less than $30,000; that’s closer to 68 percent in the southern tract. In 2009, 300 of 629 families within Cairo’s school district were in poverty. Though unemployment figures specifically for Cairo are hard to come by, Alexander County, which contains Cairo, had an unemployment rate of 11.8 percent in 2010. Statewide, that number was 10.3 percent.
The widespread poverty also affects housing and taxes. Half of Cairo’s population rents their housing instead of owning it, compared with the statewide rental rate of 32.5 percent. Meanwhile, about 20 percent of
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