
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995                   TAG: 9501310091
SECTION: STREET BY STREET                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE LOSS STILL STINGS

EVERY workday morning for 32 years, Leroy Campbell walked from his home at 322 East Ave. N.E. to his job at Woods Brothers coffee company in Southeast. He smelled the roasting beans as he crossed the Randolph Street Bridge over the railroad and hung a left on Campbell Avenue to work, where he dumped bags of coffee beans into huge bins built into the floor.

He and his wife, Dorothy McDaniel Campbell, raised four boys and three girls on East Avenue. Practically everything they needed was nearby.

Gilmer Elementary School was across the street. A fire station was next door. Their church, Mount Zion Baptist, was around the bend on Fourth Street.

"There was a grocery store on almost every corner," said Melvin "Terry" Campbell, Leroy Campbell's son. "Assaid's, Moses', George's, they were mostly operated by Syrian people," or families of Lebanese descent.

Few black people had cars when Terry Campbell was growing up in the 1940s, so all he knew of Roanoke as a kid radiated from his home by only a few blocks. He played on the school fire escape at day's end, read comic books by the radio before bedtime, and on hot summer afternoons solicited cool fire-hose squirts when firefighters cleaned their engines.

In those years, he and other black Roanokers still were barred from most downtown theaters, although they could go in the back door of one and sit in a segregated balcony. He couldn't sit at the lunch counter at Peoples drugstore. If he got sick, he would not be admitted at Roanoke Memorial Hospital because he was black.

"We were just normal people," Terry Campbell says. "I didn't have a rough time growing up as a child. I was very secure. I didn't have to worry about clothes, I didn't have to worry about food. I didn't have no worries."

His grandmother, Lula Campbell, lived on the other side of their duplex. Leroy Campbell has pictures of their old wooden house with ten rooms and new siding.

Older white Roanokers often talk about Northeast's backyard privies as justification for urban renewal, but Leroy Campbell and his family had a bathroom.

It wasn't long after he made his last house payment that he got word in 1955 that his house would be demolished. Eventually, everything fell: his house, his church, his children's school, the stores, everything.

The first families forced out were stunned by how white Roanoke officials saw their homes. "I do remember when they first started talking about urban renewal," Terry Campbell says, "and how they had to get rid of these `ramshackles.' And we thought, `What are they talking about?'''

by CNB