stage set, lifeworld, mazeway, home.
Just as Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, uprooted his team without regard for Brooklyn, so too other entrepreneurs of that era reorganized the landscape so that they could make more money. The tool that they used was urban renewal, a program of the federal government that provided money for cities to clear “blight.”13 Blight, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and it happened, more often than not, that the part of the city the businessmen thought was blighted was the part where black people lived.
By my estimate, 1,600 black neighborhoods were demolished by urban renewal.14 This massive destruction caused root shock on two levels. First, residents of each neighborhood experienced the traumatic stress of the loss of their life world. Second, because of the interconnections among all black people in the United States, the whole of Black America experienced root shock as well. Root shock, post urban renewal, disabled powerful mechanisms of community functioning, leaving the black world at an enormous disadvantage for meeting the challenges of globalization.
Urban renewal is the butterfly in Beijing, the unseen actor who caused the tempest. The vigor of the civil rights movement led to the expectation that black Americans would be better off when segregation was defeated. In fact, by 1970, some were but many were not. Instead, the have-nots had tumbled deeper into poverty and dysfunction. The great epidemics of drug addiction, the collapse of the black family, and the rise in incarceration of black men—all of these catastrophes followed the civil rights movements, they did not precede it. Though there are a number of causes of this dysfunction that cannot be disputed—the loss of manufacturing jobs, in particular—the current situation of Black America cannot be understood without a full and complete accounting of the social, economic, cultural, political, and emotional losses that followed the bulldozing of 1,600 neighborhoods.
But we cannot understand the losses unless we first appreciate what was there.
In 1995, Richard Chubb took me for a drive through territory that, before urban renewal, housed Roanoke, Virginia’s black neighborhoods. We passed a series of businesses sitting in such wide swaths of grass, they seemed dwarfed by nature. Pointing in succession at Magic City Ford, the post office, and the civic center, he said with bitter insistence, “There used to be houses here. Those are just buildings.”
As we crossed out of that business area over a bridge, his bitterness dropped away. With pride he told me, “This is Henry Street. This used to be jumping. We had neon.”
I saw a mass of vacant land and a bunch of leftover scraggly buildings typical of a burned-out ghetto. We stopped in front of one of the buildings. “Come in. I want to show you,” he said.
We went up to his second-floor office. “When I was a kid I dreamed of having a business on Henry Street, but my life didn’t turn out that way. I became a school principal instead. But I felt that there was something missing, so in 1986, I left that job and opened my counseling business here on Henry Street.
“Come over to the window,” he beckoned.
We stood shoulder to shoulder and he pointed up the empty street. “Sometimes I just stand here and the tears come down, thinking about what used to be.”
What used to be: houses not buildings, neon not vacant lots, neighborhood not emptiness. I wanted to see what he saw, and to understand how it came into being. In every city, where I was studying the effects of urban renewal, I asked people, “What was it like before urban renewal?”
Before the City Lights . . .
Though black people have been a part of American cities since their importation from Africa began in 1619—the Haitian fur trader Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was the first permanent resident of Chicago, for example—for the vast majority, urbanization was a twentieth-century phenomenon. It followed a long detour from auction blocks in ports serving the slave plantations, where blacks sojourned under the slave regime’s reign of terror. The languages and cultures of many different groups slowly yielded to a common present of oppression and a shared dream of a better future in a faceless place of opportunity they sang of as “New Jerusalem.” It was in New Jerusalem that people torn from their homes and forced into servitude would be able to make a home again.
During Reconstruction—in the immediate aftermath of the emancipation of the slaves and the Civil War—it seemed that the freed people might be able to make this New Jerusalem throughout the South. Between 1865 and 1876, black people were able to own land, establish schools, and elect representatives to every level of government. The violence that followed the federal abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876 inaugurated a frightful new epoch of oppression that greatly resembled slavery in its methods and its intent. As the white power structure solidified its dominance, it was able to introduce a system of segregation popularly known as Jim Crow.1 Between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks. The weight of this system fell with greatest force on those in the rural areas, who were tied to the land by debt slavery and peonage.
So much power was concentrated among the white landowners that it must have seemed that the divided world would last forever. But the confluence of worldwide instability and worsening of conditions in the South acted—as did the Black Death in the Middle Ages2—to create an opportunity for those living in feudal conditions to flee to the city for their freedom.
In 1916 the black mass movement to the city began. By 1930, 1.5 million black people had left the privation and oppression of the rural South to make a new life there. In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then a young painter in Harlem, created sixty panels describing the Great Migration. The stark pictures painted in poster colors on butcher paper cut to the core of the transition between rural oppression and urban opportunity. To help us understand the tension, he adds a refrain about the importance of the train:
• “Families arrived at the station very early in order not to miss their train North . . .”3
• “[White people] made it difficult for migrants leaving the South. They often went to railroad stations and arrested the Negroes wholesale, which in turn made them miss their train.”4
To make the move, you had to get on the train. When you arrived at your destination, the work of building New Jerusalem began. Geographer David Seamon has called this kind of voyage the “Dwelling-Journey Spiral.”5
Seamon traced seven steps in a novel about Swedish immigrants. Forced to leave home because of famine, the Oskar family set out in the 1850s to make a new home in America. They found land, built a home, and created a farm, thus establishing a place. But they were terribly lonely. In time, a group of other Swedish families gathered near, and together with their new neighbors, the Oskars began to create community. It was in the presence of this new community that all of the families found, once again, the opportunity to be at home in the most profound sense of the word, to be dwelling.
A story about Swedish immigrants helps us to see the journey to a new home in its ideal form. African Americans, by contrast, struggled toward their goal against great obstacles. The African American story teaches us that being “at home” requires freedom. Because of racist oppression, the African American journey
