Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove

      Marc Weiss summed up the overall impact of the twenty-four-year program by saying, “Urban renewal agencies in many cities demolished whole communities inhabited by low income people in order to provide land for private development of office buildings, sports arenas, hotels, trade centers, and high income luxury buildings.”¹⁰ Rather than providing decent homes and suitable living environments, urban renewal created a massive housing crisis. Weiss noted, “As of June 30, 1967, 400,000 residential units had been demolished in urban renewal areas, while only 10,760 low-rent public housing units had been built on these sites.”¹¹ You might well ask: How did a plan that subsidized developers, and dramatically worsened the conditions of the poor, come to be the law of the land?

      Saving Downtown

      American business leaders and mayors of large cities believed that the civic organization that had evolved over the first part of the twentieth century, that is, a central downtown surrounded by an array of manufacturing, trading, and residential areas, was becoming obsolete as the population began to overrun the borders and fill the nearby suburbs. In their view, a postwar retooling of the American city was needed, one designed to respond to the changing spatial dynamics and to prepare for competition with other nations. The changing needs of American capitalism were the impetus for the reorganization of the cities, and it was powerful men who sought solutions and pushed for their enactment into law. Weiss noted: “Urban renewal owes its origins to downtown merchants, banks, large corporations, newspaper publishers, realtors, and other institutions with substantial business and property interests in the central part of the city.”¹²

      In Pittsburgh, for example, the leadership for urban renewal came from the Allegheny Conference on Post-War Community Planning, a group of civic and business leaders that was started in 1943 to chart the course for ensuring the city’s prosperity. A photograph of the executive committee of the conference depicts a large group of white men, dressed to suggest wealth and authority, and seated under portraits of two members of the Mellon banking family.¹³ Just to list those seated in the first row:

       • Edward J. Hanley, vice president of the conference and president, Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation;

       • Edward J. Magee, executive director of the conference;

       • Leon Falk, Jr., industrialist;¹⁴

       • John T. Ryan, Jr., chairman of the conference and president, Mine Safety Appliances Company;

       • Carl B. Jansen, president of the conference and chairman of the board, Dravo Corporation;

       • Gwilym R. Price, vice president of the conference and chairman of the board, Westinghouse Electric Corporation;

       • Leslie B. Worthington, president, United States Steel Corporation;

       • John A. Mayer, vice president of the conference and president, Mellon National Bank and Trust Company.

      Conspicuously absent from the picture, and from the decision-making processes, were poor people, black people, and women. One way of understanding urban renewal is to contrast the discourse that was taking place in different settings. Clearly, when the industrialists themselves were at the table, the looming and fundamental changes in methods and places of production were part of the conversation.

      Outside of those rooms, however, the public concern of white officials was largely cast as physical improvements that entailed “no social loss.” George Evans, a member of the Pittsburgh City Council, wrote a 1943 article that put forward the public face of urban renewal. In “Here Is a Postwar Job for Pittsburgh . . . Transforming the Hill District,” Evans argued, “The Hill District of Pittsburgh is probably one of the most outstanding examples in Pittsburgh of neighborhood deterioration . . . There are 7,000 separate property owners; more than 10,000 dwelling units and in all more than 10,000 buildings. Approximately 90 per cent of the buildings in the area are substandard and have long outlived their usefulness, and so there would be no social loss if they were all destroyed. The area is criss-crossed with streets running every which way, which absorb at least one-third of the area. These streets should all be vacated and a new street pattern overlaid. This would effect a saving of probably 100 acres now used for unnecessary streets.”¹⁵ (emphasis added)

      The Hill District, which served as a newcomer neighborhood of Pittsburgh, had welcomed tens of thousands of African Americans to the city in the first half of the twentieth century. For those migrants, the tight streets of the Hill were not a waste of territory, but the nidus for making essential relationships.

      As Sala Udin, who grew up in the Hill District and later served as its councilman, put it, “The sense of community and the buildings are related in an old area. The buildings were old, the streets were cobblestone and old, there were many small alleyways and people lived in those alleyways. The houses were very close together. There were small walkways that ran in between the alleyways that was really a playground. So, the physical condition of the buildings helped to create a sense of community. We all lived in similar conditions and had similar complaints about the wind whipping through the gaps between the frame and the window, and the holes in the walls and the leaking and the toilet fixtures that work sometimes and don’t work sometimes. But that kind of common condition bound us together more as a community. I knew everybody on my block, and they knew me. They knew me on sight, and they knew all the children on sight, and my behavior changed when I entered the block. And so, I think there was a very strong sense of community.”

      For Thelma Lovette, Barbara Suber, Henry Belcher, Agnes Franklin, George Moses, Ken Nesbitt, and others I talked to from the Hill, those close-knit relationships were essential to life. The dispersal of the community and the loss of those connections had ominous implications. Thus, a third part of the discourse on the changing city was the African American community’s sense of threat, which was captured in the expression “Urban Renewal Is Negro Removal.”¹⁶

      But George Evans, writing before the integration of baseball, before the integration of schools or buses, was living in a world that promulgated racist imaginings while prohibiting genuine contact. The power structure offered no forum for Thelma Lovett or any other African Americans to argue for their version of reality. Furthermore, George Evans could speak in that manner with the full backing of white social scientists who, themselves no better informed than George Evans, concluded that African American communities were “disorganized,” the technical term for “no social loss.” In the words of a leading academic researcher, “The Negro who hesitates to leave Harlem or the South Side is chiefly reacting negatively to the unknown ‘white man’s world’ out there. His own fellow ethnics share no distinctive heritage excepting a rural origin and a common reaction to the rejection by white society.”¹⁷

      Tension Building Up . . .