Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310092
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To white people in Roanoke, the movement was considered progressive, if not downright liberal. Poor people would have better housing, the streets leading into downtown would be widened and improved, and the city could quadruple tax revenues by replacing the old homes of the poor with new developments. Millions of federal dollars were waiting to help do it.
The official phrase was "urban renewal," but the record books in Roanoke City Hall were more direct: They called it "slum clearance."
To Roanoke's white government and business leaders, Northeast was an eyesore.
Many black homes had outhouses, a sight that disgraced white leaders. "It was not a very prestigious entrance to the city," Mary C. Pickett, on City Council in the 1950s, said in a recent interview.
It is clear from old photographs and all accounts - black and white - that some of the city's most tumbledown houses were in Northeast. Those were the homes of many of Roanoke's lowest-paid workers: the black women who cooked and cleaned for white folks; the bellhops, the redcaps, the porters, the black men who washed dishes in restaurants and shined shoes or, if they were lucky, worked on the gangs that fixed the railroad tracks.
Those were the years when blacks could only dream of fair housing, equal employment and political clout.
In 1950, the median income for a black household in Roanoke was $1,662 - half the average for whites - and Northeast was poorer than some other black sections.
Even the least-bigoted whites had an ugly name for Northeast: They called it Nigger Town.
If you were black, there were only so many places you could live. Garland Sheets, in Roanoke real estate for 50 years, said real-estate agents would not allow blacks to buy or rent houses west of 10th Street Northwest. Deeds for houses in the once-all-white Rugby neighborhood said straight-out they could not be sold to non-Caucasians.
Northeast, the biggest neighborhood for blacks, was one of the few places a black buyer or renter felt welcome. Houses owned by white slumlords and black-owned shacks weren't all that stood there, though. So did wood-frame houses built in 1882 by the Roanoke Land and Improvement Co., the city's original developer, and brick houses as well. Whites who had worked in the nearby railroad shops had lived in Northeast early in this century, before they moved up in the railroad and other companies and into bigger and more modern homes.
Black families say that what looked like terrible poverty to the people who saw their neighborhood as they drove by was not so poor at all.
"In Northeast," said Charles Meadows, who lived there 50 of his 90 years, "there was no poverty because everybody helped one another. When we could afford two pounds of beans, our wives would cook them up and everybody would have a bowl. If our next-door neighbor didn't have a job, we would help them out. We were independently self-supporting as a neighborhood. We enjoyed it, because we knew we had someone to rely on."
Urban renewal, as it was practiced from the 1950s through the 1960s, made no distinctions within a neighborhood. Northeast's solid homes and its dilapidated ones, its neighborhood networks and businesses were treated the same.
With few exceptions, all 980 homes, 14 churches, two schools and 64 small businesses had to come down.
So did Northeast's hills, bulldozed flat.
Elderly black Roanokers still say urban renewal was nothing but "Negro removal."
The city's first housing projects, Lincoln Terrace and Lansdowne Park, were finished by 1952. Lansdowne was for whites, but Lincoln Terrace was ready to take blacks who had nowhere else to go.
The destruction of Northeast began in 1955 and lasted 26 years. The first section to go was 83 acres the city called the Commonwealth Project, on the west side of Northeast, between Commonwealth Avenue and Gainsboro.
In 1956 and 1957, the city burned more than 100 homes. It was the cheapest way to get rid of them, two or three at a time. Firefighters were taught about fire by torching those houses and watching them burn. "It was like looking at a war movie," said the Rev. Ivory Morton, who watched the burnings as a boy.
City leaders thought they were wiping out a worthless neighborhood. "Don't glamorize it," Mary Pickett, the former City Council member, recently warned a reporter. "It was awful. And don't stir up trouble."
The average price people were paid for their homes was $4,300.
"You used to go for a ride on Sunday and it was pitiful, children sitting out on the curb, dirty. It was a slum area and it couldn't go any way but up," said Fred Mangus, a member of the city housing authority's board for decades.
Willis "Wick" Anderson, on City Council from 1958 to 1962 and mayor his last two years, said slum clearance was a liberal idea at the time. "Urban renewal was considered a very progressive, socially desirable thing to do. First of all, you removed a blighted area from the city, you made the area available for redevelopment, and presumably the people who lived there moved into better housing." White slumlords objected most strongly to urban renewal and public housing - because they would lose income.
Many houses were in terrible shape, but Northeast was a place where women kept their eyes on one another's children from kitchen windows, where neighbors shared sweet potatoes from their gardens, and shared even a common backyard water spigot.
The Rev. Ben Tyree, Olivee Tyree's son, remembers growing up in Northeast. "The people was concerned about each other. Anybody in that community would correct you, anybody in that community would tell you, `I know your mother and father wouldn't allow that.'''
The city had to take the homes, Pickett insists. "It had to be done ... for the good of the city, for the good of the future. Their kids were growing up in slum conditions."
"That was prime growth land," she said, that could be used for communitywide facilities such as the Roanoke Civic Center. "Some people had to suffer."
And the consequences to the people forced out? "They just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."
So was a large chunk of the city's history - its first post office, built around 1846; the second-oldest firehouse, built in 1890; and the 1885 Gilmer School.
As a young lawyer, Republican former Rep. Caldwell Butler tried to help people save their homes or get more money for them. He was troubled by the attitude of many white leaders.
"They called it 'substandard' housing, but the folks were surviving and had a sense of community. A lot of them moved to houses that were much nicer, but many of them were not in a [financial] position to do that."
Roanoke Times & World-News columnist Ben Beagle was one of the few white reporters who spent time in Northeast. "We'd go over there in the afternoons. You could smell supper frying, and it was nice."
Of the hundreds of Roanoke Times and Roanoke World-News stories written in the 1950s and '60s about Northeast's redevelopment, Beagle wrote some of the few that addressed what was happening to the people who lived there.
John Eure was a Times reporter and editor in the 1930s and 1940s and retired as day managing editor after the papers merged in 1977. He said reporters rarely went into Northeast unless accompanied by police to a crime scene.
For the most part, he and other whites were blind to black life, he said, "and I'm ashamed of it."
When urban renewal came along, Eure said, few white leaders questioned it. "There was not a sensitivity - I didn't have it, either - to the fact that we were destroying part of our community, and our history.
"When people, white people, began to be aware of what was happening and what it was doing to some of our citizens and began to say something about it, they weren't very popular. Progress was the name of the game."
Said Anderson: "If we were doing it again, I don't think it would be at all done that way...You would do some spot removal but the whole emphasis would be on neighborhood redevelopment and not clearance."
by CNB