advocate with such outstanding credentials addressing my realm of anxiety simply overwhelmed me. I felt validated. It seemed as if Dr. Fullilove had come to my rescue. What pleased me most was that she had given my questions a name. She had clearly articulated something that, up until then, had been a mystery to me. I wondered if she had known the extent of my mental health crisis. But then I thought, perhaps my artwork had reflected more of my state of mind than just the social commentary I had intended. Indeed, some of my artwork, along with anecdotes from my memoir, turned out to be important contributions to Root Shock.
I was especially moved by Dr. Fullilove’s grassroots approach to the matter in Root Shock, particularly the sit-down-across-the-table, heartfelt interviews and workshops that struck at the core of the issue. Reading about others from different parts of the country who were grappling with similar issues to mine—knowing I wasn’t alone—provided kinship and perspective toward healing. And how personable she was, advising us that it’s OK to be sentimental about where we once lived—after all, those places were our homes!
Most of the interviewees, me included, responded to questions with nostalgia-flavored sentiment for neighborhoods that can never be experienced again. We had all been uprooted from close-knit places, thereby separated from enclaves supporting the traditional African-American ways of life. That similarity, at least in my view, revealed how far-flung the upheaval had been that weakened our shared traditions and moral values. In effect, urban renewal projects gone wrong made us party to our own cultural breakdown, resulting in bad times that are happening in black communities all over America today.
We must be free to attach to where we live without fear of being ripped away—sold down the Mississippi, in a manner of speaking. Bearing that in mind, as well as how threatened people of color in America are today, urban renewal projects displacing people of any color should be subject to public scrutiny.
Look in any direction from Freedom Corner today, and it is readily apparent that Dr. Fullilove’s in-depth study and workshops helped galvanize the community. Good things are happening in the Hill. The contentious civic auditorium that spurred the urban redevelopment matter in the first place is gone—this, for some at least, settled the score a bit. In place of the civic auditorium a multi-use development, including affordable housing, is underway. More importantly, the new Crawford Square housing development and similar developments taking place throughout the Hill District attest to the community’s ongoing recovery.
While recognizing that the demolition of the Lower Hill was a sad chapter in the community’s long history, and should never be forgotten, the community works to reseed its roots. Residents have developed a beneficial master plan of their own—spurring revitalization and occupying a place at the table with the city and developers rebuilding the Lower Hill.
Through her book, Root Shock, Dr. Fullilove addresses an important societal problem that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, especially by politicians, developers, architects, and planners, and whoever else is making frontline decisions that affect many. She addresses matters of common civil rights owed to anybody, anywhere. Dr. Fullilove delivers her message to communities, the unknowing sufferers, comprised of individuals like me who dare not call ourselves the victims that we are.
I wanted to walk away from the Freedom Corner Monument on its opening day, but now, thanks to Dr. Fullilove’s informative book, I not only recognize my contribution at Freedom Corner, I understand the traumas my family and many others suffered from the city’s failed urban renewal project, as well as how that outlandish project hastened the civil rights movement in Pittsburgh. Moreover, thanks to Dr. Fulliove’s undertaking, I accept that Freedom Corner stands in spirit of the many unscripted stories like mine . . . and as the place that welcomes me home.
—Carlos F. Peterson
Pittsburgh, July 2016
1 Excerpt from “Once Upon a Hill”, a memoir by Carlos F. Peterson
When there is emotional pain, psychiatrists like me believe that we can help. But before we act, we need to find some handle for the problem, some name to guide action. Once in a while, we realize that these names are inadequate for the problems we are seeing. Then we search for new names, or new ways to group old names.
When I bumped into the emotional pain related to displacement, I had the option of using labels like “posttraumatic stress disorder,” “depression,” “anxiety,” and “adjustment disorders.” But I didn’t think those labels—useful as they are—were enough to tell the whole story. Like Robert Coles, Oliver Sacks, and Arthur Kleinman, I wanted to understand displacement through the words of the people who had suffered from it. I wanted to walk the streets they were talking about, examine their photographs, visit their houses, and get a deep feeling for what they were sharing with me. I wanted to know the emotional truth of the experience through which they had lived. Between 1995 and 2003, I logged thousands of air miles, walked hundreds of city streets, examined archives, collected photographs, and talked to people who had stories to tell.
I had listened to many voices when, on December 2002, the truth hit me. At the time, I was sitting in the comfortable living room of Dr. Walter Claytor, listening to the story of his remarkable family, a family that in one generation went from slavery to professional education, a family that built significant buildings and provided a high level of health care for the surrounding community. I was so proud of Dr. Claytor and his father and his grandfather that I found it unbearable that this great American family had been dispossessed by urban renewal, a program of the U.S. government that had, between 1949 and 1973, bulldozed 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities. A million people were dispossessed by the program, among them the Claytors.
I don’t know if it was Dr. Claytor’s charm or his insouciance that helped pull the pieces together for me. He was not seeking my pity. In fact, he strove to maintain his dignity while telling the story of his losses. But the pain was such that he couldn’t quite keep it out of his voice. It was the breaking edge of his grief that linked it to the sound of pain that I’d so often heard, a sound that was obvious in some voices, and just beneath the cheerfulness in others. There was a remarkable emptiness in that pain. In that searing moment, I realized the loss he was describing was, in a crucial way, the collective loss. It was the loss of a massive web of connections—a way of being—that had been destroyed by urban renewal; it was as if thousands of people, who seemed to be with me in sunlight, were at some deeper level of their being wandering lost in a dense fog, unable to find one another for the rest of their lives. It was a chorus of voices that rose in my head, with the cry, “We have lost one another.”
Being in touch with such sorrow was not easy. What popped into my mind were the famous words spoken by Jack Nicholson in the movie A Few Good Men: “You don’t want the truth. You can’t handle the truth.”
Nope, I thought, I can’t handle the truth. The phrase, though it seemed a bit irreverent, was rather comforting. This is one of those handy mental tricks that people use to manage intense emotions. I might have used denial (“That never happened”) or repression (“What did you say, Dr. Claytor?”) or intellectualization (“How many people feel the way you do?”) but I used Jack. I must have told a hundred people, “I can’t handle the truth,” before I started to feel differently.
This process taught me a new respect for the story of upheaval. It is hard to hear, because it is a story filled with a large, multivoiced pain. It is not a pain that should be pigeonholed in a diagnostic category, but rather understood as a communication about human endurance in the face of bitter defeat.
There
