Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
the ghetto were made outside its boundaries, in city hall or in Congress. Rather, he hoped to use the ghetto as a base of power from which to work in coalition with other groups in the fight for basic necessities, education and housing chief among them. Desegregation, in his view, was the beginning of a new life for the ghetto, not its end. But how was this to be?
It was the urbanist Jane Jacobs who provided a vision of the possible future of the ghetto postsegregation.24 She argued that, though we call all poor neighborhoods “slums,” we should distinguish between two kinds of poor neighborhoods: perpetual slums and unslumming neighborhoods. They might look the same initially, she noted, but they were on distinctly different trajectories due to the actions of area residents. A slum would endure if residents left as quickly as they could. A neighborhood could transform itself, if people wanted to stay. It was the investment of time, money, and love that would make the difference. Following this line of reasoning, one might imagine some ghettos that would flourish and others that would flounder, depending on whether or not the area received investment from residents and attention from the larger body politic.25
It is significant that much of the Jewish ghetto in Rome is still standing, nearly 450 years later. Laura Supino told Carol Shapiro, “Jews have been living in this neighborhood for 22 centuries, two hundred years before the common era, with no break in their presence. So we are the only Jewish community to be present always in the same place before the Diaspora. Jewish people still live here, but of course all Italian citizens can live here and Jews can live in every other part of the town. But this quarter has always been a meeting place and a place for Jewish memories.”26
Sentiment aside, make no mistake about it, the ghetto of Rome was not just a ghetto: it was also a slum. According to Anya Shetterly, “There was just tiny narrow streets, all the garbage went out on the street. You can just imagine the smell.” But, in 2002, Let’s Go Rome tells tourists, “Although Dickens declared the area ‘a miserable place, densely populated and reeking with bad odours,’ today’s Jewish ghetto is one of Rome’s most charming and eclectic neighborhoods, with family businesses dating back centuries and restaurants serving up some of the tastiest food in the city.”27
Segregation in a city inhibits the free interaction among citizens and invariably leads to brutality and inequality, which themselves are antithetical to urbanity. When segregation disappears, freedom of movement becomes possible. That does not necessarily mean that people will want to leave the place where they have lived. The ghetto ceases to be a ghetto, it is true, but it does not stop being a neighborhood of history. Postsegregation, the African American ghetto would have been a site for imaginative re-creation, much like the ghetto in Rome.
The Second Great Migration, which began in 1940 and ended in 1970, posed another extraordinary set of challenges to the ghetto and to the city. The ghettos, largely built by the hopeful and resourceful migrants who arrived during the course of the Great Migration, were now the destination of millions of refugees, forced off the land by the mechanization of the cotton harvest. The new arrivals swelled the populations of the ghettos, bringing with them a welter of needs that far exceeded the kind most neighbors might have to offer. Whereas the earlier generation was urbanized by the factories that stood on every corner, the era of unskilled labor was drawing to a close as this second group of country people showed up looking for work. Who was to meet their needs? Where were they to be housed? Who would help them make the transition from the rural to urban life?
For if the city had been unhappy with the ghetto before 1940, the numbers and the rawness of the new arrivals were an even more severe aggravation to white sensibilities. The city would have to help meet the needs of its new citizens, and somebody had to find some room for them.
The third challenge facing the urban ghettos was the loss of unskilled jobs, some due to “runaway” plants that had left the older industrial areas for the South and other places with nonunion labor, and some due to automation of factory work and the transition to an information economy. The handwriting was on the wall: if people were not ready to compete for jobs requiring mastery of a high level of reading and writing skills, they were going to be shut out of the reconfigured urban job market.
Given the vitality of the civil rights movement, and the strength of the ghetto communities, it is possible they could have solved all these problems and more. But what happened next was an enormous setback, one that threw the homeward journey completely off course. What happened next was urban renewal.
The following excerpts are from an interview with Zenobia Ferguson, a resident of Roanoke, Virginia, who was displaced by the urban renewal of the Northwest section. This is the story of how she moved to the city and made a home for herself.
I had never lived in an all-black neighborhood until I came to Roanoke. Because where I lived was out on a farm, and all around it, people were white, and I didn’t see black people until I went to church, or Sunday School, or in the winter when I went to school. All of my schoolmates were black. That’s just the way it was. We played together. Fought and played. Country life, you were very isolated from people because most people were on a farm, and unless there was some kind of activity at the church or at school, you just didn’t see people. But you know, black people, that is. The Pullens, they lived across the road, we all played together, and they were all white.
And the neighbors we had that were black were just an old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Wax. We’d go down to see them, but they didn’t have any children. And see, I left Fincastle when I was twelve and went to Christiansburg Institute for high school, because there was no high school in my area for black people.
It was nice. They were strict. They were really strict, and I was the youngest student there. We had dormitories. We had matrons, and founders of that school were people from Pennsylvania, they call them the Quakers. But the atmosphere of that school was sort of like Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, because I understand that Booker T. Washington was instrumental in getting that school started.
Mostly the boys learned the trades. We had students from all over Virginia. Some from New York and some from Pennsylvania. It was a boarding school and a day school also.
[Commenting on the strictness] I had been over in the Edgar Long Building and I had to come back and get something I left in the dormitory, and I would run up the steps, and the matron would say, “Go right back down where you started running, and start walking like a lady.” And on Saturday night we had what was called the Douglass Literary Society, named after Frederick Douglass. And that was where you learned poetry and society, and then they would talk to us about the social graces and this kind of things.
We had to line up on Sunday morning, and we would walk over to the Christiansburg Church. And the matron would walk down the line and inspect you.
And on Monday nights, we would have a Monday night meeting, and everything that you did wrong was written in her black book. And she would go down the line, and point you out, and she would say to me, “I don’t have your name here, but I know you did something. And I’m going to find out!” And she was always on my case. Always on my case! And I saw her in Washington later, and she was with her daughter, and she said, “I just loved this girl!” And I thought to myself, “God!”
And at boarding school, you had calling hours on Sunday. And boys would put your name down, and then if you had been good, you could come down and sit in the living room and talk, but he couldn’t touch you. No handling, no, no no! You used to have to cross your ankles. I think about that and think, “God, look at kids today.” But other things that the kids do, I think, you know, it all comes in time. Because I remember when I was up there in Christiansburg, my mother sent me a new pea coat, that’s what we were wearing then. And I had everybody autograph my coat with a pen. That was what you did with it. When I went home, my mother was furious. She said,