At 12:30 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2004, Nicholas Yarris walked out of the Pennsylvania state prison at Greene after serving 22 years of a death sentence for a crime he did not commit. Although he celebrated that moment with triumphant hugs and tears of joy, Yarris quickly realized that his world had changed dramatically since he left it for death row in 1982. “My community is gone,” he said a few weeks later. “I am a ghost in my own life.”

The Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), a national non-profit group based in North Philadelphia, actually arranged a series of “reality tours” during the 2000 convention to highlight the elements of the city that the convention chose not to showcase, including the racial, as well as socioeconomic, diversity of the city.