Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia by Elizabeth Catte

Author:Elizabeth Catte
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In other words, the Supreme Court explained that it understood such ordinances had been motivated by a desire to maintain racial purity, and that its ruling should not be seen as obstructive to the broad aim of preventing amalgamation. By amalgamation, it meant, similar to miscegenation, the combining of races through procreation. In 1924, Virginia would create its Racial Integrity Act as its most explicit method of prevention.

The Supreme Court ruling meant that Charlottesville had to devise new ways to contain Black people geographically in order to preserve racial purity. The city leveraged other types of zoning ordinances, encouraged private contracts that produced segregation through deed restriction, manipulated the placement of utilities, and marked territory by Klan parades and, eventually, Confederate statues. But concentrating Black people into one area of the city also risked an outcome that white city leaders did not enjoy thinking about, either: that Black people would invest in their neighborhoods, find ways to grow their communities, and pass some generational wealth to their children. Limiting this potential meant restricting education, healthcare, employment, and income for Black people in Charlottesville as well. A study commissioned by the Charlottesville Low-Income Housing Coalition in 2020 found that after 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants were unconstitutional, the city “increased economically restrictive zoning as a proxy for explicit racial restrictions” to an extent so great that these same zoning practices now impede the city’s ability to grow.

In the 1960s, the Preston Avenue area where Klan-robed children had once frightened Black people “back into the shadows” became part of the target area for a city beautification campaign. Just a decade prior, the Supreme Court had affirmed the government’s right to utilize eminent domain solely for the purpose of beautification and redevelopment. In 1960, the mayor of Charlottesville, Thomas Mitchie, looked out at Preston Avenue and its larger Vinegar Hill neighborhood and concluded, “we are fortunate that the worst slum area in the city lends itself beautifully to plans for urban renewal.” What Mitchie found fortunate about this arrangement was that what he called a slum was located on property that was valuable to the city. The economic and physical growth of the city’s downtown was stagnating as suburbanization pushed residents and their business enterprises further out to the fringes of the city.

Charlottesville began demolishing the Vinegar Hill neighborhood in 1965. The city, however, deferred the most aggressive redevelopment of its new blank canvas to generations that followed in the 1980s. Separated by a span of fifteen years, future city leaders often did not connect the growth of the downtown and the creation of what we know today as the downtown mall to a racist urban renewal scheme. The passage of time, in other words, helped them achieve moral distance between what happened in the past and this new era in city development. In 2011, after decades of pressure, the city finally recognized its actions, and the city council delivered a public apology for the destruction of Vinegar Hill:

Now

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