“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”
- Warsan Shire1
“The fact is that American society has not yet come to grips with the question of public responsibility for the condition of life of the poor, the unfortunate, or the disadvantaged.”
- Eugene J. Meehan2
Introduction
In the archives of the Library of Virginia, 150 original black and white photographs from the mid-20th century chronicle the construction of three public housing projects in Richmond: Gilpin, Creighton, and Hillside Courts. Looking at the photos requires the viewer to step back in time, in many ways. One picture from 1940 features a horse, a ramshackle outhouse, and several pedestrians walking next to a construction zone. A large painted sign says, “Gilpin Court Slum-Clearance Project” and another advertises: “Model Negro Apartment.” The collection of pictures from Hillside and Creighton Courts shows ribbon-cutting ceremonies held on sunny summer days in 1953. While both ceremonies feature the same local dignitaries and Housing Authority officials on a bandstand, the notable difference between the pictures is that at Hillside, every person captured by the camera is white, whereas everyone at Creighton is black, except for the people on the bandstand. Other than that distinction, the photos illustrate similarly captive audiences, high school marching bands, serious Boy Scouts bearing American flags, and smiling residents taking the keys to their new apartments.
These images would probably surprise a current resident of public housing in Richmond, especially anyone from Hillside Court which has only housed a handful of white tenants over the last forty years. Everything from the careful landscaping, the sense of occasion at the ceremonies, the fancy dress of attendees, and spotlessly clean, well-appointed apartments would seem incongruous today. My commute regularly takes me past Gilpin Court which advertised “Model Negro Apartment” in 1940. While it has not been appropriate to say “negro” for decades, neither would it be fitting to call the apartments at Gilpin “model.” The uniform brick exteriors of the apartment buildings are only distinguishable from each other by the broken blinds in some windows and the dripping air conditioning units of others. The archived pictures show that today’s poorly maintained housing projects are the very apartments built with pomp and circumstance on top of last century’s slums.
Richmond, Virginia, is full of contentious and uncomfortable histories. The city is a former capital of the Confederacy, a port where native Powhatan Indians were once displaced by English settlers, a place where African slaves were shackled and auctioned off in downtown markets, and the home of massive resistance to school desegregation in the late-1950s which forced the federal government to directly intervene. Competing narratives of public history show up in racial and socio-economic tension over seemingly innocuous school zoning changes or during regional elections. I believe that these conflicts are exacerbated and perpetuated by a great disparity in the living conditions of city residents; because these arguments are deeply rooted in historical injustice, they continue to bear bitter fruit. One such fruit is modern de facto housing segregation, where the racial divide is particularly clear.
Where oppressed people’s ancestors once lived was one problem, but where their descendants live today is quite another dilemma.
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