
DATE: Monday, September 29, 1997            TAG: 9709270130

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: CHURCH STREET:

        WHAT WAS LOST...

SOURCE: BY BATTINTO BATTS JR. 

        STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  320 lines

[CHURCH STREET] AFTER INTEGRATION, A MASS EXODUS

With rising ambitions after World War II, affluent blacks began moving out of Huntersville. The golden era of Church Street was ending. The exodus accelerated with integration and the accompanying sense of freedom. Then came increasing crime, decay and the city's wrecking ball.

Something was different about Church Street when Matthew Towns returned to Norfolk from World War II in December 1945.

Many of his buddies from Russell's Grill, the Booker T. Pharmacy and the Attucks Theatre were also back from the war. But they were hard to find.

That's because Towns' friends were moving out of Huntersville, the community that surrounds Church Street and was its lifeline, like Sugar Hill was for Harlem. They moved into newer neighborhoods such as Liberty Park and Park Place.

``All the fellas were scattered then,'' Towns, 76, recalls. Towns and his new bride, Mabel, lived with his parents for a short time. Then, they joined the exodus. ``With the war being over, people had money. It looked like the neighborhood had started to deteriorate. The familiar people moved out and strange people started moving in.''

Church Street was beginning a transition - one that would take it to its current state: a hodgepodge community of ramshackle homes and decaying buildings combined with modern churches, a strip mall and pockets of new housing.

It began in the mid-1940s as ambitious black families sought better living environments. But Church Street's steady decline came after the Supreme Court declared ``Separate, But Equal'' illegal in 1954.

Despite massive resistance in Virginia, blacks would eventually have access to opportunities they were previously denied. They could shop for clothes on Granby Street, live in the housing communities sprouting up in the suburbs and eat at white-owned restaurants.

Church Street's demise was the price paid for ambition and those freedoms. With it went a sense of community, values and role models - things that are constantly discussed and longed for in the black community today.

``It is inevitable that change is going to take place with time and a neighborhood is going to change. In 1997 this neighborhood is nothing like it was at all,'' said Lester V. Moore Jr., a recently retired Norfolk Juvenile Court judge and former Huntersville resident.

In recent years, Moore said, it was not unusual for a Huntersville youth charged with a crime to come through his courtroom. Juvenile offenders were a rarity during Huntersville's heyday when there were so much family support and many role models for a youngster.

As dramatic as Church Street's metamorphosis was, it is not unique.

The same thing happened to other black communities across the nation - like Richmond's Jackson Ward section and the area around 52nd and Market streets in west Philadelphia, known as ``The Strip'' - because of integration, scholars say.

``Blacks fought to break down barriers. The ones that had an education were able to gain opportunities. They tried to enter areas that blacks had been shut out of - white schools and neighborhoods. Those were the two areas that blacks pursued unabashed,'' said Dr. W. Avon Drake, a professor of African-American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

``When they moved out you saw the culture and structure changing for the worst. All the things that were good during segregation changed. In time, not only did housing go down, everything went down except the church.''

That's because educated, middle-class blacks or those with good-paying jobs were the only ones with the affluence to capitalize on the new opportunities, Drake said. Left behind were the lower paid or elderly who didn't have the financial ability nor political might to maintain the neighborhoods.

``Nobody talked about what would happen to the community,'' Drake said. ``Nobody talked about what would happen if black students went to white schools. We had to sacrifice everything to break out of segregation. We wanted everything that whites had.''

The change integration wrought on Church Street makes some folks who grew up or spent time there wonder: Were blacks better off during segregation?

This question is at the heart of a philosophy many blacks are now buying into called ``resegregation.''

In Hampton Roads, as in other metropolitan areas, it involves blacks sending their children to all-black schools, living in all-black neighborhoods and spending their money at black businesses.

The hope is to recapture the sense of community and self-sufficiency that existed in places like Church Street and Huntersville 40 and 50 years ago.

Church Street's life as a vibrant community lasted into the mid-1960s. Movie houses, like the Regal and the Carver and clubs, like the Eureka Lodge, still thrived as the effects of integration slowly spread.

That's because the businesses along Church Street, surrounded on the north and south by residential development, still had a captive clientele with a reasonable amount of disposable income.

The street provided a great deal of adventure to those growing up during its prime.

Cynthia Hewitt Crawley recalls the neighborhood in the '40 and '50s.

``It was a very lovely neighborhood. There were a lot of beautiful homes,'' she said. ``Everybody knew each other.''

Sterling Brown remembers the colorful characters that used to hang out on Church Street. Like the Barefoot Prophet, a bearded man dressed in a robe who gave sidewalk sermons on Church Street.

``He looked like Charlton Heston,'' Brown recalled.

According to legend, the Barefoot Prophet walked to Norfolk all the way from Florida. ``They say when he got here the police arrested him because of how he was dressed,'' Brown said. ``He told the police that `as long as I am in jail it will rain.' He was in jail for 40 days and it rained the whole time.''

And then there was Wild Bill, who swaggered down Church Street wearing a cowboy hat and a holster carrying two toy pistols strapped around his waist.

Vernice Case remembers sneaking into the dances at the Palace Royal. ``I wasn't old enough, but my sister was. She used to take me with her. My parents didn't know. They would have killed me,'' she said. ``It was exciting to be somebody young. You had never been anywhere like that before.''

But the economic vitality of Huntersville changed over the years as affluent families and their dollars moved elsewhere.

Professional people, like high school teachers, professors, attorneys and doctors became scarce.

The condition of Huntersville's homes and the business buildings along Church Street, many of them built around the turn of the 20th century, fell into disrepair.

And the exodus began. The Moores left. And so did Case's family. And Crawley's.

Moore's father was an insurance salesman with North Carolina Mutual Life and his mother a teacher at Booker T. Washington High School. In 1951, the family moved from a decaying wooden frame house in Huntersville into a new brick house in the Broad Creek neighborhood near Norfolk State.

``At that time, moving was a symbol of achievement in the black community. It was a goal, an aspiration. It shows you the stuff blacks were made of back in that time,'' Moore said. ``Through hard work, determination and perseverance they were able to advance and build homes that whites were building also.''

Case's family joined the exodus from Huntersville in 1952 and moved to Chesapeake.

When Crawley, who graduated from Virginia State College in Petersburg, returned to Norfolk in 1956 to teach, she found Church Street pretty much the same as when she left and still felt comfortable walking alone there.

Crawley married in 1957 and moved to Washington, D.C., and later to Newport News and then Hampton. Crawley's husband, George, is a former assistant city manager in Norfolk and a current assistant executive director for the city's housing authority. When the Crawleys returned to Norfolk in 1963, Church Street had changed dramatically, she said.

Gone were the familiar faces and many of the old businesses. ``The large homes had turned into apartments. And you didn't know the people,'' Cynthia Crawley said. ``When I was living in Huntersville you could walk past Princess Anne Road and there was someone on every street that knew you or your family. Then it got so you couldn't do that.''

Businesses bore the brunt of Church Street's transition. Segregation had made Church Street a viable business location because blacks were unwelcome in the white-owned shops along Granby Street.

``You could go to Church Street and try on a hat. But you couldn't go to Granby Street and try on a hat because they didn't want grease in it,'' Daniel Shands said.

Blacks and Jewish business owners fostered a relationship of mutual dependency on Church Street. The only whites that blacks could do business with were the Jews, said Elston Fitzgerald.

``Whites wouldn't give us any credit,'' he said. ``We couldn't go to the bank to get a loan. The Jews were the only ones who would give us credit. You didn't have any money, so what were you gonna do? If it hadn't been for the Jews, God only knows where we would have been.''

Integration caused some blacks to believe that the establishments they had depended on for food, entertainment and clothing were inferior, Brown said.

``If you have an opportunity to eat at the Ritz rather than mom's greasy spoon, which would you choose?'' he asked. ``If you had a chance to shop at Ames & Brownley and you can go there and get good service, why would you want to shop at Altschul's? Not that Altschul's didn't have practically the same equipment. But it was just the better part of town.''

Tommy Bogger, a professor at Norfolk State University and a local historian, said the reason many blacks stopped putting money back into their own community and still don't is merely psychological.

``Many blacks have bought into the idea that anything that is black is not up to par with the white organizations,'' Bogger said.

Shands watched this change take place on Church Street while working as a clerk at Bonnie McEachin's Plaza Hotel.

``As the people found out they could go to the other clubs they would go to them, regardless of who came here. They would go where the white people were. The white people didn't want them there, but integration meant they couldn't stop them,'' he said.

William Harrell Sr. remembers that unwelcome feeling when he shopped on Granby Street right after integration.

``If I went to Granby Street, I was not as relaxed. I probably acted different,'' Harrell said. ``I knew all the people on Church Street. When I went down on Granby Street I always dressed different. I was withdrawn. I never said anything. I was trying to set an example. I didn't want to look disheveled. I had to wear a shirt and tie. I had to be neat.

``It was an uncomfortable feeling. It was a `watch your back' kind of feeling. You talked to people but you really didn't trust them. Maybe because I didn't see them a lot.''

Despite that feeling, many blacks got caught up in the promises of integration without thinking about the benefits they already had, such as a sense of community and ownership, Shands said.

That, he says, was a costly mistake.

``Church Street would not have gone down if blacks had patronized blacks,'' he said. ``Blacks spend money and buy good clothes regardless of how much money they have.''

With the loss of its financial vitality, Church Street and its surroundings became a haven for crime.

``I can't say that Church Street was a very nice place to be in the '50s and '60s,'' said Stanley Hurst, a former Norfolk police officer. ``I don't think it could have been more deteriorated. The whole downtown area was like a cesspool.

``I spent a lot of time on Church Street investigating shootings and cuttings and a variety of different things,'' Hurst said.

Heroin was the drug of choice among the community's down and out residents. But Hurst said drug arrests were rarely made on Church Street.

``Back then the drugs were mostly in the black community,'' he said. ``There wasn't a cry to come down heavy on drug dealers. The theme was it's just down in the black community. It wasn't all over.''

But when police did make arrests, it wasn't pretty, Hurst said.

Officers striking people with billy clubs for little or no reason, dozens arrested at once, raids without search warrants.

``You look back now and say, `How in the world was that proper?' '' Hurst said.

Such practices fostered mistrust among people in the community toward the police, Hurst said.

``When you drove into the community everything stopped,'' Hurst said. ``You would ask someone where such and such lived and people would say, `I don't know.' You got no cooperation. They protected their own.''

Despite the tensions, Norfolk wasn't plagued by the race riots that erupted in other cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Newark, N.J.

But Hurst thinks the frosty relationship developed toward police decades ago planted seeds in the community's mindset that still plague its relationship with law enforcement.

``When you see this, the mistrust begins,'' he said. ``It is no secret how things like this will drive a wedge in people trusting you. Nobody trained us in public relations and sensitivity.''

As the mid-1960s arrived, Church Street's business owners began floating numerous redevelopment plans with the city attempting to halt the business district's demise.

The Church Street Area Business and Professional Association was organized in 1965 to seek improvements in the deteriorating shopping district. The organization pleaded with City Hall to improve facilities, clean up the street and curb crime in the area.

Thugs were fighting in stores and insulting customers. Burglaries and muggings were increasing. Landlords were allowing their buildings to deteriorate.

The organization and the city spent years arguing over revitalization plans, several of which were aborted. The city and the business owners couldn't agree on what Church Street should be and how it should get there. Meanwhile merchants and shoppers went elsewhere.

``We couldn't get them to do anything,'' said Boris Schwetz, a former Church Street business owner. Schwetz's family business, Arthur's Drug Store, was on Church Street from 1921 to 1979, when it moved to Ghent with the help of the city's housing authority. ``We were trying to show that a small amount of investment would have paid off. At that time, most city planners were making sterile fields of downtowns. It is the most ridiculous thing.''

By the mid-1970s most of the boutiques and professional offices had moved from Church Street to Granby Street, the nearby Downtown Plaza Shopping Center, the Greater Norfolk Plaza office building or elsewhere.

Left behind was a hodgepodge of pawn shops, barber and beauty shops and clothing and furniture stores catering to those on the fringes of society, former residents and business owners say.

``The city fathers killed Church Street and the Redevelopment and Housing Authority buried it,'' Schwetz said.

Ronald W. Massie, a city planner in Norfolk during the late 1960s and early 1970s and later an assistant city manager, said Norfolk officials were interested in saving Church Street. But he agreed city officials and the business owners who were at odds over Church Street's future made that difficult.

``There was a conflict there,'' said Massie, who is now the city manager in Portsmouth. ``There was a variety of ideas. We worked for a number of years before we resolved it.''

The decision was to tear down most of the structures on the street to make way for redevelopment. ``It was a unique area, but one that had clearly passed its prime,'' Massie said. ``We decided jointly that redevelopment was the path to take.''

Because Church Street had been such a commercial center and there are a number of people still living in the area, Massie said city leaders ``struggled mightily'' to build the shopping plaza on Church Street located near the intersection of Brambleton Avenue.

The plan also includes turning Church Street into a four-lane thoroughfare.

On Sept. 4, the bulldozers demolished one of the last remaining strips of buildings linked to the street's vibrant past. With it went Bonnie McEachin's Plaza Hotel, perhaps the best known structure during its prime.

Ironically, a week or so earlier, a festival was held on Church Street to raise money to restore the Attucks Theatre. MEMO: TUESDAY: Church Street today provokes a sense of loss buy also

hope, as redevelopment plans center on the widening and rebuilding of

the street's northern end. ILLUSTRATION: Norfolk Public Library

1965: Church Street's vibrancy lasted into the mid-'60s, but the

effects of integration would slowly spread.

NHRA / M. Arnold

People went their separate ways after desegregation.

NHRA / M. Arnold

Huntersville in the late 1970s: Losing a sense of community

Norfolk Public Library

1958: New tenants at the NRHA housing project.

Norfolk Public Library

1960: Norfolk City Council