NOMAnash Gentrification Task Force (NNGTF):

Are Reparations Necessary for United States Descendants of Slaves?

Analyzing the history of the American racial wealth gap
from an architect’s perspective

Written by Tyrone U. Bunyon Jr.

Editor/Publisher: Valarie Franklin

Someone to Trust

Claire cocked her head as she analyzed the complex entanglement of symbols, diagrams and engineering jargon compiled on the blueprints.

“This is just our initial response to some of the ideas you and Chris suggested about your properties,” the owner of the architecture firm explained to his client, a middle-aged real estate developer who was planning the revision of historic houses and apartments in downtown Nashville. Claire nodded without looking up and flipped through the remainder of the drawings with experienced eyes.

“I like them,” said Claire, finally smiling at Craig and myself. Relieved, I gave a muffled sigh and looked at my boss.

“Great,” said Craig, scooping the pile of plans back onto our side of the table. I was not yet 30 years old at the time but I was excited to be completing plans for luxury homes and apartments for a wealthy Nashville client. Claire and her husband, Chris, had developed dozens of properties across Nashville and they were looking for a talented team to implement new ideas into the designs for their next big project. I was happy to be aboard, but this was not my first OAC (Owner, Architect and Contractor) meeting with a multi-millionaire client. In fact, most architect’s clients are wealthy as they typically have the capital to fund expensive and premium projects.

“Are the ordinances ready?” said Claire. “If not, what could we do to push things along? I want to get moving on this right away.” Intrigued I waited for Craig’s answer about the ordinance, but instead, he sighed. Claire did not hesitate. “Listen,” she said turning to me. “I don’t want this to get ugly. Eventually these guys will have to move out and I do not want it to turn bad. Perhaps you know someone from a church or the community to come talk to the people who are there? You know…someone they can trust.” I knew precisely what Claire was now talking about. Claire was a businesswoman— a white businesswoman; and although I’m sure she regretted displacing minorities from their homes, progress waited for no one. I starred at her for a moment, unable to speak. “What had I done?” I thought. This was not the first instance of gentrification and displacement I witnessed firsthand. As an architect and planner in the residential market, I am first row to many zoning changes and variances, some of which would eventually displace people form their homes. This is the reality for nearly all architects at some point in their career. I felt powerless and conflicted sitting across the table from Claire as she continued to analyze plans with an approving head nod.

My first experience with urban development began in 2014 in Chattanooga, TN at a firm consisting of only three minority architects. The team at TCW & Associates was preparing a master plan and envisioning new development for MLK. Blvd. (previously called 9th street). MLK Blvd. was once a prominent cultural and economic center for Blacks in Chattanooga. Looking at the desolate street today it was obvious it would take an ambitious and visionary team to imagine what MLK. Blvd. could become. What remained on the thoroughfare after decades of divestment were a few black owned business, empty grass lots and abandoned storefronts with boarded up windows but T. Cress Williams of TCW & Associates was up to the task. Mr. Williams was a tall, assertive man who was about business. One of the first contracts Mr. Williams received for the master plan was a micro-brewery. Dawn and Antonio, a middle-aged white couple, had purchased part of a dilapidated building but they were certainly not the last to make smart investments and take advantage of UTC’s proximity to MLK. Blvd. Other large and small private sector businesses were gaining ground to cash in on the lucrative future of the street. As an ambitious recent college graduate, I of course wanted to be a part of the action. I wanted not only to plan the community but to be involved in the economic development that was taking place. I proposed taking advantage of future growth to family members, friends, and church members until the reality of lack of capital began to sink in. As I dug deeper, I realized that I had come face to face with an open secret: Most American minorities, such as Black Americans, are not economically viable and lack access to capital to fund capital ventures. While the vision of MLK. Blvd. may someday be realized; it was obvious that the MLK. Blvd. of tomorrow would look nothing like that of the past with few minorities taking part.

Reality of Black Life

A lack of equity is an ongoing reality for most Black Americans. As a young black college graduate entering the work force I wanted to research and find out more. After outlining article after article, analyzing data, and watching hundreds of hours of lectures it became clear that a lack economic solvency was the key problem in the Black community. While the data did not leave room for debate as to the financial vitality of Black Americans, the why was much more convoluted. The concept of the American dream and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps to achieve their greatest ambitions has long been an American mantra. It is often asked of Black Americans ‘Why can they not achieve as other groups have in the land of opportunity?’ In spite of this being a gross oversight of the scores of Black Americans who have achieved success in America, the history of how Black Americans got to their current condition is often overlooked and ignored in favor upholding exaggerations of the Protestant Work Ethic. One must instead ask why is it that Black families have 10 cents to every dollar of white families? (1.). Why is it that blacks own less than 2% of the wealth in the United States after being here just as long as their white counterparts? (2.). Most attribute this divide to inherent laziness, not historic public policy, or exclusion from wealth building. When one considers the wealth gap of 256 years (ironically about the same time frame as American slavery) (3.) one has to question the practicality of ‘hustle-culture’. The propaganda of bootstrapping could never close such a divide.

Though my research was extensive, I of course was not the first professional to tackle historic racial issues. My perspective is from that of an architect and planner. Economists such as William ‘Sandy’ Darity, and Dr. Claude Anderson have written extensively on the socio-economic issue form a financial specialist perspective. Attorney and Harvard alumni Jeffery Robinson spoke of the wealth gap and wrote on the issue from a legal perspective. My profession as a builder had given me unique insights to the disparities as well. When NOMAs Nashville President Valarie Franklin extended the invitation to join Gentrification Task Force I knew with over five years of research and my unique perspective as a designer I could be of some help.

How We got Here

The term revisionist history gets thrown around a lot lately as people try to explain the racial wealth divide, recordings of police brutality, killings and riots. To combat fears of revisionist history, I resort to referencing legitimate resources such as the Library of Cambridge to shed light on the history of public policy which impacted black life in America between 1865 to present day. Reparations is not a new issue. Many are shocked to learn that Dr. King addressed reparations on several occasions including an interview with NBC in 1967. (4.). Dr, King understood that the US government had not paid a debt owed to descendants of slaves for their free labor, nor the terrorism suffered for another hundred years and the pathological consequences which inevitably occurred.

In a small church in Mississippi in 1968, Dr. King publicly stated on camera, “At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor… today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality." (5.)

This may be news to readers fifty years later, but to many black agricultural workers in the deep south of Mississippi and Alabama it was not. Many blacks in the rural south were still sharecroppers if not domestic workers. Dr. King goes on to explain the care and economic advantages given to many white Americans and immigrants stating,

“But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check." (5.) Find Full Audio Here.

(Above) Dr. King meets with an interviewer at Ebenezer Baptist Church. During the interview Dr. King is recorded for publicly stating the needs for reparations to repair the damage that has been done psychologically and economically to Black Americans.

Unfortunately, Dr. King was not able to deliver on that promise. He was shot through the spinal cord on a Memphis Tennessee motel balcony less that a month after this speech. The great irony to the narrative of bootstrapping is that while Blacks were released from slavery and governmental programs such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal institution which aimed to establishing mechanisms for educating freed slaves and find them tillable land, were canceled in fear of making them lazy, some ex-plantation owners received reparations for loss of land and loss of slave labor (about $300 per save) under conciliatory acts instated by President Lincoln (6.). In 1865, the vast majority of the 4 million freed slaves were illiterate and penniless. Unable to afford a formal education and without any resources such as land or money, they were now left to stay on the very plantations they had been farming their entire lives as hired sharecroppers (7.). The game was fixed but the worst was yet to come.

In the winter of 1865, after Union General William T. Sherman led his march to the sea, he met with black clergymen and laymen at a church in Savannah, GA. There they discussed recompense in the form of dividing 400,000 acres along the Georgia and S. Carolina coast into parcels no larger than 40 acres (Senator Thaddeus Stephens later mentioned a beast of burden) hence the term ‘40 acres and mule’ (8.). This commendable act, called Special Field Order no. 15, did lead to land allotments for freed slaves in the area but it was eventually overturned by President Andrew Johnson in the fall of 1865 (9. ,10.). Under President Johnson’s cancellation of all of Gen. Sherman’s special field orders, much of the land that was secured was returned to the municipality or plantation owners and any other land commandeered during the war was returned to its owner (10.). When President Rutherford B. Hayes, under the Compromise of 1877 secretly negotiated to remove federal troops from the South in exchange for electoral votes, domestic terrorist groups such as the Klu Klux Klan ensued (11.). Historians generally mark the Compromise of 1877 as the end of the Reconstruction Era and the beginning of Jim Crow (12.). The issue in Post-Reconstruction America was two-fold: Not only did blacks not get reparations because of overturned field orders by President Andrew Johnson, the opposite side of the coin shows an insidious reality in which blacks were legally terrorized and benign neglect policies were enacted.

 (Above) President Elect Rutherford B. Hayes is shown making a Faustian bribe with devil in exchange for the “Solid South’s” vote. In this illustration, published in an 1877 New Article, the Solid South is personified as a Southern Belle. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes betrayed the party and removed Federal Troops from the south allowing terrorist institutions like the Red Shirts and Klu Klux Klan to stop blacks from voting.

The bleak reality of Post-Reconstruction America was not the end of racialized public policy. Soon Black Codes became legal state mandates, restricting the rights of freed blacks (13.). By 1870, a national average of one recorded lynching per week for nearly one-hundred years occurred in the South and Mid-West with nearly no convictions or indictments. (14.,15.). While this was the life for most blacks going into the turn of the 20th century, the US government took no steps to make their African citizens whole. Instead, the infamous court case of Plessy v. Fergusson (1896) reinforced doctrines of separate but equal which empowered segregationist and Jim Crow policies. Following World War II, US soldiers were aided with the 1944 GI Bill which secured a home for them and their families. Black veterans were not allowed to participate in these new policies making it impossible for them to take part in one of the biggest equity-building assets, home ownership (16.). By 1945, redlining was well underway, making it difficult or in some cases impossible to get bank loans for Black Americans. In many instances, the FHA, a US federal program, denied loans to white builders who did not plan to segregate the communities they were developing (17.,18).

A typical HOLC residential security map shows a color-keyed layout of citizens estimated for their riskiness of loans by location and ethnic neighborhood.

Indeed, when blacks did bootstrap, their efforts were often sabotaged. Missing from school history books are the destruction of the prominent black town of Greenwood, OK (popularly referred to as Tulsa) or the mass shootings of economical flagship St. Louis East Village by domestic terrorist groups (19.). These atrocities were never specifically resolved by state or federal governments. As Richard Rothstein said in The Color of Law, ‘Letting bygones be bygones is not a good approach if we want to be a constitutional democracy’ (20.). The more I researched the more I wanted to get involved. When Valarie Franklin announced that the group would officially launch in Spring of 2020, I soon learned that NNGTF would be tackling another sinister beast I had come across in my research: Federal-Aid Highway Acts. While President Eisenhower’s transportation programs made tremendous advances for the infrastructure of the country, many of the highways were constructed through black neighborhoods (21.). Black neighborhoods, which were historically urbanized, were bisected by towering interstates, making them difficult to navigate, enjoy or thrive. This was the case in Nashville, TN, the city where I had been practicing architecture and where we plan to help bring dignity, representation and better options to the gentrification process for minority constituents.

Where do We go From Here?

During the integration of the late 1960s and early 1970s, blacks divested from their own communities to chase better paying jobs and higher quality of life in integrated suburbs leaving historic neighborhoods such as Jackson, MS, Nashville, TN and even MLK. Blvd. in Chattanooga, TN (the very part of town I had been planning with TCW & Associates) desolate and forgotten. This is indeed something that must be addressed. This is the role of the architect—to cast a vision, lead in the planning effort and see opportunities and visualize what could exist where others do not.

Haven been laden with such a burdensome past while the wealth of some Americans continues to grow and calcify at the top, it is difficult to remain optimistic. The intention of this article was not to be divisive. My goal was to shed light on American history and public policies which have constructed the fabric of our present circumstances which is often forgotten. I have provided evidence and cited references to prove that Black Americans are by no means entirely to blame for their current socio-economic circumstances. If Black Americans never get substantial help or recompense from the government, individuals within the community must cast a vision and a plan or there is no future. Minorities, such as Black American descendants of slaves, cannot hope to compete with a tenth of the resources as white counterparts. In Where Do We go from Here, Chaos or Community, Dr. King calls for planning and asserting our efforts for future change. Black Americans should make clear, logical demands from the government as Dr. King realized before his assassination in 1968.

The Black American Community should also deal with the reality of never receiving reparations. If this is the case, we as community leaders, entrepreneurs, architects and planners must work together to cast a vision and take action to make all equitable in the land of opportunity.

*The names in this article have been changed for the protection and privacy of said individuals.

References

1.  Percheski, Christine; Gibson-Davis, Christina (2020) A Penny on the Dollar: Racial Inequalities in Wealth among Household with Children.  Retrieved August 9, 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023120916616

2. Anderson, Dr. Claude. (2001) Powernomics. p.92-93.

3. McIntosh, Kriston; Moss, Emily; Nunn, Ryan and Shambaugh, Jay. (2020) Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap.  The Brookings Institute. Retrieved August 10, 2020.

4. Dr King Speaks with NBC News (2018. Published 1967) Retrieved August 1, 2020.

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/martin-luther-king-jr-speaks-with-nbc-news-11-months-before-assassination-1202163779741

5. Ta-Nehisi Coats (2014) Martin Luther King Makes Case for Reparations. Retrieved August 1, 2020.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/martin-luther-king-makes-the-case-for-reparations/372696/

6.   Appiah, Anthony; Bunzl, Martin. (2007) Buying Freedom: Ethnics and Economics of Slave Redemption Princeton University Press.

7.  Monteith, Sharon (2013) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South. p.xiii, 242.

8. Barton Myers, ‘Sherman’s Field Order No. 15’. The New Georgia Encyclopedia. 2005.

9. Rabinowitz, Richard; Beard, Rick. (2011).The Legacy of the Civil War. p. 2. Retrieved August 16, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/features/waso/cw150th/reflections/legacy/page4.html

10. . Rabinowitz, Richard; Beard, Rick. (2011).The Legacy of the Civil War. p. 2-5. Retrieved August 16, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/features/waso/cw150th/reflections/legacy/page4.html

11. George C. Rable, (2007). But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. pp. 101, 110–11.

12. Stewart (1998) Black Codes and Broken Windows, p. 2261-2.

13.  Robinson-Nkongola, Audrey; Montgomery, Jack G. (2016). ‘Wandering the Web--Laws that Affect the Life of Americans from Slavery to the 21st Century’. Against the Grain. p80-83. doi:10.7771/2380-176X.7341. Retrieved 6 August 2020.

14.  "Lynchings: By State and Race, 1882–1968". University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Archived from the orginal on June 29, 2010. Retrieved August 1, 2020. Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.

15.  "Lynchings: By Year and Race". University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Archived from the original on July 24, 2010. Retrieved July 26, 2010. Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.

16. Rothstein, Richard (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company.  p.72. ISBN 978-1-63149-285-3.

17. Herbold, Hilary (1994). "Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (6): 104–108. doi:10.2307/2962479. JSTOR 2962479.

18.  Rothstein, Richard (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company.  p.8-11, 72i. ISBN 978-1-63149-285-3.

19.The Negro Silent Protest Parade organized by the NAACP Fifth Ave. New York City July 28, 1917. PDF. National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC. National Humanities Center. 2014. Retrieved August 12, 2020.

20.  Rothstein, Richard (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company.  p.xi. ISBN 978-1-63149-285-3.

21. Karis, David (2015) Highway to Inequity: The Disparate Impact of the Interstate Highway System on Poor and Minority Communities in American Cities. University of Delaware. New Visions for Public Affairs, Vol. 7.   Retrieved August 1, 2020. https://www.nashville.gov/Portals/0/SiteContent/Planning/docs/trans/EveryPlaceCounts/1_Highway%20to%20Inequity.pdf