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The Disappearing Black Community of Williamsburg
C. Russell Tabb was the first African American elected to the Williamsburg City Council.
WILLIAMSBURG--People come in droves to get a fancy ham dinner and a piece of history at Colonial Williamsburg. On a spring day you’ll find more strollers on the Duke of Gloucester Street than a busy New York avenue.
But behind the scenes, a quiet exodus is happening. A once-thriving black community has been pushed to the margins of a city that has welcomed over 100 million tourists since 1932.
It began 80 years ago with a renovation that removed black people from the historic center and confined them to segregated neighborhoods.
Today, city planners and investors have made it hard for working people to live in a town where the bottom line of booming land values and corporate profits have replaced the old conventions of Jim Crow.
In Williamsburg, big money divides people the way institutional prejudice once did. And black people didn’t have much say in the matter from the start.
It was oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller who hired a special agent to buy city land on the sly in the 1920s. By keeping his name secret, the philanthropist paid lowball prices for property that would form the core of today’s 300-acre historic district.
In 1928, the city voted whether to let Rockefeller renovate the historic area. But not everyone was invited. One in three Williamsburg citizens was black, writes Andrea Kim Foster in “They’re Turning the Town All Upside Down,” a Ph.D. dissertation, and none could enter the white school where the referendum was held.
That was the day white voters elected to give Rockefeller public properties in exchange for new municipal buildings and infrastructure. And Colonial Williamsburg was born.
Business owners (black and white) were forced to sell out under threat of “eminent domain”—a phrase that still haunts the local African-American community. Black homeowners were removed to smaller housing units than those given whites, and few were given reconstruction assistance at all.
Perhaps most telling, the Rockefeller plan designed separate neighborhoods for people of color. Today, many older black residents agree that the makeover of the city center segregated the town in a way it had never been divided before, even in the heyday of Jim Crow.
Williamsburg became a company town--and black people still work for the company. Many are quick to note how the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation brought to a sleepy southern town a level of prosperity never imagined BR—“Before Rockefeller.” “What would Williamsburg be like now if there wasn’t CW?” asked black city councilman Robert Braxton. “We don’t even want to think about that.”
But prosperity has come with a price. The vast majority of jobs at CW have been in the low-wage hotel and restaurant sector. For decades Colonial Williamsburg was the only large local employer and could set wages as it wished. When Anheuser-Busch moved to the area in the 1970s, black employees left CW in droves to find better paying jobs, though some eventually migrated back.
And aside from a helping of mid-management positions, African Americans have been rare in CW’s upper chain of command. Of 10 vice presidents today, one is black. On the 21-seat board of trustees, there is one African American.
More significant to Williamsburg as a whole is the loss of black entrepreneurship. Before Rockefeller, the city was home to many black enterprises—general stores, cleaners, restaurants. Today, there are none in the historic center, where a busy commercial area still thrives. Braxton could count only one black-owned business, a barber shop, within the current city limits.
The city counted 1600 African Americans in the 2000 census.
Why have black businesses disappeared? “People just figure, this is Williamsburg, this is probably too costly for me,” Braxton said. The Chamber of Commerce is seeking minority businesses, he explained, but progress has evidently been slow.
Other reasons seem more likely. The black population of the city has shrunk from 30% in 1930 to 13% in the latest census, the result of rising prices, age-old frustrations, and a general lack of political clout.
Until lately, black people had been missing in city government since at least the time of Plessy v. Ferguson. In 2000, C. Russell Tabb became the first African-American elected to the Williamsburg City Council in, as he put it, “at least 100 years.” (Records from the 19th century are sketchy.) After Tabb was defeated for reelection, Braxton became the second black on the council, elected in 2006.
In a town still largely segregated, city council seats are elected at-large--a policy that minimizes minority representation, Tabb believes. “You’ll have some African Americans on that board” and “more than just one at a time” when elections are districted and the number of council seats increased, he said.
Tabb pointed to other local governments like James City County where representatives are elected by district, even though African-Americans have also been rare on their Board of Supervisors.
That the Foundation and city government have close ties is no secret. Williamsburg mayor Jeanne Zeidler was once director of community cultural affairs for CW. City councilman Paul Freiling is the Foundation’s co-director of special gifts—and former chairman of the town planning commission. CW stocks the Greater Williamsburg Chamber and Tourism Alliance with several board members to boot.
Together, city leaders and CW have been shaping the landscape of Williamsburg since Rockefeller came to town. The historic restoration has expanded its reach until rising prices and municipal pressure have forced low-income inhabitants to pack up and move, many of them African Americans who found themselves on the wrong end of a bulldozer.
Al Johnson, an African American entrepreneur, remembers when the Triangle district on Armistead Avenue was full of black-owned businesses, including a hospital, tailor, electrician, grocer, and blacksmith. In the late 1960s, the Williamsburg Housing Authority, armed with federal money, slated their building for demolition and forced the owners to sell.
One of those owners was Charles Gary, Russell Tabb’s cousin.
The occupants, virtually all black, were given first preference for a return to the new building. But none of them came back. And some never opened a business again.
Johnson, who owned a restaurant in the Triangle from 1985 to 1999, said the displaced owners didn’t get the help from city advertising and the housing authority they expected.
Johnson sees more than one cause for the loss of black businesses in town. A line of credit is a hard thing to come by, he said. “A black can always get a Cadillac, but he can’t get the money to open a shop.”
And he holds his own community partly responsible. “Black people don’t move money around among themselves,” Johnson said, lamenting that they rely too much on a cash economy. A lack of trust prevents people from pooling large sums of money, he said, and investing in enterprises the way other ethnic groups do.
Johnson added he was forced to close his Japanese restaurant, Sakura, by high taxes and stiff competition from the chain restaurants. His clientele was 98% white.
Since he came to town in the 1960s, a flood of well-heeled Northern retirees have forced up real estate prices even further. Some have settled on retirement tracts once owned by African Americans.
Johnson doesn’t mince words about the future of the local black community: “We’re disappearing.”
Philip Burnham is a recipient of a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
PART II
Losing Black-owned land in Williamsburg
Douglas Canady and his community are battling the threat of eminent domain on the outskirts of Williamsburg.By Philip Burnham
WILLIAMSBURG--By some accounts, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has been a blessing to the Black community here.
Many older residents say it began long ago when the infusion of northern money and tourism at CW took the bite out of segregation.
But the truth about race in this historic town is more complicated. Whatever good it may have accomplished, CW has made its gains at a cost. It has forcibly relocated residents--Black and white--and moved, co-opted, or destroyed key buildings in the black community in order to expand its political and economic influence over the town.
And the consequences of the historic renovation, which has driven the flight of African Americans from the city, are still being felt.
Born in 1922, Robert Hall still remembers when “Black and white was living together, door to door” all over the city--until the day John D. Rockefeller brought an open checkbook
to build an outdoor history museum.
Like many locals, Hall chooses his words carefully when talking about the Foundation. His father worked for 30 years at CW as a brick mason’s assistant, and Hall was part-time for several years himself.
“[Colonial Williamsburg] did some good things here, and still do because a lot of people still work for them,” said Hall, a deacon at Oak Grove Baptist church. “But on the other hand, they was trying to get all the Blacks out of Williamsburg…And they did get them out.”
Once CW started, “Black people couldn’t get no money” to borrow and improve their property, said Hall. The only bank in town froze its deposits “because they didn’t want anybody to borrow none to fix up their places.”
“They give you a certain time to do certain things,” Hall continued. “Then they would buy your place if you couldn’t fix it up. They’d offer you so much, and you had to accept that. You had to move. And it was wrong.”
Hall added that both white and Black people were uprooted from the town center.
But CW’s drive for Black-owned land didn’t stop during the Depression.
In 1953, Rockefeller offered the First Baptist Church on Nassau Street, in the core of the historic district, $130,000 to relocate. The 19th century building, said CW, wasn’t old enough for the colonial-era restoration.
Since many members of the congregation had already been moved out of the historic center, the First Baptist no longer served a nearby neighborhood.
In urgent need of more space to expand, the congregation accepted the offer and moved to a much larger building on Scotland Street.
The building they left behind dated from the 1850s, and the congregation had probably worshipped on the same spot since the previous century. It was the oldest continuous Black baptist congregation in the country, said Tommy L. Bogger, director of the Harrison B. Wilson Archives at Norfolk State University.
“I can’t blame the congregation,” said Bogger, a native of Williamsburg who attended the old church as a boy. “But it’s unfortunate that something couldn’t have been done to preserve the structure. At that time [CW] had absolutely no interest in Black history.”
Did it matter to CW that it was a Black church? “It would have been there where it always was if it was a white church,” said Reverend Thomas Shields, who served as pastor at First Baptist for 20 years. Bogger, an expert on Black history in the Tidewater, agreed.
The lot where the old First Baptist once stood is vacant to this day.
Decades later CW acquired another key landmark in the Black community. Bruton Heights School had opened in 1940 as a community center and model African American school, partly funded by Rockefeller himself.
In the late 1980s, the school board announced the public building was in disrepair and would take a huge investment to restore. When concerned citizens obtained the engineer’s report through the Freedom of Information Act, said Shields, it revealed the building would last for another 40 years.
Shields led a committee from First Baptist that confronted the school board and city council and accused them of lying. The board later voted in a closed session to sell the school to CW, said Shields, which he claims wanted the building all along.
The Foundation, added Shields, worked indirectly through the school board and its own employees, some of them African American, to scuttle community resistance.
Bruton Heights was closed in 1989 by the school board and bought by Colonial Williamsburg.
Another Black landmark had been lost to the community.
Today, the building is part of CW’s Bruton Heights School Educational Center. It provides office space, community meeting rooms, and museum exhibits on Black education. CW hails the old school as a key part of its research “campus.”
But the loss of Bruton Heights School, said Shields, who stepped down as pastor at First Baptist in 2002, was “tantamount to an amputation.” The building was “part of the heart of this community.”
That the building has exhibits on Black history is little comfort, he said. “If I took your house from you, and you don’t live there, every time you walk by it your heart sinks.”
Other historic Black properties may still be in danger. Historically, CW has coveted the Mt. Ararat Baptist property on Franklin Street. Uprooted by the renovation one time already, the church is surrounded by Foundation-owned land in the historic district. Offers to the church in the past were dismissed as too small.
“They’ve strangled Mr. Ararat,” Shields said. “They’ve bought up every piece of land around it—and it can’t expand, not even for parking.”