Civil Rights & The Urban Tools of Dispossession (1920-1970)

In Durham, lunch counters and restaurants became a key site of struggle during the Civil Rights movement. The civil disobedience at Durham’s Royal Ice Cream restaurant in 1957 was the first sit-in in North Carolina and ignited an era of organizing and direct action. Five years later, a protest to desegregate the Howard Johnsons on Highway 15-501 attracted more than 4,000 people. It was the largest protest in Durham’s history, with protesters chanting “We’re going to eat those 28 flavors” in a defiant reframing of a popular Howard Johnson’s advertising campaign at the time. The struggle to desegregate Durham eateries intensified in 1963 when protesters engaged in sit-ins at six downtown restaurants on the eve of the municipal elections. More than 100 people were arrested and hundreds more surrounded the jail in solidarity. In the weeks that followed, 700+ Durhamites, both Black and white, ran a full-page ad in the Durham Herald pledging support to restaurants and other businesses that adopted “equal treatment to all without regard to race.” The mounting public pressure resulted in mass desegregation of Durham eateries by the end of the year- in advance of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act that legally ended segregation.²⁰⁶

Black-owned businesses helped support the Civil Rights Movement by providing food to protestors. As Hayti neighborhood restaurateur Peggy Tapp of the Chicken Hut recalls: “We had a lot to do with the sit ins. Fed the CORE folks. Had dealings with all of them. Took food to the jailhouse, and out at Duke University during the sit-ins.” Black women in Durham also played a special role in the Civil Rights Movement. Women showed up in greater numbers to demonstrations, raised money, advised youth groups, coordinated activities, and fed protesters in a show of love and solidarity. This included Mrs. Humely and Mother McLaurin, two cafeteria workers at North Carolina College who made sandwiches for jailed student protesters. As described by historian Christina Greene, “they [Humely and McLaurin] were not simply doing ‘women’s work’ but were literally nurturing the freedom movement.”^210-211

Although civil rights wins brought about new political, economic, and social opportunities for Black people, desegregation was not a boon to Black businesses. Segregation, with all its indignities, had fostered a strong sense of racial solidarity and a parallel Black economy. This was reduced as a broader set of options became available to Black consumers. As Andrea Harris from The Institute, a Durham-based nonprofit focused on minority economic development reflected: "With integration, the marketplace was opened. [Before that], a lot of black businesses operated in what I call a sheltered market environment--because you are meeting needs of people who could not buy these products or services in the larger marketplace. With integration, that marketplace was opened." Moreover, whereas Black consumers started patronizing white businesses after desegregation, white consumers did not seek out Black businesses in the same way. As a result, the bottom line of Durham’s Black food businesses were negatively impacted.²¹³

Both nationally and locally, the Civil Rights movement was always clear to link the issue of racial equality with economic opportunity. At the time of his assassination, Martin Luther King was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on a Poor People’s Campaign, to elevate the intersection of these two issues. Civil Rights advocacy, as well as books and exposes about living in poverty such as “the Other America” by Michael Harrington led President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson to declare a “war on poverty” in the early 1960s. This war entailed a host of new social welfare policies and programs that became known as “The Great Society.” Reforms included the expansion of healthcare through the creation of Medicaid and Medicare (Social Security Act 1965), adoption of the Title I program that provided additional funding to high-poverty school districts (Elementary and Secondary Education Act 1965), and the passage of the Food Stamp Act of 1964. The food stamp program was implemented in Durham County in 1966, and a decade later, the program was in every county in the country. Researchers heralded “no program does more to lengthen and strengthen the lives of our people than the Food Stamp Program.” Until the early 1980s, the food stamp program received broad bipartisan support.²¹⁸

Also concurrent to the Civil Rights Movement, was a new slate of federal housing policies that would fundamentally reshape the urban landscape in Durham. Key among them was the Housing Act of 1949, passed during the presidency of Harry Truman with the goal of providing “a suitable home and living environment for every American family.” To accomplish this bold goal, the act included three key provisions. Title I provided funding for clearance of slums and blighted areas in cities, in what became known as “urban renewal.”  However, a clear definition of what constituted a slum was never provided. Title II of the act expanded the authorization of the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance program. Title III was a vast enlargement of public housing funding for 800,000 new units nation-wide.²¹⁹

In the late 1950s, Durham applied for a large sum of federal money for a local urban renewal program. There was to be complete local discretion regarding how and where this money was to be used. The city formed a Redevelopment Commission in 1958 and created an urban renewal plan in consultation with the University of North Carolina’s City and Regional Planning Department. In the plan, a large section of the Hayti area, the largest Black neighborhood and home to the majority of Black-owned businesses, was slated for total demolition and redevelopment. This decision occurred in close conjunction with the building of a new state-funded highway, NC 147. The reasons given to focus on Hayti were the presence of rundown buildings, stagnant property values, and public health concerns. Durham planners, city officials, and newspapers used language such as “blighted eyesore” and “economic and aesthetic drag” to describe Hayti and predicted that if something was not done its “tangle of pathologies” would spread to other parts of the city like a virus. This language reflected racist assumptions about dysfunctional Black communities and completely ignored the long history of disinvestment and racial discrimination they had endured. By only focusing on the physical conditions of the area, they disregarded the experiences of its residents and the ways in which place-based community was integral to their survival and well-being.²²⁰

During the urban renewal planning stage, the City of Durham was the most powerful decision-maker at the table. In addition to the demolition and clearance of so-called blighted areas, they were also keenly interested in the redevelopment of downtown and clearing the way for the building of Highway 147. White business interests were enthusiastic about building a freeway to relieve congestion downtown and connect to the newly planned Research Triangle Park. They also saw opportunities for private development in the clearance areas and projected an increase in the city’s tax base. To gain support for the project, city officials made three big promises to the Black community: new housing, new commercial development, and major infrastructure improvements in Black neighborhoods. With these commitments made, Black political leaders, in turn advocated for the program. Most working-class Black people knew little about urban renewal or how it would impact their lives, but voted in a bloc with the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs. Thus, when urban renewal went to public vote in a bond referendum, over 90% of Black people voted in support. The most vocal opposition to the project came from Durham’s white working class communities, who saw no benefits to their own communities in the proposed plan. In 1962, the referendum passed by a narrow margin.

Across the country, 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities were dismantled through urban renewal. A million people, disproportionately people of color, were displaced by the program. Locally, the urban renewal program from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s was slow and incredibly disruptive. In the end, the program destroyed much and replaced little. Over 4,000 families and 500 businesses were displaced. This destruction and displacement included a significant part of the area’s food infrastructure, such as grocery stores and restaurants. But the promise of a renewed Hayti and adequate replacements for lost housing and businesses never came. Black leaders and the Hayti community were left stung by a sense of betrayal, and many incurred devastating economic losses.²²¹ When redevelopment did eventually come, it consisted primarily of public housing projects and strip malls.²²²

Where did displaced Hayti residents go? Some moved to adjacent poor white neighborhoods like Edgemont and East Durham which experienced rapid racial turnover. Many others ended up in new public housing projects. Durham’s first projects in the 1950s were segregated, with Few Gardens for white people and McDougald Terrace for Black people. By the late 1960s public housing had been racialized and was a program almost exclusively for Black people. In the severe housing crunch at the time, public housing was initially a big improvement in residents’ lives, but the promise of public housing as safe, decent, and affordable housing did not last long. Like most places around the country, Durham’s public housing was cheaply constructed, poorly maintained, and quickly deteriorated from normal use. Today, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has more than $35 billion in repair backlogs and deferred maintenance for the nation’s public housing stock. Although the federal government funded public housing construction, the local government made all the decisions about building design and project location. Rather than distributing public housing throughout the city, nearly all public housing projects were clustered in existing Black neighborhoods in southeast Durham. This cut off public housing residents’ access to other parts of the city and reinforced patterns of racial residential segregation.^229-230

In reality, the federal government had a two-tiered housing policy for most of the 20th century. On one hand, white people were given unprecedented homeownership opportunities, through long-term, low-interest mortgages backed by the Federal Government, and moved to the suburbs- which were subsidized by the government on nearly every level. On the other, Black people and people of color got public housing that provided no wealth building for its residents. Moreover, Black people were dispossessed of substantial real estate and business holdings through urban renewal and highway projects. The effects of these policy decisions are critical in Durham, and elsewhere, because food insecurity is a result of poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Amidst the ravages of urban renewal, a host of new community organizing endeavors took form in Black Durham in the mid to late 1960s. The Carolina Fund, an anti-poverty program started by Governor Terry Sanford, brought paid organizers to Durham’s poor neighborhoods. They knocked doors, listened to the issues facing poor residents, and created a politically powerful federation of neighborhood councils called United Organization for Community Improvement (UOCI). These neighborhood councils convened over food and organized neighborhood cleanups. They protested against urban renewal and advocated for impacted residents. They took on slumlords exploiting the housing crisis in Black Durham with rent strikes and public shaming. In 1967, housekeepers and cafeteria workers at Duke, primarily Black women, organized under AFSCME’s Local 77 union and created demands for higher wages and better working conditions. The next year, Durham’s Black community, responding to the firing of 31 Black employees from Watt’s Hospital, formed the Black Solidarity Committee (BSC). The BSC submitted a list of 88 demands to the Durham Chamber of Commerce and Merchants Association related to employment, education, political representation, and police conduct in the Black community. They organized and sustained a boycott of white businesses for over nine months and ultimately won some of their demands. Historian Christina Greene called this boycott “the longest, most successful, broadest-based protest ever waged by Durham Blacks.”^231-232

During the same time period in the late 1960s, the Black Power Movement took root in Durham. Perceiving limited tangible gains for Black people in the civil rights desegregation victories, its leaders called for Black self-determination and autonomy. One expression of this movement locally was the formation of Malcolm X University (MXU), an independent higher-learning institution that opened in the heart of Hayti in 1969. Its mission was to provide an ideological and practical methodology for meeting the physical, social, psychological, economic and cultural needs of Black people. The curriculum called for African language study and travel abroad to Africa. Students were required to concentrate studies in one of the fields deemed most needed to sustain a Black nation, one of which was food science. After a year of operation in Durham, MXU moved to Greensboro. One of the attractions of the Greensboro site was that it afforded students space to operate a farm, where they grew vegetables, raised chickens, and learned about various African foodways. The university subsequently closed in 1973, but planted many seeds that would come to bear fruit.^233-234