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Creating
a New Segregation
When
Richmond combined Jim Crow with urban planning in
the 1940s, the result was expressways, the
destruction of African-American neighborhoods and white
flight.
As
a non-Virginian and a non-Richmonder, I am
fascinated with the history of both. As one who
has lived in the state off and on since 1973, I
have been intrigued at how representations of
history are handled, what facts are covered, and,
more importantly, what is left out.
Therefore,
the Valentine Richmond History Center is to be
commended for its new exhibit that opened April 4,
“Battle for the City: The Politics of Race
1950s-1970s.” This modest show (the size of one
big room), has the usual materials – a Ku Klux
Klan robe, pictures of sit ins by young
African-Americans at bus stations and dime stores,
and grainy photos of school children finally being
admitted to an all-white city school years after
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation
unconstitutional.
What’s
truly interesting in the show is something I did
not expect to see. The exhibit takes pains to
explain how the most densely populated and, in
some cases, the most culturally rich
African-American neighborhoods were ripped apart
by new toll roads planned by the white
establishment because that was the trend in land
use planning (or “human settlement patterns”
if you are so inclined).
Not
only was the highway construction highly
destructive of the city’s core, it created the
avenues for white flight away from Richmond. Huge
political and economic repercussions are being
felt today.
To
blame are the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, now
Interstate 95, that runs through the heart of
downtown Richmond and the Downtown Expressway that
whisks thousands of white commuters away from the
downtown office area to their homes in
Chesterfield, Henrico or other suburbs at the end
of every work day.
The
Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike was spawned in 1944
as a way to alleviate north-south automobile and
truck bottlenecks that stopped up at Richmond on
U.S. 301 and U.S. 1. The war was on, the
automotive explosion hadn’t quite occurred yet
and attitudes about race and class were typically
Old South.
So,
planners didn’t think much of it when they ran
the 34.7-mile turnpike through traditionally
African-American communities, including Navy Hill,
Carver, and Jackson Ward. The last area was a
pulsating cultural and economic center for blacks
in the South. Marquee name jazz groups such as
Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald
regularly performed, the nation’s first
African-American bank was opened and there were
plenty of nightclubs and restaurants. To be sure,
some of the neighborhoods were pitiful slums owned
by absentee landlords, but there was a strong
sense of community, nevertheless.
So
strong, the exhibit proclaims, that many African-
American residents loudly protested. It didn’t
matter. Some 7,000 of them, or 10 percent of
Richmond’s black population, were removed to
make way for the road between January 1955 and
August 1957. The highway opened in 1958.
Ditto
the Downtown Expressway. Competing all-black and
all-white civic groups debated the plan to rip
apart low- income neighborhoods, but, of course,
the whites won. This time 900 individuals were
forced out of the mostly-African-American Randolph
and Byrd Park neighborhoods and mostly
working-class white Oregon Hill. All
in all, about 4,700 mostly African-American
housing units were destroyed from 1950 to 1960.
Race-baiting
politics weren’t the only reason for the
property condemnation pogroms. City leaders were
following the advice of well-respected urban
planners. The chief one was the famed Harland
Bartholomew who, with Robert Moses, was one of the
most influential planner-engineers in the early to
mid 20th Century. Richmond hired Bartholomew’s
consulting firm to come up with plans for Richmond
and in 1947, the firm came up with the city’s
first master plan.
Bartholomew
was a major proponent was what was then called
“Society First” planning for major toll roads
and freeways. The modern city, he argued, needed
big, wide superhighways that would whisk residents
to and from city centers. Mind you, this was
before cars truly exploded on the national scene
in the 1950s, but ideas like Bartholomew’s
created an environment in which the auto explosion
could happen.
His
plan called for a “beltway” around Richmond,
including the early form of Route 288 which has
only recently been completed. Yet, such new roads
had an unintended (or intended, depending on your
point of view) consequences. They further segregated city
neighborhoods. Whites were afforded easy access to
suburbs that were kept all-white by redlined
mortgages or unspoken rules discrimination. Blacks
flowed into their segregated neighborhoods.
Downtown stores like Miller & Rhoads and
Thalhimers died. The first of what was to be
dozens of suburban strip malls, started by Willow
Lawn, were built.
Bartholomew
also did a lot of work in Washington, including
developing early plans for the Washington Metro
which got underway in earnest in the 1960s. I was
a high school student in the area at the time and
always wondered why there was no Metro stop in
fashionable and white Georgetown. Could it be to
keep young blacks out? Hmmm.
What’s
curious about the Valentine museum exhibit is that
it points out how local African-American lawyers
skillfully broke down race barriers in schools and
lunch counters through a series of lawsuits in the
1950s. They confronted each barrier the White
Establishment erected, such as state “Pupil
Placement Boards” which, of course, were
designed to deny black students places at white
schools. The big irony is that while
the black lawyers prevailed in forcing equality in
some sectors, urban planners, willfully or not,
created an entirely new regime of successful
segregation. Thanks to the Valentine Museum for
the thought-provoking display.
--
April 7, 2008
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