by restoring value in our homes, we should be able to lift our communities and the people in them. In chapter 3, “Buy Back the Block,” I examine one man’s efforts to restore value through real estate development in the historic Black neighborhood of Ensley, which is in Birmingham, Alabama.
White and middle-class flight leaves many physical structures unoccupied, including school buildings, that are tactically placed to optimize a neighborhood’s access. Adding value to communities will require converting some of these vacant properties into organizations and firms that meet communities’ needs. Chapter 4, “A Different Kind of School,” examines one effort to convert my first school into a business incubator.
There will be mistakes in adding value to communities. In chapter 5, “The Apologies We Owe to Students and Teachers,” I show how my own efforts to reform schools devalued Black teachers of New Orleans. In chapter 6, “Having Babies like White People,” I return to family. The devaluation of property is really a manifestation of the debasement of Black people. Restoring value in our communities will require the expansion of options to make family, gaining reproductive justice rather than restricting it through family planning. I will show how social connections and reproductive justice literally make Black lives matter through an examination of racism, infant mortality, and surrogacy.
Restoring value in communities will require a legislative agenda delivered by the people we elect. Chapter 7, “For the Sake of America, Elect a Black Woman President,” highlights the Atlanta mayoral race to show how Black women voters and elected officials provide a vantage point that can unify communities in an era of fractured politics. In closing, I show in chapter 8 that, in spite of many efforts to remove Black culture from city landscapes like Washington, D.C., chocolate cities can’t be erased because our brilliant culture won’t allow it.
I work toward fixing systems instead of people. I can help my hometown forge a new path in the face of new challenges caused by devaluation. But I’m also creating a new path for my own development. Like many Black men, I directed my unresolved anger at people I should have loved instead. I do my best to atone for those actions throughout the text. However, I choose to keep some of my anger—an anger we all should have when our home, our hometown, is taken from us without a fair hearing—for this project. This time, I will direct my indignations toward biased policies instead of people.
1
Who Runs the City
In 1985, when pop stars convened to perform at Live Aid concerts around the world, singing “We Are the World” to raise awareness of starving populations in Africa, I decided to join the Wilkinsburg cross-country team. One of my team’s primary training routes was a straight six-mile down-and-back on Penn Avenue, the main street running through the heart of town. Single file, the team would patiently weave between shoppers and workers, who animated the physical assets shops and transportation hubs that Wilkinsburg possessed. As it did then, Wilkinsburg still has the infrastructure and location that should sustain investment in the borough. But as I was coming of age, the percentage of Black residents grew, which seems to alter the value of assets beyond what their intrinsic qualities would suggest.
Historically, Penn follows the same military throughway that was known as Forbes Road, or, during the colonial period, Great Road.1 In the late 1700s, Forbes became a “de facto civilian highway, providing settlers and traders from eastern Pennsylvania with a land route to … the fledgling community of Pittsburgh that took root in its shadow.”2 It would later be named the Greensburg and Pittsburgh Turnpike before it was called Penn Ave.
The road ran east to west through the 266-acre tract purchased in April 1769 by European settler Andrew Levi Levy Sr.; he named it Africa. Wilkinsburg was later sited within that tract.3 It’s unclear when the original name of Africa was dropped (or why Levi Levy called it that in the first place). In 1788, Levi Levy sold the tract to General William Thompson, who died a year later. Thompson’s heirs transferred the deed for the land to Colonel Dunning McNair, an officer in the Pennsylvania state militia who became a prominent Pittsburgh area legislator, businessman, and land speculator.4 McNair named some of that land McNairstown and laid out its street plan. McNair would later rename the tract Wilkinsburgh in honor of his friend General John Wilkins Jr. (the “h” was dropped in 1878). The name Wilkinsburg stuck, and the fledgling borough grew rapidly.
Because of Penn Avenue, Wilkinsburg has been favorable to commerce since its christening. The 1841 General Business Directory listed twenty-two businesses and people, but the village of “Wilkingsburgh” had fewer than 100 people.5 When the railroad began stopping in Wilkinsburg in 1852, more people and businesses came to the municipality. “In 1880, there were 3,000 residents; by 1910, there were 19,000,” according to the Wilkinsburg Historical Society.6 Although the city has realized many ups and downs since the turn of the last century, I grew up seeing the productivity of generations’ past.
Wilkinsburg High School sat only two blocks off Penn Avenue. In 1985, Wilkinsburg’s downtown offered something for everyone. Heavy street traffic kept our cross-country training runs confined to Penn’s busy sidewalks. George Westinghouse’s extremely profitable company, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, was on the cutting edge of technology and was based in the adjacent borough of East Pittsburgh, and a good many of its 20,000 workers used Penn to get there. Westinghouse was good for Wilkinsburg business, bolstering the borough’s retail corridor on Penn Avenue.
Mom’s daughter, my auntie Mary, routinely took the family to the same establishments I passed on my training route. G. C. Murphy, the local five-and-dime, anchored the corridor. Mary would go there to collect the money that Cheryl, a manager at Murphy’s, owed for watching her sons David and Jamar. From there, Mary would take us to the Red, White, and Blue Store, a second-hand clothing store also located on Penn Avenue. Mary often stopped in Don’s Appliances as well as Steel City Vacuum on her way to Mellon Bank down the street to make a deposit.
Eateries like Smith’s Bakery and Angelo’s Pizza were always busy after school. My classmates bought candies from the Pittsburgh Asian Market, which was a full-scale supermarket catering to the Asian diaspora. I bought my first pair of name-brand tennis shoes from David’s Shoes, which was conveniently nuzzled up next to Sol’s clothing store, whose owners smoked cigars while they showed you their goods. They’d size you up on the spot and hem your smoke infused pants within minutes. Next to Sol’s sat the Montgomery Ward department store, the classic catalog store from back in the day. Touch of India sold Indian clothing and curios, but it also catered to the edge of Black culture, with its ten-karat hollow gold chains, New York fashions, baggies, and pipes for drugs. New comics came out on Tuesdays, and the family would head to Zern’s magazine shop; Marvel’s Kung-Fu was my favorite.
Once the team crossed the above-ground bus expressway, East Busway All Stops, better known as the EBA, we got a little more elbowroom. The two-lane bus-only highway in Wilkinsburg connecting Pittsburgh with the Black neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city. We passed Columbia Nursing Home and Forbes Hospital, which sat cattycorner from each other on Penn Avenue. Back then, I didn’t realize how much economic power our tiny borough wielded. Wilkinsburg was so busy I would sometimes not even realize when we crossed over into Pittsburgh proper, sitting cheek by jowl as the cities do, with only the lonely street of Point Breeze as border. Writer and Wilkinsburg native
