Raised/Razed

- [Yvonne] Don't be surprised if their corporate relations representative doesn't come out and say, "What are you guys doing?"

(Yvonne chuckles) - [Michael] This is our parking.

This is our parking space.

- Yeah, that's right.

This is where they park their cars.

- Yeah.

- [Yvonne] What is that building, Michael?

You know what that is?

This is amazing that they built this on this property like this.

- [Michael] I'm amazed all these condos, apartments.

- Go on!

Ain't that something?

Right on the spot!

And it sat there for so long as a parking lot.

This is what I was hoping.

I didn't know this.

This is what I was hoping that you were going to be able to get this land.

We're with you.

You ready?

(dramatic music) - [Voiceover] Production funding for "Raised/Razed," is provided by... (celebratory organ music) - [Narrator] North Carolina is familiar with the names Fayetteville and Pettigrew Street.

Here in the center of Negro Durham, more commonly called Hayti, the lifeblood of the community is represented in this busy populace, going vigorously about their daily activities.

- I was first introduced to urban renewal by my grandmother.

We had left the drug store one day on the way home.

And she said, "Yvonne, the drug store won't be here much longer."

And I said, "Granny, what do you mean?"

And she said, "Because urban renewal is coming."

And I didn't know what that meant.

I was like eight years old.

It's like, "Who is urban renewal?"

Is it a person?

What is urban renewal?

I didn't know, but sure enough, four or five years later, came back to Durham to visit my grandparents.

And we parked right about where we're standing now with the spotlights of the car facing into the store.

And it was like a bomb went off.

It looked like a war zone because they had start tearing down the area.

- As a young kid, when I was say six or seven years old, I used to be behind these counters in the Garrett drug store playing around and seeing how, the elegance of it was so classy, I was so impressed.

I kind of took it for granted 'cause I was a young kid.

- Your David Garrett grandfather was extremely faithful.

He got up every morning for decades and worked from nine in the morning until 11 at night.

And he set such a great example for his family, for his community.

Everyone knew him.

Dr. Garrett, Dr. Garrett.

He was was known throughout the community as a pillar in the community.

- [Narrator] We are reminded that Hayti is almost completely self-sufficient in her shopping facility.

- [Michael] The Garrett drugstore, it was a major hub on Black Wall Street.

We were the only black pharmacy store, pretty much in the area that served the community and a lot of businesses and meetings where run from this location.

Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, they all come through here.

You wanna get your prescriptions filled?

You can come to the Garrett drug store on Pettigrew.

If you come to Durham, this is where you go.

(train hoots) - They started demolishing it I would say in the late 1960s, early 70s, they started dismantling.

It was a big project throughout Durham in the Hayti area.

When they tore down the original Pettigrew Street, as we knew it, historically, it sat for 50 years as a unused parking lot, basically, without any markers, historical markers or signs, or even any plans to fulfill the promise of urban renewal, which was promised to my grandfather and other business owners that they would redevelop the area so that they could bring their businesses back in and continue to thrive.

That never happened.

- And granddad, at that time, I remember him being very adamant about this whole deal.

I had many discussions with him at the kitchen table around the table, just him banging his hand on the table saying, "Hey, you know, this just went wrong."

- At least 300 million was lost through the 500 businesses that were once in Durham alone, you multiply that throughout the nation.

How much lost economic impact, and how do you quantify that going forward?

If they were able to be maintained, what would be the economic growth within the African American experience that is not there now.

- There are so many other families like ours and all over the country that has not, this story has not been told as far as the struggles and the separation and the promises of urban renewal.

So we need to tell this story.

It needs to be clear and what we need to do and tell why it happened and how we've fixed it and make sure it doesn't happen again.

- That's right.

That's exactly right.

(Yvonne claps hands) That's right.

That's it.

(energetic instrumental music) (relaxing piano music) - Oh God.

My mother can make the best rolls that anybody wants to put their tongue on.

She would make the rolls and the butter would just slither off of them.

There wasn't a day that the food wasn't and I'll tell you a secret too, when she would make the cake, I'd get the batter and run my finger around in the batter and lick my fingers from the cake.

My mother also did canning.

She did pickles and string beans, and we had a small garden at one time and she would do canning for the winter.

- I grew up on 341 Commerce Street, Charlottesville, Virginia.

The people on Commerce Street were very, very good people.

We were family.

We had maybe 30 families on Commerce Street and each one of us went to each one's house during the holidays, the smell of turkey and ham and potato salad and greens, it was wonderful.

- I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I was raised in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood.

I can go back to maybe when I was three or four and we lived on Third Street.

My grandmother lived on Fourth Street and they were row houses that we lived in.

And it was just, all I can say is nice because I was a kid.

You know, I didn't, we knew what we knew.

We seen what we seen.

And you lived as you lived.

- Vinegar Hill for me was a place to go, a place to spend time with my father.

Spent a lot of time with him on Vinegar Hill.

It was a Saturday like adventure to leave Page Street, Page and 10th and go downtown through Vinegar Hill and hit all the hot spots along the way and stop and converse with people.

Talk with family, eat.

- [Woman] In summertime it was nice.

The kids got together.

You know, it was the families.

Each family took care of each family.

If my mother needed flour, and Mrs. Hallem's out, we would go down, "Go get a cup of flour off from Helen."

"I'll give it back to her on Friday, payday."

- My grandmother lived on Fourth Street.

So I recall going and visit my grandma a lot because it was close by.

There was so many people in our neighborhood that were real neighbors and families.

Everybody looked out for each other.

Hmm, that's my grandma house.

And she had eight kids and believe it or not, almost all of 'em lived in there all at one time, having their kids as well.

And I can remember them putting me to bed and closing the door so I wouldn't hear everything, but I can remember as soon as they closed the door and they get downstairs, I would come and sit on the steps and listen to 'em.

And sometimes my parents would dance.

My mother and father both were excellent ballroom dancers, They listened to Duke Ellington.

They listened to Nat King Cole.

They listened to the Four Tops.

We had it all.

- The sounds were music.

I remember walking past places and hearing music.

The Blue Diamond was a place that I used to love to stand around.

You know, they were playing pool and eating.

And so Saturday, half a Saturday was always spent there, in that area, right at that, in that V. We had a gentleman who would come in from the county, Mr.

Via, who would come and open the back, 'cause we didn't lock up anything.

It wasn't like you had to put the alarm on and the bolt lock.

He would come in to bring the eggs every Saturday morning and he would take the crate, take the money off the table, if my parents, if we weren't home, put new eggs there and go on.

So believe it or not, Vinegar Hill, we didn't always lock the doors.

(Kathy chuckles) - [Interviewer] George Ferguson, the interviewee is Milton J Carpenter, 12:15 80.

The address is 702 Ridge.

- I was born in 307 West Main Street and that was at the top of Vinegar Hills.

And I lived there for 15 years.

Of course, I went to school in Jefferson School, elementary school and that is in the area that they called Vinegar Hill now.

But the original Vinegar Hill was from foot of Main Street to Preston avenue, up to Side Street.

The original Vinegar Hill housed various types of business and residents.

There were some stores down there.

There was a barber shop.

We had some beautician and some seamstress and some launderers.

My father was the first black physician here and up until 1974, we always had two black physicians in Charlottesville and Charlottesville supported.

(relaxing music) - Jimmy Saunders was my apartment mate at the time.

And this was Jimmy Saunders' program.

And I am not sure who Jimmy was involved with as far as, "Squad, we were gonna do this, whatever," but my background was American American Studies.

Initially, those, those first phone calls were kinda hard.

We weren't really sure what we were gonna do.

We weren't sure if they, if they gonna trust us, we weren't really sure what we were looking for.

And you're not quite sure how to ask the questions to get the right answers or whatever.

- And what they were asking us to do was to go into the people's homes and ask them questions about something that happened to them, in their community, in their history.

And so, you know, you'd have to pick up your tape recorder, you have to pick up your questions and you gotta go find these people and sit down and see if they wanna talk to you.

One of the questions was about how Vinegar Hill got its name.

- [Thomas] My father used to tell this story: That a barrel of Vinegar fell off at the top of the hill and rolled down and broke down that somewhere on Vinegar hill, and after that, it was always called Vinegar Hill.

And that to me sounds reasonable.

- I remember that story and I was like, wow, So that's why they call it Vinegar Hill.

He said, "I'm not sure if that's true," but that's the story he told me.

(Thomas chuckles) - From what my parents tell me, I spent my first few months actually living in a house that would've been about where the parking lot is for Staples office store right down here on Fourth street.

So when my dad and mom got married, they moved into a house right there.

- I lived in what was called west boundary of Vinegar Hill, which was Fourth Street Northwest.

So that would be my connection.

I lived there for five years.

- So this is a picture of the house.

I'm pretty sure it's is my godsister standing out front.

My mom started teaching in Farmville in the fall of '56.

And then on the last day of school in 1959, both of my parents were informed that they would no longer have jobs because the school system shut down as a part of massive resistance.

And so that's how we end up here.

I remember many nights, my dad would have fraternity meetings in the basement.

And so all those gentlemen, I knew my whole life and they'd look out for me and impart wisdom to me, these were folks that were first generation college grads, who had gone from their communities and either went to Virginia State or Hampton or St Paul's or Union or whatever.

That was just the norm and it was the expectation.

- So the Jefferson School is the first African American school founded in 1865, about six months post-emancipation.

It was founded as a Freedman school and it was both a graded and a normal school, which means it taught teachers.

There is a moment in the forties where you could argue that all of the academic life or the education life of the community is happening in this precinct because you also have Barrett Early Learning Center in the 1940s.

That's also in this general area.

So you've got your preschool, you've got your elementary school and you've got your high school.

And at one point you also in the building have the public library for blacks.

So this really the a site really becomes the site of education and social commerce of a sort.

- [Woman] School was a social place.

Man, these halls were always humming, always with activity, but it's interesting being here in this place, brings back a lot of memories, good memories.

This was the social place.

This was where you needed to be, to be cared for educated and loved.

- [Woman 2] I met my best friends that I still have, now when I came to Jefferson school.

- [Woman 3] We came to school here at Jefferson school.

We came up the hill, we had to come all the way up to here.

Cause we was down in the bottom on Commerce Street.

We had not a lot, but we enjoyed what we had, and that was friendship.

We loved each other.

- Yeah, that's it.

- That's it?

- [Deborah] Uh huh.

What was that standing there?

- [Verlease] Yeah.

Had the RC Cola on the top.

- [Deborah] Yeah, Uh huh.

- I mean, we were sort of new business, you know, my husband and I, I think it was about '57 or '58 when we opened up and we just really getting started, we just a young couple, one child, (Verlease chuckles) - [Deborah] They had a quality retail store, is where I spent a lot of my formative years, three or four years, yeah.

- We had newspapers, magazine and all the kids came from Jefferson School.

That was a, that was a test, you know, (Verlease titters) keeping up with the kids, getting the candy thing.

- Oh my, yeah.

And I bagged the candy.

(Verlease laughs) One cent candy so they could get a lot.

for five, ten cents.

(both chuckling) Yeah.

I can remember working behind the counter.

Yeah.

Learning how to count,- - How to count!

- at the store and give back change to people that came in the store.

I mean, at that time I was riding a tricycle.

I can remember riding my tricycle up and down Vinegar Hill.

- That was the end store.

- That way you, could, yeah.

We were in the middle, right where the Lewis and Clark statue is.

That's where our store was.

Quality Retail Store had a big window, and she could watch me go up the street.

- I heard about Mr. Inge, I was very excited about meeting him and talking with me and him I may have met him before, I'm not real sure, but I've heard the name.

Mr. Inge dressed up for that interview.

I mean, I think he had a little, little cap and his little neck tie.

I mean he dressed up and and he's at home.

I went to visit him in his home.

- Well, I was born in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood.

I was born at 333 West Main.

My grandparents, practically raised me.

We lived over top of Inge's store and grew up on Main Street over top of the store.

And my grandfather Thomas F. Inge Sr. would tell me different stories about Vinegar Hill.

When he opened the store in 1891 on the first day of July Main Street, West Main, up there in the block where my store is now, whereat my store was, was a mud road, no pavement.

- For some reason, I remember his voice soft, grainy, walking you through what you were gonna get.

And very gentle man, "Young lady," was always young lady, And he expected you to behave that way in his establishment.

- I remember the wooden floors.

And once you entered the store on the right side, there were glass cases where they kept candy and, stuff like that.

And then in the back of the store, they had a refrigerator where they sold boloney, meat, fish.

- Anything that we needed from Mr. Inge.

And if your mom did not have the money that day, "Come, get it.

Your mom will come pay me next, she'll pay us in a couple of days, we lived good.

I mean, we didn't know we were poor, 'cause our parents took care of us.

Mr. Inge took care of us.

- That was important to the Afro-American community because some of 'em, you know, couldn't afford to pay for everything at one time.

And he kept a book in the store, with the different charge accounts and individuals were coming in and charged groceries, and they would pay 'em in two or three weeks or a month later.

And he would accept that.

- [Ray] And my father, who started this business, came to Charlottesville 1917.

And his first funeral home was located in Vinegar Hill 'cause that's where all the black businesses were and they had more or less been restricted to opening businesses within that Vinegar Hill district.

He stayed there until 1925.

So he built this building and it was built by a black contractor named Charlie Coles, who had his office on Vinegar Hill.

So most of your businesses, most of your insurance offices, your restaurants, the Masonic building, some and churches were located in Vinegar Hill district.

- So that's how we have JFL funeral home today.

His, his cousin was here, Dr. Jackson, who was a dentist on Commerce Street.

And he said that he felt we needed, they needed to have a- - A mortician, - Mortician, a funeral home- - Home, yeah, funeral home- - in Charlottesville.

And that's how he decided to come here because my grandfather's originally from Petersburg, Virginia.

But Grandma Bell she's from Charlottesville.

She grew up here.

She met my grandmother at Virginia State University and he was a very distinguished gentleman.

When he would conduct funerals he wore tuxedo and top hat.

And everybody talked about that, that he was just such a presence.

- It was white, trimmed and black, white stucco with a front porch and a rocking chair that my grandma used to sit in, and at night we would sit on the steps so that we could see the people passing by.

The yard was full of hedges and a huge tree was right here.

And it was a wall that extended here.

And so basically I guess about where this line is in the sidewalk is where the yard stops, and he's driving in my yard!

(Kathy chuckles) I think if I'm cremated, (Kathy titters) when I die, I'll probably ask my daughter to drop my ashes right here, 'cause this is where I started.

So, this is just how personal I feel about this area because I still feel the presence of my family.

I still feel this is where we were supposed to be.

This is where I wanted to bring my daughter back to.

Now I was born at the University Hospital in the basement where the black, well, at that time, the colored babies were.

And when my mom and dad brought me home from that basement, this is where they brought me.

And just to think that I can't go back and point to where I live is, it's hard.

It's really hard.

(sweeping instrumental music) - There was an optimism that's built into urban renewal, which is if you wipe this clean and the city owns it, we'll be able to put this for productive use.

We'll able to attract a developer to work on this land, to attract somebody to build here.

And in a lot of cases that just doesn't happen.

(percussive music) - [Dr. Douglas] What we have found in the research that we have done, we know who bought the first deed in Vinegar Hill.

That in and of itself is a story of prosperity.

That in and of itself is a unique story.

John West, whose parents, who himself born an enslaved person who inherits a sum of money.

And then with that inheritance begins to buy property and aspires, and his aspiration is suggested in the amount of property he buys over his lifetime.

The second property that we know about is an 1888 property that is bought by Nannie Cox Jackson, who is a black woman.

People are buying property, they're owning their own businesses.

They're building things.

There is a really tight five years or so when a lot of activity is happening in this community.

(ominous music) 1902 constitution in Virginia inserts the legal racism, one was chattel slavery, now we've got legalized racism.

And here we sit beyond 60 years and recovery is slow and inching.

The University of Virginia raised the Confederate flag in 1861.

United Daughters of the Confederacy formed in 1893, the Sons of the Confederacy, 1894, the university's faculty, members of the Anglo Saxon club, that then from Richmond, that then leads to Ku Klux Klan that comes and rides, that when you think about what segregation looks like, 1924, the Racial Integrity Act makes it impossible for blacks and white to congregate in Charlottesville together.

Charlottesville creates a space of distinction in lockstep with the rest of the country.

As much as you understand the south, this place is as south as you can get.

- [Dr. Nelson] Mostly when I talk about urban renewal, I mean a specific federal program that began with the Housing Act of 1949, Title 1 of that, which at the time they weren't using the term urban renewal, they were using urban redevelopment.

In '55 that gets amended and that's when the term urban renewal enters parlance of this federal program.

(ominous instrumental music) - [George] Now behind Vinegar Hill, they were all more or less residents.

But those residents that people complained about, I should think if you are interested in history of that section, if you would go to the city clerk's office and look up and see who owned those problems at the time it had urban development, you would find that most of those properties were owned by white people renting to black.

And a lot of 'em had outdoor toilets.

You know what that is?

- The language used to remove Vinegar Hill was the same language being used to remove McKee Row.

It was blighted.

It was about the disturbance of blackness.

The space of Vinegar Hill at that point where it's being described as blighted.

It's not things that are being owned by black people.

It's being things that are being owned by white people who through neglect have caused people to live in impoverished conditions.

- [Dr. Nelson] So there's lots of cases where the urban renewal efforts, where there is opposition mounted in localities and they're able to fight it.

And this becomes more common as you move further into the civil rights era in the later 60s.

There are still the exceptions.

In a lot of case the people whose homes are destroyed by urban renewal, they're the most vulnerable, they don't have the political power.

They might resist this, but they don't have the political strength in Jim Crow America to actually make any difference in their city councils.

- [Ray] Really, we had no political power.

We had no one represented on city council.

You must remember this time there were no black people elected the city council.

Charles Barbour was the first black officer in council.

I was the first black that was appointed to the school board here in Charlottesville.

And that didn't happen until 1963.

- The other part about it is when it happens.

1964 is the Civil Rights Act.

That's a double-edged sword for urban renewal because the language that says you cannot discriminate based on race also implies that you cannot restore as a consequence of race.

It's devastating here because the Voting Rights Act doesn't happen until 1965.

And so most of the people who urban renewal happens to, have no ability to stop it.

They make an attempt to stop it.

They vote as if they are able to, but they don't have the right to do much about it because the poll tax exists here.

- I can just think about the sadness my mom and dad had and how they fought to keep Vinegar Hill.

There was a lot of buildup before they demolished Vinegar Hill and registering the people to vote and trying to get the community together, to stop the city council from wanting to demolish Vinegar Hill, right?

- [Yvonne] And passed by a few votes too, not those many votes, you know.

- There is growing opposition to it, particularly as the civil rights movement ramps up and becomes more ubiquitous in the country and just gains strength because the brunt of it fell so heavily on African Americans.

And because it followed (melancholy piano music) in a long history of black people being moved around by white elites, whether those be government elites or just economic elites for economic purposes, by whites, that benefit whites, right?

So this is going back long time, you get like the domestic slave trade and the movement of millions of people from the upper to the lower south.

- By the time you get into the early fifties, into 54, you know, 53, 54, Charlottesville is as prepared as anybody else to enter into a actual civil rights movement.

Ray Bell and his brother come home from the Korean war, Eugene Williams and Rev.

Jackson, all of these men, you know, Rev.

Bunn, these men in 53 and 54 are creating what we understand to be this really active NAACP.

And it's not just the men.

The women in this community are very, very active in that too.

They're the ones who are going out and getting people to join.

- [Eugene] I got appointed to be the chairman of the NAACP Membership Committee.

And the first year believe that was in 1955, I believe it was, we increased our membership from 65 members to 900 the first year.

And that gave the signal that there was power.

And the big thing to accomplish then was to get the city comply with May the 17th, 1954 decisions.

And the second year our membership drive, we moved our membership from 900 members to 1,500.

- [Ray] The state government took a stance of massive resistance and they would resist this and they waived the banner of state's rights.

And there was a court case in Charlottesville, where it was called Allen vs. the Board of Education.

We had spot with Robinson, Oliver Hill, but we took that case on.

As a consequence of massive resistance, the Charlottesville schools were closed.

They closed down all the schools.

(melancholy music) - Mr. Williams told me about how his daughters were part of the original Charlottesville 12-lawsuit, and his wife went downtown to buy some eyeglasses and the store that she went to, you could buy 'em and pay it weekly.

They called putting that on an account, and they wouldn't let her do that.

They wouldn't sell her eyeglasses once they joined that lawsuit.

And there was another gentleman who was a waiter at Farmington Country Club.

And he said his tips went down when he joined that lawsuit.

So that's the kind of thing you had to put up with, or that's the kind of thing you had to expect if you made that commitment, made that sacrifice.

- [Ray] And our aim then was to be able to get desegregated facilities, restaurants.

We went out to Holiday Inn called, and I remember going there with Mr. Williams.

So we ended up sitting in at that Holiday Inn a couple of days, and they desegregated.

And several other places, there was a little rucus up at a place called Buddies and it was at that location that Rev.

Johnson was jumped on by some huge man, some white guy who to attacked him to try to break up the marching, the protest march.

And we didn't let that deter us.

We kept coming back and he closed down rather than to open his place.

And there was another phase where we attacked the segregated housing in Charlottesville.

We wanted the Fair Housing rule, and we would go out on Sundays and go to white developments, such as the one off Cherry Avenue, Johnson Village.

I remember going over there and they wouldn't, they didn't want to show us any houses.

- They can't be divorced from each other.

You cannot divorce Charlottesville's integration from its urban renewal process.

Because in my mind, the question is, what do you do with these black people?

What do you do with these people who are demanding things that they now have right to demand, and how do we protect that which we have always had?

And how do we keep our racial divide and lines intact?

- There's this long history of, of African Americans, either being consigned to places and limited to places or being taken from places and relocated some place else when it served the economic political interest of people with power and generally white people with power.

And so the famous critique of this that is absolutely right, is when James Baldwin says that urban renewal is Negro removal.

- A boy last week, he was 16 in San Francisco, told me on television, thank God we got into a talk, maybe somebody will start to listen.

He said, "I've got no country."

"I've got no flag."

Man, he's only 16 years old.

And I couldn't say you do.

I don't have any evidence to prove that he does.

They were tearing down his house, because the San Francisco is engaging as most, and all the cities now are engaged in something called urban renewal, which means moving Negros out.

It means Negro removal.

That is what it means.

And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.

(suspenseful music) - There's more than 600 municipalities in the country that, and when I say municipalities, we think urban renewal, we think cities, right?

But it's not just cities, it's towns and villages.

Sometimes counties like you have towns that are less, than a thousand people that get urban renewal funds.

You don't think of these places as urban sites, right?

We don't think of these as urban, little town in Arkansas, say.

The numbers are huge.

It's over 300,000 families, families in mid-century America are three and a half people, I think on average.

And so we're talking about north of a million people and about 170,000 of those families were categorized for use for white or non-whites.

So 170,000 were non-white, 139,000 were white families.

So 54% of the reported families that are displaced by urban renewal are families of color.

And it continues until 1974 when urban renewal as a federal program ends.

And since you have up to this 25-year, evolving for sure, but massive federal program to provide funds to cities, to engage in what was initially slum clearance but really grew and become a far more capacious program that would cover things like the seizure of land and expansion of universities, and later of hospitals.

- It was very profitable on Vinegar Hill and I think most of the businesses were doing very well.

(melancholy piano music) What was so bad was that I don't think that the businesses got what they should have received, as far as nobody got what the value for their businesses or the value for the homes that were in that neighborhood.

Most of the businesses, when they moved to other areas, it just wasn't as profitable.

And they moved a lot of the people, as everyone knows, to West Haven, most of the people that had to buy homes with that money, I don't think they were able to get, that much for their property to begin with.

- Public housing is complicated.

And one of the things we talk about when we talk about urban renewal is, there's an economic loss for sure.

And there's some great houses that are owned or rented by African Americans that get destroyed.

And they don't want, this is their home and they don't wanna see it go.

In other cases, there are there really some pretty horrible conditions that people were living in and probably materially, no loss, but community-wise that's a loss, right?

Like that they have still have neighbors that they might be tight with, or to say nothing to the emotional component, like they know those neighbors so they can make common cause when they're like trying to just engage as citizens.

- [Ivan] Okay, now when they told y'all to move out, do you feel that you were adequately paid or compensated for your property?

Do you think you got a fair amount?

- [Sadie] We didn't own any property.

- Okay, just let me get this straight.

They just told y'all, y'all had to go?

They gave y'all some money or something didn't they?

No, because cause we did not own property, We were renting.

- I know- - Apparently- - [Ivan] You mean they just said whoever's renting y'all have to find somewhere else?

- [Sadie] You had to go, you had to go, what else?

- [Ivan] And they didn't give you anything?

- Nothing.

- Nothing to go out and find you know, make a new down payment on another apartment or nothing.

- Nothing.

- Ooh-wee!

- [Sadie] No compensation whatsoever.

- Was there a bait and switch here?

Was something offered because something else that was said several times was that folks who had land was supposed to be able to go back and get it.

But they have no records of anybody getting land back or whatever.

- I could hear stuff, how my mother and father would be talking.

And they would say that, my mom said, "Man, there's a development coming through and they're gonna turn these houses down."

"They say, they want to talk to us."

"So see if we can afford to go over to Hardy Drive."

You know, not everybody was up on just picking up our stuff and moving, but you had no choice because they wanted to tear it down.

They had had walkthroughs at that time where families could walk and pick and choose on the houses that they wanted.

So my mom, dad, and the kids, we all walked to the area that we wanted.

So my mom picked 830 A Run Street.

That's where we started out, three bedrooms.

And for Dad, my brothers and my sister and I, it was pretty, had good families moving in, everybody from down on Commerce, William street, not everybody came, but I think it was 126 units.

So, 126 units with families, one and two and three bedrooms, some five bedrooms.

It was a lot of people up there.

- I think I was almost about five years old when we moved to West Haven.

And to us, it was like the highlight of life, all these beautiful weeping willow trees.

The grass was nice.

We had rose bushes, we had nice landscaping.

The community was a nice community.

Families looked out for families, my grandmother and my aunt lived across the street.

So my grandmother and them also had to move.

- I think there was a sense of helplessness, that there wasn't really anything we could do.

And people had tried.

I don't think that's changed a whole lot, in many ways, but just the loss, it was very painful, to see your neighbor's house torn down and you knew it was coming your way.

And you having to move from places that you'd lived all your life or your family had, to make way for something, because somebody else thought it was bad.

To be told that what you had wasn't worth anything was just hurtful.

And I think we still feel that that pain.

- The outcomes of the urban renewal is that communities are lost, that communities are divided in favor of highways or in favor of kind of commerce.

Because the putting in of a highway is really about commerce and economics.

- So you do end up with huge numbers of parking lots.

There's just a ton of asphalt that is covering over sites that were slum clearance or other urban renewal project sites.

So that is not remotely uncommon.

It's not universal from project to project, but you're gonna find cities across country where you go to an urban renewal site and what you see today is a parking lot.

- So when they tore down the original Pettigrew Street, as we knew it, historically, it sat for 50 years as a unused parking lot, basically out any markers, historical markers or signs, or even any plans to fulfill the promise of urban renewal, which was promised to my grandfather and other business owners that they would redevelop the area so that they could bring their businesses back in and continue to thrive.

That never happened.

- [Man] That was dirt for years.

There was just nothing there.

It was just cleared out and there was nothing there.

It was just dirt, yep.

That was it.

I don't remember when they put Ridge McIntyre in.

I don't remember when they put that road in, but yeah.

I just remember thinking, "Are they ever gonna do anything with this?"

- I stopped coming that way.

I didn't like to come by that, you know what I'm saying?

Cause I'm telling you, even now, since they remodeling and tore it all down, everything is... (melancholy piano music) It still doesn't look like a downtown.

You know what I mean?

(Verlease chuckles) You'd expect them to build back.

- It was vacant for so long.

- Yeah, yeah.

It was vacant for so long.

Was very interesting because it just sat idle for so many years until they finally, think it was the hotel that they put in.

- [Man] It seemed like it took 'em a long time to tear down Zion Union.

I almost feel like that was the last thing they tore down.

And I remember like everything else around it, and then you'd look at Zion Union and you could kind of see through it.

It was like parts of it they torn up, parts of it they hadn't.

And so you could see the light shining through it.

You know, I remember that.

- In reality, it wasn't the blighted community that they described.

It was just a community in the way.

The advancement of the city is occurring on the backs of black people.

And that's what's happening in vinegar Hill, but it's not new.

There is a way that one begins to think about how the problem of blackness begins to be solved.

As a historic fact, it's solved by erasure, meaning black communities are on the lower parts of our topography and the corridors are in the upper parts of our topography.

So as you move through the city, it's really easy not to see blackness, and over and over and over, we see removal happen here.

That's part of the trend, right?

So I think that as we start to shape how we understand Vinegar Hill, I've always said, and always believe that it's not just about this instance as an instance, it really has to also be seen as practice.

But this is how whites deal with blacks in this space.

(dramatic music) It's most devastating because of what is removed and how much property is then lost and how much, what is lost, can never be recovered again.

- I was not even aware until I got the call from you that my great-grandparents and grandparents live there.

This is my grandfather here and he's marrying my grandma.

So this is Benny Wynn Jr., marrying Viola Hawkins.

As a realtor, watching people hand down generational wealth from one generation to the next and seeing what it does, my ceiling is my son's floor.

You know?

And what does that represent?

What does that mean?

When all of a sudden the ceiling is ripped out from the next generation, and now they gotta go back to the floor again.

- You know, it fits into the narrative of systemic racism.

Unfortunately, you can't be surprised at what people will do in the name of progress, and even though it's not progress for a certain group of people.

- I always say the racism in Charlottesville is stewed to perfection.

It is so nice and so pleasant and so polite.

You don't even realize it's happening to you sometimes, until you look at the outcome, these systems produce certain outcomes, so you have to either believe that African Americans are inferior or you have to believe there's a system that produces these outcomes with these deficits.

- A hundred years from now I think the way they'll teach it is, let's see, this was another example of the way America unintentionally, or intentionally destroyed the wealth and destroyed progress, and really put black people in the position of having to start all over.

- I live in a neighborhood now that was predominantly black.

And now it is integrated.

I go to my mailbox, people walk past me that are white with their puppies and their little children and they don't turn and they don't speak.

So we still have a long way to go.

- This is more of a market driven phenomenon, but the effects of it are the same.

People are having to move to the urban ring to be able to afford housing.

And yet it's harder to fight the free market than it is to fight a political fight.

Because as they say, "Big bank always wins over little bank."

- I really wish I could talk to somebody who knew some of the people who made these decisions, the city council, people to find out what kind of people they really were.

- You know, one of the things that I always find interesting when things like this happen is that we'll talk about, what happened, "All right, this is what happened."

But there were individual people who made these decisions like who were those individuals?

You know, they have names, who are they?

Who made the decision?

Someone made a decision to do this.

Who were they?

Why did they do it?

And are their descendants willing to step forward now, and speak about that?

- Pettigrew Street was not broken.

It may have need to be refurbished in some areas, upgraded, but never uprooted.

It was uprooted.

And we have not recovered from that uprootedness, not only myself, my family, but other families as well, over 500 businesses were lost.

And so we have this generational economic loss as a result of our social and economic root system being uprooted.

And we're here to see that change, to raise the consciousness level of our value, of our worth and restore what has been lost.

And we're gonna continue to lobby with local, state, federal leaders, stakeholders to say, we must build back.

This is a reparation issue that we can get our arms around and understand the economic impact that this devastation has had as well as social devastation it has had on our community.

- I saw a story.

There's a story where family's land was taken out on the beach at California.

And now that piece of property is valued at 75 million, that was taken from that family.

I think it was in 50s, 60s, '55, something like that, $75 million now, you know what I mean?

How do you make that family whole, from what you did?

You can't.

- You have to start somewhere.

You have to behave in a different manner.

The manner hasn't changed.

You can't keep doing the same thing to people, but yes, they got so much that they have to give.

They can't even give it.

They be poor and broken.

They don't have enough.

They don't have enough.

(laughs ironically) I don't see it.

- Charlottesville city planners are moving forward with designs on Vinegar Hill Park, the Vinegar Hill subcommittee met today... - Because you can't piece back together those relationships that were lost.

You can try to do other stuff.

You can put up markers and recognition and we can Vinegar Hill Day or whatev... All of that's nice, but that doesn't change the fact that a piece of property now that is valued at whatever is valued at is no longer a part of my family and the true value of that was not passed down.

And the fact that what I see people do with wealth in homes, in terms of sending their kids to college and education and helping them, using the homes to start businesses and that type of thing, you can never calculate those things that were lost and never able to be accomplished because of that.

So the only way to try to reasonably rectify that and make it whole is through some sort of financial compensation.

Don't tell me it can't be done.

I know it can be done.

You know what I mean?

It can be done.

So we need to think about the people that we put in place, because the people we put in place make the decisions on what gets done.

Just stop thinking that it can't happen.

No, it can happen.

We know who these people were.

We know what happened.

We can find their descendants.

It's not rocket science.

It's not even that complicated.

People still walking around here, who this happened to.

So... (inspirational instrumental music) - [Voiceover] Production funding for "Raised/Razed," is provided by...