ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
RESIDENTS protested the intolerance of diversity and the lack of government help at the last Roanoke race-relations meeting.
Two of Roanoke's best-known advocates of young people and neighborhoods blasted city government Thursday night for empaneling a series of commissions, task forces and consultants over the years but largely ignoring their recommendations.
Charles Price Jr., former chairman of the Roanoke Planning Commission, said "Roanoke Vision," the city's comprehensive plan for 1985 to 2005, has done little of what it said it would for declining neighborhoods.
"The city's vision plan? What happened to it?" he asked the city's Community Relations Task Force. "It went blind."
Kaye Hale, director of the West End Center, a nonprofit study and play center for poor children, warned members of the Community Relations Task Force that their eventual suggestions for improving race relations and cultural diversity may be ignored, too.
"I think your hands are tied behind your back," she said. "Government in Roanoke is from the top down, and not the citizens up. ... If I see another book of recommendations that never get used, I'm going to use it for firewood."
Only seven people spoke Thursday night at the last of a series of four hearings around the city, but all were outspoken on matters including Roanokers' intolerance of homosexuals and what was described as the city's insincerity toward residents even though it sets up plenty of meetings with them.
As in all of the city's public hearings - including City Council meetings - no one was allowed to criticize any resident, elected official or city administrator by name.
Here is what some of them had to say:
James St. Clair, a longtime employee of General Electric:
He said though racial progress has been made, there's still prejudice in Roanoke, his home for almost 50 of his 56 years. In 1980, he said, he was forced to leave his new split-level home in Boxley Hills because, though his immediate neighbors were friendly, distant ones harassed his family. "People rode vehicles across my yard."
The only way he sold the house, he said after the hearing, was to remove family pictures from his walls and stay away when white buyers came to look at it. Otherwise, he said, they might never have bought a black man's house.
Bo Chagnon, singer and songwriter:
Though he's heterosexual, he became an activist for gay and lesbian concerns, he said, after his brother was abducted and brutalized in Florida "because of the assumption that he was homosexual." Not long ago in the Roanoke area, Chagnon said, he was discouraged from publicly performing his songs about the trials of being gay in America.
The Rev. Charles Green, president of the Roanoke Branch, NAACP:
He didn't identify it, but Green said one employer of hundreds of people in the Roanoke area has no black workers. He said it occasionally hires blacks, but white workers are so hard on them they all leave. "Almost every day I receive a call - sometimes three or four times a day - from a black person who's been fired from their job."
Charles Price Jr., a building contractor and coach of young Northwest Roanoke athletes:
He asked why trees are not planted in black neighborhoods and why many streets there have no sidewalks after decades of requests. "Why in the city of Roanoke within a five-mile radius in the black community [is there] one grocery store ... if we are a city of All-Americans, if we are a city that is responsive to all people?"
He said in Northwest, where black children are in dire need of athletic facilities, the track and football field built years ago for the former black Addison High School have not been kept up. He served on city boards that came up with plans for parks, but little came of it. "I'm here because I know I said certain things and they weren't done," he told the task force. "I want you to know they weren't done."
Price warned task force members that city government uses appointed bodies like theirs to shield it from resident outrage. "All citizens group are buffers," he said. "Be strong. Be sure you are heard."
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