Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
elusive sense of what we call wellbeing, but each of us can easily summon the experiences that contribute to it. The neighbor who greets you, the yard you admire, the shop owner who goes to the back to find you something, the postal worker who stops to talk, the sense of safety and security in the known, the familiar. Lose all this and what’s at stake is our health, our social fabric—our lives.
Root Shock emerged as a pioneering, synthesizing work that perches at the intersection of history, sociology, architecture, urban planning, and public health, all of which are embedded in where we conduct our everyday lives. Today, focusing on neighborhoods and place-based interventions is common in many fields. Across New York City government, city agencies seek to bring resources and programs to neighborhoods, treating them as settings that have the capacity to mold social outcomes independent of the particular individuals who live in them. In my field—public health—we talk a lot about how disease burden varies by community, with some neighborhoods—for example, Harlem or the South Bronx—experiencing enduring excess burdens of ill health and early death compared to wealthy enclaves such as the Upper East Side. These neighborhoods are the legacy of ghettoes segregated by both race and class, which in New York are virtually synonymous. What Fullilove conveys, often through the words of the residents whose narratives she has preserved and shared, is that all neighborhoods have assets, histories, and memory. Gone are the archetypal images of poor Black neighborhoods as sad, needy, and downtrodden—neighborhoods that need our benevolence, our help. Fullilove uncovers the complex histories of neighborhoods and debunks the enduring creation myth that troubled neighborhoods arise from troubled people. In some of the most moving passages of this book, residents of poor, largely working-class neighborhoods speak as powerful witnesses to and analysts of the destruction of the communities that nurtured them in a harsh world.
Deprivation is not a natural state, but one visited upon communities by bad policies, both past and present. When I first read this book, I was struck by its forthright exposition of the ongoing presence of structural and institutional racism. A decade ago, racism was a word that had practically vanished from both intellectual and everyday conversation. But racism is not gone, and, as groups like Black Lives Matter and other emerging movements articulate, racism will not disappear without attention to the structures that perpetuate it. Many such policies are embedded in our cities, in our housing policies and siting practices. And, while “slum clearance” I hope has ended, how to make cities places where people of all races and classes can survive and flourish is very much a challenge of today. Creating more affordable housing is critical, as the poor and middle class face escalating real estate prices, and gentrification continues to change and challenge neighborhoods. It is also critical to maintain the character of communities that makes cities—all cities, including my city—the vibrant places we love. Read this book as a cautionary tale and an extraordinary call to action.
—Mary T. Bassett, MD
New York City, July 2016
Opening day for the Freedom Corner Monument, April 22, 2001, was a day of pride and healing celebration for the Hill District community, but it didn’t feel that way to me.
City Councilman Sala Udin thanked everyone. He thanked God “for bringing us thus far along the way.” He thanked the ordinary men and women who had performed extraordinary feats for the cause of freedom against all odds and whose names we may never know or inscribe onto granite. He thanked St. Benedict the Moor Church, whose various pastors acted as custodians of Freedom Corner for more than 40 years when it was just the broken-down sidewalk in front of their church. He thanked contributors, large and small, for their generosity and the members of the Freedom Corner Committee for illuminating the dream of Jake Milliones and countless Freedom Fighters. Finally, he thanked the architect Howard Graves and me, the artist, calling us two gifted men whose collaboration on the design and building of the monument was choreographed like a fine-tuned dance creation.
The community celebrated throughout the commemorative service on that special day, and rightfully so, for the monument does honor great people who marched and sacrificed for civil rights in America. However, within that rousing chorus, many celebrated the event not only as a commemoration but as a kind of resurrection of their beloved community. Many recognized what had truly manifested at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street had been born of emotions that stewed from 40-odd years ago when Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence and his wealthy renaissance men deemed the Lower Hill to have long outlived its usefulness. This declaration of the Hill to be a slum of no social value to anyone, soon thereafter, unleashed a sweeping urban renewal plan, that by March 1958 demolished every building in the area. Headlines called the mayor’s ruthless plan ‘Slum Clearing’, but the urban renewal project, all for the sake of one civic auditorium, displaced 8,000 mostly black families and demolished the entirety of the Lower Hill District.
By springtime of 1957, we’d grown accustomed to hearing demolition sounding in the distance. Oftentimes, my brothers and I, taking pause from playtime, watched the buildings come down. I was delighted seeing the brick walls taking a hit, the way they’d stagger at first, seemingly poised for another mighty blow, but, when that 2-ton iron wrecking ball smacked again, walls faltered like shameless drunks, collapsing in dazzling clouds of dust. And to be there when they released that wrecking ball from way up sky-high—setting it free—letting it freefall from the tip of the towering jib—oh my!—did the sidewalks let out a bluster of dust and a thundering shuddering right up through our sneakers.
And then, there came the dusty black men from way up on the hill, strutting down our way looking for a day’s work. Carrying tiny hammers for tending the fallen brick, they’d saunter about, some taking giant steps, their clodhoppers stomping, puffing up the dust. Some parked their Rocket 88s right next to a humped pile of brick and claimed it as their own. Others power-steered junkyard Buicks across vacant lots and still others backed their Fairlanes leaving the trunks gaping open wide, hungry to find whatever metals they could salvage from the dust.
Hunched over scattered bricks, they toiled, getting dustier than us, so heavily blessed under crowns of mortar dust, we could hardly tell the young men from the veterans. Most often, the old men sat straddled a crate. Gripping a brick with their calloused black hands, they’d flip the brick in one hand, tapping it with the hammer as if performing a magic trick; having struck off the mortar, they’d heave their bricks atop sorted heaps, each one landing with a clink among the chorus of many. By day’s end, pennies earned accounted for the history that each man sweated to pile so high.
And then there was always that local man, the special man, the old one who’d lay his hammer down. Carefully brushing dust from his dirty overalls, he’d ascend woefully to the top of the highest mound. Gasping as if he’d climbed peaks of Mount Everest, sucking dust from his laden history, he’d scan the aftermath of his labor before looking toward the sky. And we’d be, right there, my brothers and I, stoning windows or playacting as pilfering pirates ransacking houses nearby. Oblivious to our sordid surroundings, we climbed atop those treacherous heaps—claiming ourselves kings of the hill.1
I was six years old then, the youngest in a poverty-stricken family of eight, twice displaced by the civic auditorium project. Nevertheless, my story is but one drawn from such a bad time experienced by many.
In time, the mayor’s 1950’s urban renewal project was proven to be nothing more than a giant steel chastity belt purposed to preserve white virtues, wow the wealthy, and, in the process, castrate the Hill District’s cultural crotch. The brutal renewal plan nearly succeeded in destroying the Hill District in its entirety, but the Hill community, declaring the steps of St. Benedict the Moor Church and the run-down sidewalks at the intersection of Crawford Street and Centre Avenue as their recognizable line in the sand, fought heartily against the mighty political power of city hall.
Arm in arm, the community stood in solidarity, launching protest marches from the renowned intersection against the city’s ongoing aggression. Massive well-organized protest marches from that corner addressed loss of housing, employment, police brutality and social ills that coincided rightly with the nationwide Civil Rights