Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford

Author:Susan Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

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Nichols Chapel is a block and a half away from the Gadsden Green Homes. It was founded in the 1970s as a community church with a strong relationship to Gadsden Green. Just about everyone who lives in Gadsden Green, in a neighborhood known as “Back da Green,” is Black, and half live below the poverty line.27 Most are women and families with young children. They are lucky to have a place in the Homes. There are hundreds more families waiting for placement in public housing in expensive Charleston.28 Eric Jackson, who grew up in the Homes, was priced out of the peninsula when he came back from the military in 1998. He still believes in the peninsula as a central place for the city’s economy, even though he now lives in West Ashley: “We might not be able to live down here, but we’ll be able to work and feed our families down here,” Jackson says.29

Back da Green has declined over the years. Michelle Mapp’s paternal grandmother, Susie Minus, lived in Gadsden Green, and when Mapp was a child she often visited her there. The young Michelle loved visiting her grandmother, who lived surrounded by plants and had a soap opera murmuring—The Young and the Restless!—all the time. The place was well-kept then and a lady selling candy out of her house lived close by.30

Now Gadsden Green is falling apart, dank, and troubled. Few in power seem to care. It seems to Mapp, who saw rapid, wholesale displacement of African American communities and people in North Charleston, that the condition of the Gadsden Green public housing buildings is emblematic of Charleston’s attitude towards its Black residents: zero investment for decades benefiting people who had been there all their lives.31

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