Background
Roanoke, which was first known as Big Lick for the nutritious salt marshes that drew game to the area, was incorporated as a city in 1884, making it one of Virginia’s younger municipalities.
At the turn of the twentieth century, some 30 percent of Roanoke’s population was African American. Though they were poorly paid and denied the most lucrative jobs, the industrial work that Black locals found at the Norfolk and Western Railway, cigar factories, and foundries was more promising than the dead-end sharecropping available throughout most of the South. Many Black residents settled in segregated blocks north of the railroad tracks, in the northwestern or northeastern sections of the city. These areas were among the last to receive public services such as running water, paved streets, or gas lighting along the streets or inside homes.
In the 1930s, the federal government, through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created color-coded maps that assessed the creditworthiness of neighborhoods in 250 cities across the country, including Roanoke. Based on racist assumptions, these maps “redlined” many Black neighborhoods as financially hazardous, cutting them off from housing assistance in the depths of the Great Depression and denying homeownership to Black residents. This led to the further decline of these segregated neighborhoods filled with often poorly maintained rental housing, resulting in their classification as “slums.”
The federal Housing Law of 1937 provided federal funding to local housing authorities for the construction of public housing for lower-income families and individuals, but required the demolition of one unit of “slum” housing for every new unit built. It was followed by the federal Housing Act of 1949 and the subsequent 1954 amendments, which gave local housing authorities the power to acquire land perceived as blighted to clear it for private or commercial development or for the construction roads and other amenities for white residents in the rapidly growing suburbs.
Northeast Roanoke
In July 1949, the Roanoke City Council established the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA), which was the first step in applying for federal urban renewal funds. The Northeast neighborhood, a largely Black residential area without political power at a time when the Black vote was constrained by the poll tax, was the first area targeted for redevelopment under the RRHA’s Commonwealth Project redevelopment plan. A 1953 survey conducted by the RRHA concluded that 76 percent of the 438 residential structures in the neighborhood were “substandard” and 248 were completely “dilapidated.”
In 1955, the Roanoke City Council determined that the Northeast neighborhood was a “slum and blighted area.” This cleared the way for them to approve the Commonwealth Redevelopment Project to raze approximately 83.5 acres of homes, businesses, and schools to widen Williamson Road, a major thoroughfare that passed through Northeast to downtown, and make the remaining area available for private and commercial development. The key word in their agenda was “progress,” by which they meant modern cityscapes with new industries, large public facilities such as a civic center, and high-speed superhighways to zip white visitors into downtown.
White leaders like Mary C. Pickett, a member of Roanoke’s all-white city council at the time, complained that on Sunday drives they would pass by Northeast’s outdoor toilets and “dirty” children sitting on curbs. “It was not a very prestigious entrance to the city,” Pickett told The Roanoke Times & World-News. “That was prime growth land. Some people had to suffer.”
Roanoke’s two white-owned daily newspapers, The Roanoke Times and its afternoon sister, The World-News, offered no opposition to the Commonwealth project. The papers routinely reported on crime in African American communities but otherwise ignored the culturally rich Black world north of the railroad tracks, with its garden clubs, debutante balls, and historic library. Northeast also boasted a number of Black-owned businesses, including beauty parlors, barber shops, gas stations, pharmacies, a music school, and an ice cream parlor. Children sledded on Northeast’s jaw-dropping hills and climbed the area’s hundreds of trees. The nation’s first Black ambassador, Edward R. Dudley, pioneering civil rights attorney Oliver W. Hill Sr., and well-known doctors, business leaders, educators, and ministers came out of Northeast and neighboring Gainsboro.
Because Jim Crow rules forced Black residents of all means onto the same tight streets, the class diversity visible in their housing—stately brick homes next to ramshackle rentals—was strikingly different from Roanoke’s white neighborhoods, which were arranged neatly by income level. When whites looked at Northeast, they perceived it as dysfunctional. In 1957, as bulldozers were busy mowing down one street after another, World-News editorial writers called Northeast “a slovenly and unsightly approach to the city’s heart.”
The citizens of Northeast, however, later described a neighborliness available to them nowhere else in town. “In Northeast, there was no poverty because everybody helped one another,” said the late Charles Meadows, a Norfolk and Western Railway worker who lived in Northeast most of his life. “When we could afford two pounds of beans, our wives would cook them up and everybody would have a bowl. If our next-door neighbor didn’t have a job, we would help them out. We were independently self-supporting as a neighborhood.”
Meadows had invested $20,000 in his four-bedroom brick home at 604 Patton Avenue Northeast, carefully remodeling and expanding it. He and his wife, Carrie Meadows, raised their five children there. By the 1960s, when urban renewal turned its sights on his block, the city offered him $7,800 for the house, plus extra money to help him relocate. Authorities acknowledged his house was in tip-top shape, but it would have to go, they told him, because the house next door was run down. Once the Roanoke Gas Company bought and redeveloped Meadows’s property, values zoomed to $67,000 an acre. A few years later, once his street was razed, graded, and repurposed, the eight acres that had comprised his neighborhood were assessed at $2 million.
In the early days of urban renewal in Roanoke, city officials promised the first residents forced out of Northeast that they could eventually rebuild there. That never happened. In addition to homes, churches also were destroyed. Greater Mount Zion Baptist, a thriving church in a handsome new brick building on Madison Avenue Northeast, was torn down to build a civic center. It and a few other churches were able to rebuild in Northwest Roanoke, but many churches did not survive urban renewal.
The Commonwealth project was followed in 1964 by the Kimball Project, which destroyed most of the remaining homes in Northeast, displacing an estimated 305 families, to make way for a new main post office, a Norfolk & Western Railroad computer center, and Roanoke Gas Company offices.
In the end, all of Northeast’s hills, trees, and streets were leveled and replaced with a civic center, highways, a car dealership, chain motels, a McDonald’s, and acres of parking lots. Since burning was quicker and cheaper than demolition, firefighters set approximately 100 homes ablaze, two or three at a time. The Rev. Ivory Morton, then a child, recalled that seeing his neighbors’ houses burn was like watching a war movie from his front porch. When it was clear that Northeast was gone for good, “A lot of people died heartbroken,” said Meadows. “The older ones just somehow couldn’t take it.”
Others put up resistance, some through unsuccessful court challenges, others through unyielding determination. Kathleen Vaughn Ross, a beloved elementary school secretary, refused to leave her home on Third Street Northeast, purchased by her parents in 1927. She witnessed neighbors leave and move into other houses, only to lose them because they could not keep up with the mortgage payments. She vowed to city officials that she would not sell her house until they offered her a fair price. She endured more than a decade of dust, fumes, and engine uproar as the Roanoke Civic Center’s parking lot was built around her home. Finally, with the satisfactory sale of her home, she moved into a condo far from the fray.
Displaced homeowners dealt not only with the loss of homes and communities but also encountered difficulty finding new homes on the only streets available to them in white neighborhoods near the farthest reaches of the old racial barriers. Most white residents chose to flee these integrating neighborhoods for new suburban housing that was closed to Black homeowners through racially restrictive covenants that prevented nonwhite people from purchasing or occupying specific homes. Many Black residents were forced back into debt for decades to pay for the formerly white-owned houses. Black renters from Northeast moved into housing projects such as Lincoln Terrace that were newly built to accommodate them.
Even the ancestors of those ousted were not spared by urban renewal. Builders exhumed some 933 bodies from Old Lick Cemetery, the final resting place of many of Roanoke’s early Black inhabitants, for construction of an Interstate 581 interchange in Northeast. Their remains were reburied in a mass grave outside of town.
Gainsboro
Following the leveling of Northeast, Roanoke turned its gaze to the Gainsboro neighborhood in northwest Roanoke. Redevelopers focused on Henry Street and the surrounding blocks, a commercial and entertainment district that was the economic and cultural center of Black Roanoke. The area was home to movie theaters, auditoriums, restaurants, gambling houses, nightclubs, and social clubs. Fans came from near and far to hear Duke Ellington, Fats Domino, Nat King Cole, James Brown, and other famous musicians. The neighborhood also housed medical and law offices, hotels for Black travelers, the newsroom of The Roanoke Tribune, a weekly Black-owned newspaper, and the studio of pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.
Gainsboro
Gainsboro was also home to Burrell Memorial Hospital, one of the best-equipped Black hospitals in the South, and the Burrell Pharmacy, one of the earliest Black drugstores in southwestern Virginia. The hospital was named in honor of Dr. Isaac David Burrell, the founder of Burrell Pharmacy, who died from an acute case of gallstones when local white hospitals refused to treat him.
The city government toggled back and forth for years on how to redevelop Gainsboro. At various times, plans were to preserve and restore what was left of the neighborhood or to tear it all down and build something else. As a result, redevelopment lurched along interminably, a block or two at a time. Even after the federal urban renewal program formally ended in 1974, the City of Roanoke continued to implement redevelopment projects using other funding sources. Over the years, Henry Street was studied by nearly a dozen consultants of varying philosophies, each with different ideas for how to revitalize a street that had lost most of its original buildings. Meanwhile, fires of unknown origin destroyed many key Gainsboro buildings, and demolition crews continued to obliterate others, such as the Roanoke Tribune office. Burrell Hospital closed in 1978. In 1983, with no warning, according to longtime publisher Claudia Whitworth, bulldozers knocked down her office and destroyed thousands of historical photographs and back issues.
Twenty-three acres of Gainsboro homes and businesses were demolished by the city to accommodate an expansion of a Coca-Cola plant in the 1980s. In the 1990s, as the city widened Wells Avenue from two lanes to four and created a convention center adjacent to the Hotel Roanoke, city officials backed off on plans to demolish two historic homes and instead moved them to neighboring Gilmer Avenue. However, other homes and former stores were razed. Even more homes and other structures were leveled by the city for the building of Second Street Northwest, which takes motorists over the railroad tracks and through Gainsboro.
Many Gainsboro residents, expecting their homes to be taken soon, stopped maintaining them. As the homes fell into disrepair and the neighborhood deteriorated, housing values declined. As a result, many homeowners did not receive a large enough payment to comfortably relocate. In the end, hundreds of Gainsboro homes, many of them stately houses built in the nineteenth century, plus scores of businesses and churches, were demolished. More original buildings were spared than in Northeast, and some new homes were built, but not enough of the community remained to keep the few surviving businesses alive. Some unfortunate residents who lost their homes in Northeast and relocated to Gainsboro were forced to move twice.
The Gainsboro Neighborhood Development Program was officially closed by the City of Roanoke and the RRHA in 2008.
The Legacy of Urban Renewal in Roanoke
In January 1995, The Roanoke Times & World-News published a twelve-page history about the effects of urban renewal on Roanoke titled “Street by Street, Block by Block: How Urban Renewal Uprooted Black Roanoke” by reporter Mary Bishop. It documented the fate of the Black homes, businesses, and institutions uprooted in the city, as well as city leaders’ decisions and reasoning over the years as they reshaped a significant portion of the city and tore apart a vital network of mutual support for Black residents. As Bishop noted, of the more than eighty local officials who oversaw urban renewal in Roanoke, only eleven—four city council members and seven members of the RRHA authority board—were Black.
Citizens who had endured urban renewal told their stories and shared their photographs of the Black world that once thrived in Roanoke. Though Roanoke’s actions were not unusual among American cities, the intimate chronicling of the consequences for the people who lost their communities was rare. Earl Reynolds Jr., a former Roanoke planner and assistant city manager who grew up in Gainsboro, told Bishop that urban renewal was pushed through with little regard for how obliterating the homes and sacred places of thousands of families would affect individuals or the city over time. “There was no whole, no big picture,” he said. “I think the city as a whole is worse off because of it.”
As a result of “Street by Street,” Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, a social psychiatrist, included Roanoke’s experience with urban renewal in her groundbreaking book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (2004). The book chronicled the health effects of urban renewal’s mass displacements on an estimated one million Americans, most of them African Americans.
Today, the city’s urban renewal history continues to muddle land-use discussions. Black residents express extreme wariness when city planners propose even small projects in predominantly Black neighborhoods. They testify fervently in public hearings about their fear that they will lose their neighborhoods again or that new traffic patterns and big-box development will upset their hard-won peace and quiet.
Roanoke officials have been talking for years about issuing an apology to their citizens displaced by urban renewal.
