Exposing the Myth of Black Wall Street
Although many people take pride in Durham’s fanciful tale of once being a black economic paradise known as Black Wall Street, truth is , there is another side of the story rooted in neglect and economic despair.
Everyday in Durham, we wake up to the news about how someone’s loved one has fallen victim to violence. And thus begins the finger pointing. Since 1965, and release of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report , The Case of the Negro Family ,the blame for problems in the hood has been placed ,unfairly, on the shoulders of single Black mothers and the deterioration of the Black family. (Read Michele Wallace’s, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.)
Fast forward to the 90’s and the usual suspects have remained unruly Black youth who have unlimited access to guns that , seemingly, just drop out of the sky onto the streets of the Bull City. However, few people have ever ventured to ask the fundamental question, how did we get here? How did Black Wall Street turn part of Durham into a Gangsta’s Paradise?
Somebody sold us out.
Although the shootings in the Bull City are beginning to appear in more random places, many of the acts are still centering around public housing developments. However , many people in this town seem to shy away from discussing the origin of the problem, overlooking the role of capitalist greed and the benign neglect of predominantly Black neighborhoods.
To many people the creation of high crime neighborhoods, is just written off as a natural act of nature. They have always been here, and will forever more be. (Read Dark Ghett0 by Kenneth Clark). Why blame systemic white supremacy coupled with classism when it is much more expeditious and politically correct, as William Ryan wrote in his book of the same title ,to continue, “ Blaming the Victim. “
To find the answer to the decades’ old question of the destruction of Hayti and other historically Black communities, we must go back to the late 50’s with the coming of urban renewal.
In his work , The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein raises the issue of “slum clearance” where public officials used construction efforts such as highways to shift “ African American populations away from downtown business districts so that white communiters , shoppers, and business elites would not be exposed to black people.” When you combine this with unscrupulous White business owners and upper middle class Black opportunists, the results are bound to be disastrous for economically disadvantaged Black folk.
The result of this clandestine relationship was the demolition of Black neighborhoods and the mass displacement of Black families. Although the politically correct term is urban renewal , a more correct wording would be economic ethnic cleansing.
By the late 60’s , according to Christina Greene’s book ,Our Separate Ways, Black Durham residents, initially, welcomed urban renewal but “it soon became clear that the poor would have no voice in its implementation. “
Quiet as kept, this could not be pulled off without the participation of the Black Bourgeoisie, some of whom launched a massive PR campaign to sell the less affluent Black community on an idea that turned out to be more like a fool’s errand than a highway to upward mobility.
Like many cities across the country , African American residents were bamboozled into giving up their family homes in exchange for being shoved into public housing.
Although many people seem totally in shock when there are shootings in places like McDougald Terrace, in reality, the writing was graffitied on the wall more than four decades ago. According to Brandon K Winford in his book ,John Herver Wheeler, Black Banking and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, placing Lincoln Apartments in such close proximity to McDougald Terrace would “result in intolerable congested conditions and would overburden already crowded education and recreational facilities in the area.” And this is just one example.
Even in 2024, we see the cycle continuing with gentrification and the silencing of the voices of the poor in Durham, as if they have no say so in their exile from the current economic boom in the Bull City and Research Triangle Park.
However, if we are ever going to stop the flood of blood that is drenching the Bull City we have to have an honest conversation about from whence it sprang. Someone has to have the guts to connect the dots.
Before they open their mouths to address the crime issue in Durham, every politician must be pressed on their assessment of the relationship between the history of urban renewal and the violence we are experiencing in the city on a daily basis. And how gentrification is continuing to perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Not only that, we, as citizens, must demand to know how they will repair the socio-economic devastation created by decades of urban renewal and neglect.
Unless we correct these historical wrongs, history will just keep repeating itself and we will be left with more dead bodies on Bull City streets for eternity.
Min. Paul Scott is Minister of Information of the Black Hoodie Brigade. He can be reached at (919) 972–8305 or minpaulscott@yahoo.com Twitter/X @truthminista
Article courtesy of Militant Mind Media
