This is the place: Robeson is the state's poorest, most violent county, battered by economic forces that stole its chance to escape that fate.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover story

Traffic roars incessantly along Interstate 95, the East Coast's Main Street, running from the top of Maine nearly to the tip of Florida through most of its metro centers. But this is Lumberton, the seat of rural Robeson County. "Your name here," solicits a sign on one of the vacant industrial plants along an adjacent service road. Vines twist through the padlocked gates, and inside, the buildings are musty and dark. Greg Cummings, 66, has spent most of his life trying to keep jobs in places like these. "There's laughter, then one day, all of a sudden, there's silence. You've got water on the floor, possums running around and pigeons flying overhead." He's the economic recruiter for North Carolina's poorest county and, by at least one measure, the nation's third-poorest for its size. Nearly a third of the people live below the poverty line, twice the state rate. Unemployment is 40% higher. Half the children are poor. Two-thirds of the population is classified as low-income.

Snuggled against the South Carolina border, this is America's most racially diverse rural county. Native Americans predominate, as they do in half of the country's 20 poorest counties. Thirty-nine percent Indian, a third white, a quarter black, most of the rest Latino, minorities are the majority here. Robeson is the state's biggest county, but its population barely holds its own, growing only 0.5%, from 134,168 to 134,841, since 2010. It's one of 10 in North Carolina, all in the east, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture labels persistently poor. That means more than 20% of the population has been in poverty through at least three consecutive censuses. People remember Robeson for the wrong reasons, such as the 1993 rest-stop murder of Michael Jordan's father, two men taking the staff of a local newspaper hostage in 1988 or, more recently, the sheriff and 16 deputies pleading guilty to racketeering and other charges. It had the state's highest rate of violent crime last year. And the previous year. And the year before that.

Lack of jobs leads to crime, Edward Graham, 53, says. He and his wife, Betty, 56, live in Thunder Valley, a neighborhood of patched, rusting mobile homes near Red Springs, he with multiple sclerosis and both unemployed since the textile mills where they worked closed a decade ago. Outside, about a mile from the convenience-store parking lot where gunfire killed a man, children cheerfully leap puddles as they walk a half-mile to Old Lowery Road because school buses can't negotiate the unpaved streets. "Busted the oil pan," Graham says of the pothole that claimed his car. The Rev. Mac Legerton, a friend and counselor who has fought for souls and against poverty since 1975, listens. "I had to do a funeral for one of the young men who'd been in our youth program," the preacher says. Legerton helped him finish high school and tutored him to pass Army entrance exams. His hitch up, he got gunned down in a drug-related case of mistaken identity. "He'd come back to help his mom."

Forty-odd years ago, it didn't seem things would be this way. As enforced segregation ended, Robesonians of all races climbed down from tractors to work beside each other in factories. In 1960, about 11,000 toiled on farms and 3,900 drew manufacturing wages. A decade later, things had reversed, with 4.000 on farms and 9,600 in factories. In 1990, fewer than 2,300 had farm jobs. Manufacturing employed a third of the workforce. At its peak, Converse Inc., the North Andover, Mass.-based maker of athletic shoes, had 2.000 on the payroll at its plant west of Lumberton. "Manufacturing jobs temper poverty," says Leslie Hossfeld, a former professor at UNC Pembroke who wrote the definitive study of the county's economy. Her co-author--Legerton, the United Church of Christ minister--adds, "We had poverty down to 22% in the 2000 census, the lowest in the history of the county."

Good times, however, set the stage for bad. Six years earlier--20 years ago this year --the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, toppling trade barriers between the United States, Mexico and Canada. Subsequent treaties lowered Asian barriers. American products weren't the only things to flow to foreign shores. In 1995, Winston-Salem-based Sara Lee Knit Products Inc. shut down a Robeson plant, moving its 500 jobs out of the country. It closed another one the following year, idling 370. A worker told Hossfeld she was excited when offered a trip to Mexico--she thought as a reward for her loyalty. It was to train her replacement. Converse laid off 166 in August 1996. The plant outside Lumberton, its last in the U.S., closed in 2001, two years before the company was sold to Beaverton, Ore.-based Nike Inc.

"We lost more jobs due to NAFTA than any other rural county in the nation," Legerton says. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates as many as 10,000. "We say we took one for the team," says Phillip Stephens, a Lumberton physician assistant who is county Republican chairman. "A disaster for our rural communities," U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre, a Lumberton Democrat, calls the treaty. Cummings, the...