Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310061
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It displaced thousands of men, women and children, wiping out neighborhoods and institutions. A long chain of broken promises scarred citizens' political trust so badly that the bitterness flares up in public hearings to this day.
And yet the story - from the point of view of those who lived through it - has never been told.
Today, in a special report called "Street By Street, Block By Block: How Urban Renewal Uprooted Black Roanoke," we tell what the federally funded program called urban renewal did to the black families of Roanoke.
Their uprooting from the city's two largest and oldest black neighborhoods - Northeast Roanoke and Gainsboro - began in 1955. Urban renewal went through three long waves and several small ones that stretched over four decades. It continues today on a smaller scale as the city prepares to tear down 10 Gainsboro homes to build a road to downtown.
The history of urban renewal in Roanoke was all about what city leaders, most of them white, wanted to do with 395 acres of prime developable land just north of the railroad tracks from downtown and inhabited for generations by black families.
Government leaders here thought urban renewal was a progressive way to clear what looked like slums to them and put in highways, industries and public complexes such as the Roanoke Civic Center. But there was a lack of understanding among those policymakers - as well as reporters and editors at this newspaper - of what life was really like in black neighborhoods, what those communities meant to people, and exactly what would happen to the families made to leave.
Most of all, there was little recognition that black families had the same attachment to each other, community and home as everybody else.
"Slum" and "blight" are words that Roanoke's older white leaders use to describe what they saw in those neighborhoods. Black people who lived there had another word for it: Home.
In the 1950s, a majority of black Roanokers lived in either Northeast or Gainsboro, so nearly every black family in this city has known the effects of urban renewal, if not directly, then through the loss of a grandmother's home, a best friend's, a church, a school.
White people felt it, too, even if they did not realize what was happening to them because when black people were forced out of segregated neighborhoods, they had nowhere to go but the white neighborhoods just beyond the old color line. In the 1950s and 1960s, white families fled their newly integrated streets and fanned out across the valley, filling the suburbs that began to encircle the city.
While some blacks moved into public housing and have been there ever since, most black families bought sounder homes than the ones they left. The problem was, many took on staggering debt to make the move and lost their neighbors, friends and social connectedness in the process.
Several older black Roanokers interviewed for today's report said it's too painful to ponder what urban renewal did to their communities. "I don't mind telling you," one man said, apologizing as he ended a long account of what happened to him, "it sort of makes me a little sick to talk about it."
Gainsboro natives still argue among themselves about whether they should have fought harder against urban renewal, which promised revival of one of the city's oldest neighborhoods but wound up doing more tearing down than building up. All these years later, they're still divided over it, another man said. "Just like Vietnam or Korea."
Urban renewal took place during the administrations of nine U.S. presidents. It was overseen in Roanoke by seven mayors, four city managers, three Redevelopment and Housing Authority directors, 44 members of City Council and 32 members of the authority's board of commissioners. Of the more than 80 local officials who presided over urban renewal, only 11 - four council members and seven authority board members - were black.
All these officials bear some responsibility for how urban renewal reshaped black Roanoke. No single person, however, has been held accountable.
"I have personally come to the conclusion, and it helps me sleep at night, that it was nobody's fault and it was everybody's fault," said Earl Reynolds Jr., a former Roanoke city planner and assistant city manager.
A couple of years ago, Ted Edlich, executive director of Roanoke's anti-poverty agency, Total Action Against Poverty, put on paper what he thought were the long-lasting impacts of the loss of Roanoke's oldest black communities. He agreed a few days ago to let his words be printed here, saying his feelings haven't changed.
"These actions have for decades left the impression that the city of Roanoke not only has no regard for black neighborhoods and their institutions but will stop at nothing to appropriate the land and property of blacks when it desires it for some other use," Edlich wrote.
"It has dampened the incentive of blacks to invest in their homes. It has created a sense of transiency which has been a deterrent to attracting business investment. It has created a sense of hopelessness and even bitterness which has been transmitted to a new generation of young people who have seen their parents exploited."
Black Roanokers still feel wounded and angry about urban renewal. White Roanokers haven't understood why.
Today, we try to explain.
by CNB