Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Last month, a Virginia lawmaker made headlines after proposing a commission to study her state universities’ history of uprooting Black communities. Other state officials joined Delegate Delores McGuinn in calling for these Black families and their descendants to receive some form of redress, ranging from scholarships to broader types of reparations.
Now, of course, the notion of reparations — or repair from harm — has moved to the center of the public imagination as more and more people confront the degree to which this country’s prosperity has been built on the exploitation of Black people through slavery in particular. But very few know about the role that, of all things, university expansion also played in the destruction of Black communities.
These Virginia politicians only learned about this tragedy in their own backyard because of an investigative series produced by ProPublica in September, which chronicled, in detail, the heartbreak faced by the state’s Black residents at the hands of local universities. The report primarily focused on the Shoe Lane community in Newport News, Va., that was violently uprooted in the 1960s. Black families had planned to sell parcels of their farmland to others pursuing the American dream of homeownership but had been shut out of white neighborhoods. Instead of encouraging this neighborhood expansion, the City Council used eminent domain to seize 60 acres of the area. Black residents fought back and pointed out that there were alternative locations and cheaper properties where a school could have been built. But the goal was to erase what the city called the “Black spot” by making way for a two-year college that eventually became Christopher Newport University.
Additional reports in the news series talked of similar damages when Norfolk sacrificed Lamberts…
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