Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310089
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Dr. Lawrence E. Paxton, a Gainsboro dentist and at the time the city's only black School Board member, warned people that the housing authority had betrayed Northeast before.
"They brought in bulldozers and shaved it like with a razor," he said in a 1964 newspaper story. "Now they're selling it as business property for 10 times what they paid our people for it."
He said homeowners living debt-free in Northeast had little choice but to assume big debts to buy Northwest houses that cost twice what they got for their old ones.
Either that, he said, or they "ended up drinking up the money" and living in Lincoln Terrace.
Paxton feared the worst about the latest clearance, named the Kimball Project for Kimball Avenue, one of the main streets: "White people will make a big profit and we will get our necks broke." But he was unable to stop it.
The World-News urged the city to tear down Kimball. "Since the completion of the Commonwealth slum clearance," a 1964 editorial said, "Kimball has stood out like a sore thumb, lying cut off as it does between Williamson Road, Orange Avenue and Tinker Creek. Residents, mostly Negro, are in a worse position than ever and the section is increasingly becoming a problem area. As long as Kimball stands unchanged, it will be a roadblock to progress."
A 1965 story in the Roanoke Times said tax revenues had almost quadrupled in the Commonwealth area. One new business, Magic City Motors, already was paying more in taxes than the entire area did when it was residential.
The caption under a 1964 aerial photograph in the World-News said 300 "units" - presumably housing units - would be built in two years and that some old homes could be saved.
Within a few years, hundreds more black families, businesses and churches were forced out. No homes were left, and no new ones were built.
The city realized from the Commonwealth Project that people needed help. Those forced out by the Kimball Project got more money - a price for their property plus up to $5,000 to help find another home.
Poor families had never had that much money before; some bought their first cars with it, then had trouble paying for a place to live.
James Robertson was recruited by a government and business coalition to help talk blacks into moving out. "They wanted me because I was a labor person and I talked their language," said Robertson, then secretary of Roanoke's Central Labor Council.
Robertson, who is white, went from house to house. "They called it a slum district, but it was small homes. Some of them didn't look that good from the outside, but they kept them neat and clean on the inside. A few of the houses, we'd see curtains pulled back, but they wouldn't come to the door. They'd heard we were coming.
"We were supposed to tell them what a golden opportunity it was. The sad thing about it was, they went in debt, those old families," when they were forced to move into higher-priced, formerly white neighborhoods.
People did get better houses, but at a price, Robertson said. They lost touch with people they had known all their lives. "Like a lady told me" about her next house, ```This is a house but not a home.'''
Walter Fizer Sr., part-owner of the Fizer Funeral Home, grew up adjacent to Northeast in Gainsboro and recalls how connected the people were in Northeast.
"It was knitted," he said. "The city wouldn't let that continue. They must have studied for years and they finally took it. They certainly didn't buy it. They took it. They did it with coldness, I'm telling you."
by CNB