State To Study Impact On Black Communities Uprooted By Growth Of Virginia Colleges

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

What will happen now that a new 19-member state legislative committee is studying the impact that historically White universities have had on nearby Black neighborhoods acquired through eminent domain?

Two are located in Hampton Roads: Christopher Newport in Newport News and Old Dominion in Norfolk.

Will these colleges in Hampton Roads compensate displaced Black families? Will they award scholarships to impacted descendants, the way Georgetown University did after it acknowledged the role it played during the slave trade. Georgetown launched a 2022 annual fund of $400,000 to support slave descendants who were sold on Jesuit plantations in Maryland and forced to move to Louisiana in 1838.

Virginia has included its current budget the establishment of a 19-member commission to examine several universities in Virginia that acquired property via eminent domain. One is Christopher Newport University, which was established in Newport News in the 1960s on land taken from a Black community through the use of eminent domain, in the Shoe Lane neighborhood.

Committee members will also be examining the Lambert’s Point neighborhood in Norfolk, which was disrupted in the 1960s-70s to make room for a new branch of the College of William and Mary, which later turned into Old Dominion University. Lambert’s Point was previously a middle class Black community. The move displaced more than 150 families.

The University of Virginia, meanwhile, wiped out a Black local neighborhood and business district called Vinegar Hill when the school needed more room for its growing student population in the 1960s. UVA acquired the former downtown Black business and residential district through urban renewal regulations.

“The University played a direct role in the physical destruction of Black neighborhoods and displacement of its residents. At other times, its influence has been felt more indirectly,” the University of Virginia noted on its website in a  March 15, 2021 post.

In 1965, Charlottesville utilized eminent domain to acquire the Vinegar Hill neighborhood and business district, raze it, and attempt to redevelop it for a new thoroughfare and commercial development. The urban renewal scheme for Vinegar Hill followed a blueprint proposed by urban planning firm Harland Bartholomew and Associates, infamous for pioneering racially motivated slum clearance in St. Louis.

As was the case in cities across the nation, urban renewal had a devastating impact on Charlottesville’s African American community. All told, the city’s redevelopment of the area resulted in the forced displacement of more than 600 Black families and the closing of more than 30 Black-owned businesses that, combined, generated a gross annual income of $1.6 million,” according to a University of Virginia post on its website.

Records show a similar takeover of Black land occurred in Norfolk as ODU required more land to expand.

The damage that historically White universities have inflicted on nearby Black neighborhoods is a topic that one of the state’s new commission members, Del. Bonita Anthony, a Norfolk Democrat, is focusing on.

She said, “I am very interested in this topic simply because Norfolk historically has been the very core and center of redlining and displacement. My expectation is for us to gather as much information as we can and to look at overarching policies that the General Assembly can put in place to make sure we don’t repeat history.”

Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, also a commission member and history professor at Norfolk State University, said she hopes the legislative panel will focus on reparative justice.

“The next step has to be to heal,” she said. “Healing doesn’t just come from acknowledgement. It comes from actual steps to repair because right now we are structurally still in a racist society.”

Brandi Kellam, a reporter who led the initial Christopher Newport University investigation, which initially ran in ProPublica, said,  “This is not just a local Newport News issue, not just a city council issue, not just a college issue,” she said. “This is a collective, systemic dismantling of a community by several parties in power across the state of Virginia.”

According to news reports, “The statewide panel will probe historic land acquisitions and consider potential redress for Black families and their descendants. The commission will work with public colleges and universities to examine property transactions in majority Black communities, and determine whether and what form of compensation or relief would be appropriate,” according to the state budget, which was signed into law May 13.”

Del. Delores McQuinn, D-Richmond, who introduced a bill to establish the 19-member commission in January, said, “Just as universities have been winners, families have lost a lot,” McQuinn said when introducing the bill. “I just want families to somehow be made whole.”

Throughout the USA, similar efforts have resulted in displaced Blacks receiving scholarships at Georgetown and at colleges in New Orleans.

For example, after about  7,000 undergraduate students enrolled at Georgetown learned of the school’s forced slave sale, they voted for a 2022 reparations fund that would generate close to $400,000 a year through donations. Recipients are to be chosen twice a year through an application process.