
DATE: Sunday, September 28, 1997            TAG: 9709250143

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: CHURCH STREET:

        WHAT WAS LOST...

SOURCE: BY TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  332 lines

PART ONE: THE GOLDEN YEARS

In the 1930s and '40s, Church Street was Norfolk's Harlem - the place to be for the city's 44,000 black residents. Paradoxically, the district flourished under the hated social policy of segregation. Today The Virginian-Pilot begins a three-part series examining the rise and fall - and potential rebirth - of Church Street.

Sparks arc away overhead as the brown-and-reddish-orange trolley car rattles to a stop in a bustling, urban streetscape. Climb on, drop in your seven cents and go for a ride, uptown.

Do you see the Plaza Hotel? There are Soroko's Market, Arthur's Drugstore, Hollywood Photo Studio, the Greenleaf Ballroom - could those be Louis Armstrong's trumpet notes pealing out? Movie theaters, enough for a month of lazy Sundays: the Carver, Dunbar, Regal, Manhattan, Lenox, the Booker T.

Is that Ella Fitzgerald crossing the street?

Glance around you, now. There are well-dressed women, gleeful children hanging out. On the sidewalks, workmen in heavy boots brush up against professionals in suits and ties.

Almost all of them are black. The trolley riders, the shoppers, the doctors and lawyers, some of the shop owners. A streetful of black Americans, going about their business. Except for the cops. They're white.

This was Church Street - or at least a Church Street somewhere between people's memories and reality. Now the trolley cars are gone, as are most of the buildings. Down the street, the Booker T., now the Attucks Theater, still stands.

In the 1930s and '40s, Church Street was the place to be for the 44,000 black residents of Norfolk.

More accurately, it's where they had to be. America wasn't wise enough yet to enfold all its citizens in the same embrace. These Americans were segregated.

Yet the time and place also created a particular confidence that made a black person feel as if he or she had come home. As one man told a cop back then, ``If you were a black man for one Saturday night on Church Street, you would want to stay black.''

It was Norfolk's Harlem, its mecca, Uptown. It started down among the wharves at the Elizabeth River, about where the Omni Hotel stands now, and plowed north through the heart of Norfolk. St. Paul's Church used to be on Church Street.

That Church Street doesn't exist anymore. Oh, there's a Church Street, and some of it's even busy, but it's a fast-moving road, with gas stations and shopping centers, not much foot traffic.

And the people? Most of them are gone, too.

Many are still in the area. They live in better houses than you would have found around Church Street, alongside black and white neighbors.

Sometimes, they wonder what was lost.

Church Street was segregated. No African American wants to return to that.

Yet some in South Hampton Roads wish they could regain some of its qualities: a neighborhood with strong family ties, successful role models close at hand, and a social fabric that reinforced the best of black culture.

Integrated into larger society, enjoying its freedoms and material wealth, black Americans experience feelings of unraveling and cultural loss that Jews, Asian Americans or Italian Americans and other ethnic groups would recognize.

Vincent Newby, 57, is a retired assistant superintendent of Norfolk's city cemeteries. He lives in Virginia Beach, not far from Green Run High School, in a house with photos of his father's horse-drawn cart on Church Street, and he and his pals standing on the street, grinning.

``I was reading something in the paper the other day; there was something on black kids not meeting the same requirements as white youth, and they said they don't know why,'' he said. ``I can tell you why. The key to all of it is home.

``On Church Street when I was growing up, if I did something wrong down on the corner - which happened to me many times; I was a rebellious little kid - this lady down on the corner would whip my tail and send me home.

``And when I got home, there was no use telling my parents that she whipped me for no reason. I would get another whipping anyway. And that's the way it was.''

When Newby and his friends were little, there were black role models all around them.

A black dentist on Church Street hid 1,000 pennies and 1,000 eggs in a field every Easter for an Easter egg hunt. Or maybe it just seemed like a thousand.

There were businessmen like Jessie Leonard, who owned Hollywood Photo Studio on Church Street for 30 years. At Booker T. Washington High School, all the teachers were black.

``Probably the two role models most black males had were Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis,'' said Horace Balmer, 58. ``But there were also the teachers and the other successful people in the community.''

Even a black mailman's uniform, he said, represented a successful man.

There was Daddy Grace, too.

Balmer, now chief of security for the NBA, knew Daddy Grace as ``the first person I'd ever seen that supposedly had a lot of money.'' Every single soul on Church Street knew Daddy Grace, the national leader of the United House of Prayer for All People, which had a church on the street.

Daddy Grace built apartments for church members in Norfolk and frequently visited. He held a parade every year on the Fourth of July.

What many remember the most about Church Street was people helping themselves and each other. People did for each other because everyone was getting by about the same. If your uncle in the country brought you a mess of fish, you shared.

Your family was likely to be close by, and they could come around to help out in a pinch.

``Black people cared about each other,'' said Vernice Case, 68, who lived on Smith Street in the 1940s. ``When somebody died, everybody in the neighborhood came and brought food to you.''

Among the places they turned for help were Jewish businesses, common on Church Street.

In earlier decades, Church Street had been a primarily Jewish neighborhood - the novelist Leon Uris immortalized it with several pages in his book ``QB VII'' - and in the 1930s and '40s there were still many Jewish businesses, almost every other building. Jewish grocers lived over or beside their stores in the community.

Like black Americans, Jews suffered discrimination in white society. They often extended credit to customers - you usually paid them when you got paid, Balmer remembered.

Those were the kinds of individual kindnesses and simple gestures that cause many of Church Street's former residents to think of it as growing up in a small town, their town.

But oh, Church Street could jump.

Many of the entertainers who headlined in Harlem came to Norfolk, too, to stay and play on Church Street.

The list is long but worth repeating: Ella Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong. The Inkspots. Moms Mabley. Nat King Cole. Jesse Owens, the runner, working as a tap dancer. Fats Waller. Fats Domino. Lionel Hampton. Cab Calloway, doing the ``hi-de-hi.'' Duke Ellington. Billy Eckstine. Ethel Waters. And later, Otis Redding. Ray Charles. Sam Cooke. Jackie Wilson.

They often stayed at the Plaza Hotel, long owned by the late Bonnie McEachin, ``the queen of Church Street.'' Among other places, they played at the Greenleaf Ballroom, over the Woolworth store at Olney Road, and at the Phyllis Wheatley Ballroom.

Elston Fitzgerald learned show business from Isadore ``Izzy'' Sandler, who owned the Virginia Pharmacy and also worked as a promoter. Fitzgerald went to work in the pharmacy for Sandler in 1934, at the age of 15, delivering prescriptions by bicycle for 10 cents an hour.

The pharmacy sold home remedies, he said, like one for the common cold, called ``Kol-Nox,'' that was mostly Epsom salts.

Sandler quickly put Fitzgerald to work in music and promotions as well.

``Really, I received an education in business,'' Fitzgerald said. ``I knew nothing about business before then.''

The Inkspots, before they came to Church Street, sent a big telegram to Sandler that he put in the window of the pharmacy. Fitzgerald remembers that each Inkspot made $500 a week, an unheard-of sum of money to a teen-ager.

Ella Fitzgerald called Elston ``cousin'' because they had the same family name. She came to Church Street in 1938, singing her hit song ``A Tisket, A Tasket,'' and he walked her across the street to buy her cosmetics.

Whether there was a big name in town or not, Church Street danced. At the ballrooms, or places like the Eureka Lodge or the Palace Royal, they danced the ``Jitterbug,'' the ``Mashed Potato,'' the ``Offtime'' - when you danced slower than the beat - the ``Two-step,'' the ``Charleston,'' and the ``Mexiana.''

The bands played for funerals, too: slow, funeral music on the way to Calvary Cemetery, then party music on the way back, New Orleans-style. The Excelsior Band was popular for funerals.

And like anywhere else in the world, boys met girls and fell in love.

About 3 a.m. one night in 1939, Elston Fitzgerald was walking home after another of Sandler's big-name entertainments.

``I was singing a little song, and Doloris and somebody else were sleeping out on their porch,'' he said. ``We didn't have any air conditioning then, you know, so people slept out on their porches. I stopped singing when I got near the house.

``She said, `Don't stop singing. That sounds good.' Suddenly the light went on in my head and I said, `I ought to get to know this girl.' And I married her.''

Those were the best sides of Church Street. Start a conversation with someone who grew up there, and before long the other part comes up, the times they saw the reality of segregation.

``You could have an argument with a white person, and it didn't matter what it was about or who was right,'' said Fitzgerald. ``If a policeman was called, the black person was going to jail. We understood what we had to do in order to survive.''

Most of the time, segregation became apparent when a black Norfolk resident left the security of Church Street.

When Fitzgerald came home from the Army after World War II, he went to a bank in Norfolk to withdraw some of his pay that had been sent home. Although he had his Army ID, the white banker wouldn't give him any money until someone came into the bank who knew him. Two hours later, someone did.

Fitzgerald withdrew all his money and left.

When Horace Balmer was 10 or 11, he and his friends would get hot dogs at a restaurant on 21st Street - from the back door.

Balmer left Norfolk in 1960 because there were too few job opportunities here for a black man. He moved to New York City, where he became a police officer in 1965.

He said, ``As I was taking the oath, the first thing I thought was, `Gee, I could have been doing this in Norfolk, but I wouldn't have been considered qualified. But here I am being sworn into the largest police force in the U.S.' And it was only the color of my skin that prevented me from serving in Norfolk at that time.''

The police officer was the most visible sign of white society, and its long reach, during Church Street's heyday. Nearly all of its police officers were white. They had tremendous power.

``We were basically afraid of them,'' Balmer said. ``I remember across the street from me, a young man was in a fight. He was literally dragged down the steps and across the street and into a car by the police officers.

``This was one of the first experiences I had as a young person with police officers. It did not leave a great taste in my mouth for dealing with policemen.''

Stanley Hurst, a former Norfolk city councilman and a white police officer on Church Street in the 1950s, concurs.

``The laws back then were different,'' he said. ``Rights were stepped on nightly. People were hurt.

``Officers were quick to act. A guy could say something and get hit with a billy club.

``Back then you made arrests unannounced. Search warrants were non-existent. You made arrests and did what you had to do. The African American did not fare well at all during those years.''

Poverty also was a reality on Church Street, but the universal refrain is, ``We didn't know we were poor.''

People remember it with a kind of innocence, impossible to separate from what the reality may have been. They recall little serious crime or drugs, something that would intrude later on Church Street.

But in those early years, amid the neighborhood support and close family contact, people felt their lives were complete, even rich. If you didn't have something you needed, maybe your cousin did. Or you could barter for it.

``See, we didn't realize we were poor, because we didn't have anything to measure it by,'' Vincent Newby said. ``Everybody else had the same things. We ate well. I didn't realize I was poor until later on in my life, when I was in the Army.

``Sometimes I think they were the good days. Then again, I say, were they the good days? People say, hey, pork chops cost 20 cents a pound. And it only cost 20 cents a week to send each of us to a private school. But, you know, my parents had a hard time making that 20 cents.''

Few people needed a car. You could travel by trolley, or walk, to most places you needed to go.

A young black man found any work he could. Fred Jordan, whose family moved to Alexander Street in Norfolk in 1931, set pins at a bowling alley for 2 cents a game. He also shined shoes and delivered papers. He remembers ``butcher boys'' selling food from their baskets in the movie theater aisles.

Jordan worked in a canning factory on the Eastern Shore for a time, at 20 cents an hour, but found it too dangerous. He also was a grocery delivery boy, and used to carry 5 or 6 live chickens at a time on his bicycle to a rabbi who ritually cut the chicken's necks and drained their blood so they would be kosher. Jordan carried the dead chickens back again to the grocery.

``You had to do those things in order to survive,'' Jordan said. ``There were not many lazy people around.''

There were some. Balmer, who worked in a hardware store and sold popcorn at the municipal auditorium before he left Norfolk, said some guys in his neighborhood ``got involved in numbers or just hung out. Some of the people in my block were looking to hit that number so they could take it easy.''

``Numbers,'' a fixture in city neighborhoods to this day, is a simple way of gambling, a sort of neighborhood lottery - illegal, but widely tolerated. The winning number each day is agreed to be something random and public - the number of the winning horse in a certain race, say, or the last two digits of a stock market indicator. Someone takes the bets, hands out the winnings, and makes a profit from it.

``There was a shoestore - no names, now - where everyone took their numbers,'' Balmer said. ``People would hit for 50 dollars and that was great.

``There was a black person running the numbers, and they were considered to be a successful business person. They were doing better than the average black person. We didn't consider them role models, but they loaned money to people when they were broke, they did a lot of good things for their neighborhood.''

People don't remember much serious crime on Church Street in the '30s and '40s. Later, drugs would become a fixture. Mostly, there were fights, generally with fists and knives rather than guns.

What does Church Street's heyday say about how African Americans live today? All the nostalgia in the world won't re-create a single visit by Louis Armstrong.

For many, circumstances have improved. There are better jobs available today, and more of them. Horace Balmer sees far more black police officers than in his youth.

Yet at the same time, the black community, once compressed into a small society that reinforced many of its best features, has unraveled with integration.

In Newby's youth, he saw successful black people all around him - doctors, lawyers, business owners. That is far less likely in today's Norfolk than it was in the Church Street of the 1930s and '40s.

Now middle-class black professionals often live in comfortable, integrated suburbs, and poor black families live in inner-city apartments. They see little of each other.

Vincent Newby, who pays close attention to his 9-year-old grandson, Christopher, draws inspiration from those days. Church Street was great because of the people who made it and the community that surrounded it. There was a brotherhood, he said. There is still strength in the community today.

``We've come a long way, but we're retrogressing, through crime and other things that are going on,'' Newby said. ``We need to get hold of ourselves and get things right.

``We're going to do it. It's going to take a lot of energy and a lot of hard work, but we can do it. And education is the only way.''

Christopher won't be able to hang out on Church Street's trolley cars, as his grandfather did when he was 9. Yet Newby hopes some of the important qualities from his childhood, the ever-present lifeline of family, community and friends, will endure as Church Street's real legacy. MEMO: On Monday: Church Street began to decline in later decades as

integration allowed black people to move away and urban redevelopment

tore it down.

EDITOR'S NOTE: BECAUSE OF TECHNICAL ERROR, THE WRONG PAGE WAS PRINTED ON

PAGE E7 OF TODAY'S DAILY BREAK. THE CORRECT PAGE APPEARS ON PAGE B7 IN

THE HAMPTON ROADS SECTION. ILLUSTRATION: Photos

NORFOLK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Church Street, 1932...

1953: Shooting pool at the Huton[sic] YMCA

Phillip Bress

...several theaters thrived...

...cops were white...

Courtesy of the McEachin family