Gentrification is a Slavery Remix
Gentrification is a Slavery Remix
Mass displacement & dislocation of Black residents is a vestige of slavery - & it could be dismantled and restructured into a new form of immediate reparations right now
Dr. G.S. Potter | Senior Editor
This nation wasn’t founded on the principles of Democracy. It was founded through the demonic coupling of white supremacy and manifest destiny. It was birthed as a result of the rape of Turtle Island and the genocide and displacement of the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples and hundreds of tribes that protected her. The United States of America grew and thrived because of the enslavement and torture of Black people, too.
This nation was built on a foundation of theft, genocide, and enslavement. But, today, we have a softer word for it: we just call it gentrification.
White people own the land. They own 98 percent of the agricultural land, and just about as much of the private property. They stole it. They own it. They decide what gets built on it. They decide who gets to live on it. And White people decide how much it costs to survive.
And if they decide they want to remove BIPOC folks and families from their land and put something or someone else there, that’s exactly what they do. They not only do it, but they make the people they are kicking off their stolen land pay for it.
Sherman’s Special Field Order
This is why 157 years later, after the end of the Civil War, the Black community is still fighting for 40 acres and a mule. The story of reparations is the story of White displacement of Black people. It is inseparable from gentrification.
Just months before the Civil War ended, the Union was faced with a number of questions. What should be done with the land that was seized from the Confederates? What would become of the thousands of starving Black people that accompanied General Sherman on his March to the Sea? How were Black families going to survive in the South?
In efforts to answer these questions, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman met with 20 Black ministers to form a plan. Four days later, on January 16, 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15.
Without access to land, the resources to build and grow on it, and protection from the Confederates, Black families and communities would not be able to survive in the South and the Confederacy would be able to rebuild. The fates of the Union and free Black people were inseparable.
With the backing of Congressional strategists, Sherman was authorized to “give” 400,000 acres of land from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville Florida to formerly enslaved Black folks and families in 40-acre portions. Later, policies would be passed to give Black folks the resources and supplies they needed to build with and work the land. Together, this promise was encapsulated in the demand for 40 acres and a mule.
Just over four months after Sherman issued his order, Lincoln was assassinated, and the political winds changed direction. President Johnson was a Southerner that was sympathetic to the Confederates. Johnson attempted to block a number of Reconstruction policies from passage and was quick to pardon Confederate soldiers and officials. He did not believe that Black people should have the same rights and privileges as White people and objected to the 14th Amendment. He would go on to be impeached in 1868, but the damage he did to Black communities would serve as the foundation for the reparations struggle today.
It was Andrew Johnson that took away Black folks’ 40 acres and he took their mules along with it. It was Johnson that ordered the return of Confederate lands to White people, and he even went so far as to make Black people carry out that process.
As described by HistoryNet …
The restoration of confiscated lands to their antebellum owners proceeded at a breakneck pace. On January 31, 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau controlled 223,600 acres; within 18 months that total had shrunk to 75,329 acres. In July 1866, the congressional reauthorization of the Freedmen’s Bureau included a provision returning all the lands included in the Sherman Reservation to their original owners. Those freed people continuing to occupy confiscated land were generally given a choice: Sign work contracts, thereby accepting peonage, or leave. Most left.
White People Giveth. White People Taketh Away.
In fairness, Black folks only needed to look at the way that White people weaponized treaties against Indigenous peoples to know the weight of a White man’s word. But it doesn’t make the actions of Confederates and their apologist friends any less egregious. Black people were promised “40 acres and a mule” and that promise was taken away.
Not only was it taken away, but the generations following the Civil War ushered in a new era of policies and political violence all geared at keeping Black people from owning or even accessing what was considered to be White people’s land.
Take, for example, the battle for Black Bottom in Philadelphia. By 1959, long after the Lenape tribe had been removed from the land, Black Bottom had become a vibrant working class Black community. But then some White people decided they wanted it for themselves. The West Philadelphia Corporation, whose majority shareholder was the University of Pennsylvania, made plans to transform West Philadelphia into University City. Their vision for redevelopment did not include Black people, especially lower income Black people. And so in collaboration with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and the city itself, they worked to declare that Black Bottom was “blighted” so they could take it over through eminent domain and force the Black people that lived there out of their homes and off of their lands. Close to 2,700 people were displaced. Approximately 78 percent of them were Black.
Black folks organized to defend themselves, and they found some White allies amongst the student population at Penn. Protests, media reporting, and a six-day occupation of College Hall led to an agreement between the White University Administration and the Black residents of Black Bottom. White folks promised to create a commission that included community activists that would be given the authority to review any new developments in the Black Bottom Area. In 1969, they approved a plan that included three low-income housing developments alongside four new University buildings.
But White people seldom uphold their treaties or their agreements to people that aren’t white, and the Black Bottom resolution would prove no different. Black folks in Black Bottom were promised housing. They were promised a piece of their 40 acres, albeit at a price.
And that promise was broken by the White people that made it.
Instead of building housing, the land was held for almost a decade when it was decided that a different group of White people could have the land for $1 if they promised to build some affordable housing. The Altman Group lived up to this promise and the University City Townhomes were erected. As part of the larger deal to secure control of the stolen Indigenous land that Black people had once thrived on, The Altman Group had to maintain the 73 unit, 2 complex development for section 8 renters for 39 years. That agreement ends on July 8, 2022.
The Altman Group waited out the terms of the agreement and have now decided to remove Black folks and families from “their” White land and sell it for upwards of $100 million. That’s a remarkable return on investment if you factor out the lives, livelihoods, and moving costs of hundreds of Black people.
Many of the families that live in the University City Townhomes have been there for decades. Their lives are being upended. They are being forced to absorb the cost of moving, the rent increases they face, and the destruction of their neighborhoods and support networks at no cost whatsoever to the developers of the City. They are just being told they need to move out of their homes and get off of the White people’s land.
All while the ancestors that Marched to the Sea with General Sherman watched from above.
A Common Story
The story of University City Townhomes is common across the nation. We’ve seen the gentrification of communities of color in cities from the east to the west. We’ve seen the gentrification of Brooklyn and Harlem in New York. We’ve lived through the gentrification of China Town, the Mission and the Filmore in San Francisco. In cities like Seattle, Washington DC, Austin, and New Orleans we see time and time again communities of color are removed and replaced at the whims of their White counterparts.
Each time a Black community gets gentrified, it is being forced to replay and relive the revocation of Sherman’s Order. Each time a person of color is removed from their home, from stability, from the opportunity for economic progress, from their neighborhood support systems all because a White person doesn’t want them there, they are being forced to relive the genocide and displacement of the ancestors before them.
Gentrification is an extension of genocide. It is a vestige of slavery.
The effects of being disconnected from the land are the same now as they were when the United States were being violently colonized. Individuals and communities can’t survive, let alone succeed, without land to live on. Ultimately, we need to stop the displacement entirely.
In the meantime, we need to take the burden of displacement off of the backs of BIPOC communities and start making it more costly for White people to displace them. For example, Black folks should receive reparations for the dismantling of Sherman’s Order. And the tenants of the University City Townhomes should receive reparations right now to pay for their displacement.
Recently, Charles Ellison, political strategist and host of Reality Check on WURD Radio, posed the following question on Twitter:
It's a fantastic question that leads to more. Why aren’t we demanding that the people responsible for displacement pay for the costs of relocation and destabilization? Why can’t developers make immediate reparations for taking the means of survival away from communities? Are there cities that have done just that?
It turns out, there are advocates and policymakers asking these same questions … and carving out some innovative solutions. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, a bill passed in 2020 that requires:
…[L]andlords to pay relocation expenses for permanently or temporarily displaced residents in units condemned by the DHCA, which handles code enforcement for the county’s rental housing. For permanently displaced residents — those forced to relocate for 30 days or more — a landlord must pay whichever is greater: three months of the tenant’s actual rent or three months of the fair market rent value for the unit’s ZIP code, as defined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Seattle, Washington also has a Relocation Assistance Ordinance that reads:
Property owners and developers must get a Tenant Relocation License if the project meets the criteria listed above. The license covers all renters in your building. Only low-income renters receive relocation assistance of $4,232.00. Property owners pay half of that amount ($2,116.00) and the City of Seattle pays the other half ($2,116.00).
California and Texas also have tenant relocation programs. There is no reason that a similar or even bolder approach can’t be adopted in Philadelphia or anywhere else nationwide. There is also no reason that tenants should not be offered an additional portion from the profits if their homes are sold right out from under them. Black folks deserve reparations for the reversal of Sherman’s Order. They deserve this every other time that land has been promised and is removed from under them.
There is a lot of work we must do to ensure Black folks receive the full nationwide reparations packages that they deserve. There is also much that must be done to stop the displacement of Black people and the dismemberment of Black communities. While we do that work, we can ensure that reparations are immediately made to the people that are the targets of gentrification. We can make the developers pay for the displacement they cause - and we can certainly keep Black people’s lives and livelihoods from being destroyed simply because White people don’t want them there.