Cannot use data allocation directives (assembly)

I am writing a program  to check if a given string is a palindrome and it is not running as expected. The code is from a textbook so it's not mine, but I can't understand why it's not running as it should. I actually had the same problem with a different program (which you can see on my stack overflow post here if you want) but I ignored it and moved on. I had the same issue again and I think the  'DCB' and 'DCD' instructions are not doing what they should. The reason I think that is the problem because when I look at the program in the debugger, the memory address that should be holding the string is clear. I don't know how to see what memory address holds a given variable but the address is loaded into r6 so I checked in memory area and its empty? What am I doing wrong?

My target device is an AMRCM7 by the way, and I'm on keil uvision v5.38a and the compiler is ARM compiler v6.19 

Here is my full code:

		AREA myData,DATA
		ALIGN
string 	DCB "rats live on no evil star", 0     ; NULL terminator explicitly added

		AREA palindrome,CODE
		EXPORT __main
		ALIGN
		ENTRY
		
__main 	PROC
		LDR 	r6, = string	; load address of string in r6

		;Find string length
		MOV 	r1,#0	; len		
		MOV 	r5,r6	;  r5=string
strLen	LDRB 	r2,[r5],#1	;post-index
		CMP 	r2,#0	;Check for NULL character
		ADDNE 	r1,r1,#1
		BNE  	strLen
		
		;Check palindrome
		SUB 	r1,r1,#1	;len - 1
		ADD		r1,r6,r1	;&str[len-1]. 
		MOV 	r2,r6		;&str. First character of string
		
cmpStr	LDRB 	r3,[r2],#1 ;Len - 1
		LDRB 	r4,[r1],#-1 ;str[len - 1 - i]
		CMP 	r3,r4
		MOVNE	r0,#0 	;set flag
		BNE		stop
		CMP 	r1,r2
		BLT 	cmpStr
		
		MOV 	r0,#1
		
stop	B 		stop	
		ENDP
		END