April 4, 2023: Urban Renewal and the Destruction of Wheeling’s Black Neighborhoods with Brian Kammer
“Redlining, Urban Renewal, and the Systematic Destruction of Wheeling’s Integrated and Black Neighborhoods”
In the 1930s, the federal government through the Federal Housing Authority designated almost all of downtown Wheeling a “hazardous” investment risk because of the presence of Black people and “foreign-born” European and Middle-Eastern immigrants. This was called “redlining” because the federal “risk security” maps colored these downtown zones red. These maps guided real estate investment in Wheeling and most American cities for decades afterward. Starved of investment credit, downtown housing stock declined over time, leading the city to declare large swaths of downtown “blighted” and therefore vulnerable to being seized under eminent domain. Black families and businesses were disproportionately affected by redlining policies that prevented them from purchasing or improving properties within the redlined areas, while at the same time also systematically preventing them from buying into non-redlined, all-white neighborhoods.
Beginning in the early 1960s, federally funded “urban renewal” projects in Wheeling resulted in the demolition of many homes and businesses, along with the displacement of many Black families particularly in Center Wheeling, then an ethnically and racially integrated part of the downtown area. Many of the displaced never returned to the city. Housing segregation increased as many Black families who stayed in the city relocated to the predominantly Black neighborhood in East Wheeling between 10th and 12th Streets, or into apartments in Lincoln Homes or Grandview Manor. Redlining policies and other exclusionary racist practices in the real estate industry forced Black families to crowd into this increasingly tightly circumscribed neighborhood, or to leave the city altogether to find affordable housing elsewhere.
In the early 1970s, a time of acute racial tensions in Wheeling, the city, via the Urban Renewal Authority and with federal backing, perpetrated another round of “renewal” as part of the ill-fated Ft. Henry Mall project by acquiring and ultimately leveling several city blocks worth of homes on Chapline, Eoff, Morrow, Palo Alto, High, Charles, and 12th Streets — virtually the entirety of the vibrant Black community that had existed in East Wheeling since the late 1800s. The city promised to build alternative housing there, but city residents voted to abolish the Urban Renewal Authority before it could rebuild the vital neighborhood that was destroyed. Many displaced Black residents scattered to Ohio, Pennsylvania; some went to live in Lincoln Homes or Grandview Manor apartments, which were later themselves leveled, causing a new round of displacement.
Brian Kammer will discuss this history in detail with the aid of newly uncovered archival documents originating with Wheeling’s defunct Urban Renewal Authority. He will argue that the evidence shows that racist federal and local policies around housing, real estate, and urban renewal systematically undermined and destroyed vibrant integrated and Black neighborhoods in Wheeling, and in so doing “paved” the way for the overall decline of our city during the 20th century. Kammer grew up in Wheeling in the 1970s and 80s. He attended Wheeling Country Day School and Linsly School before leaving the state to attend college. He went on to become an attorney defending death-sentenced prisoners in Georgia for over two decades. That work necessarily involved investigating the histories of class and racial inequality in his clients’ home communities. Brian never lost touch with his own hometown and retained a passionate interest in its history. In recent years he has used the investigative skills he honed in his work as a capital defense lawyer in the deep south to uncover and document the history of segregation and racial disenfranchisement in Wheeling, focusing on the effects of redlining and urban renewal.
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April 11, 2023: Wheeling Poetry Series Presents Frank X. Walker
A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published eleven collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of the 2004 Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, which he adapted for stage, earning him the Paul Green Foundation Playwrights Fellowship Award. His poetry was also dramatized for the 2016 Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV and staged by Message Theater for the 2015 Breeders Cup Festival. A lover of comics, Walker curated “We Wear the Mask: Black Superheroes through the Ages,” an exhibit of his personal collection of action figures, comics, and related memorabilia at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center in 2015; he reprised the exhibit in 2018 at Purdue University and Western Carolina University. Walker recently returned to the world of visual art with a collection of new and early multimedia works, “Black Star Seed: When Mi Cyaan Find Di Words” which was on exhibit at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co- founded the Affrilachian Poets, subsequently publishing the much-celebrated eponymous collection. His honors also include a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, the 2008 and 2009 Denny C. Plattner Award for Outstanding Poetry in Appalachian Heritage, the 2013 West Virginia Humanities Council’s Appalachian Heritage Award, as well as fellowships and residences with Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kentucky Arts Council. In 2020 Walker received the Donald Justice Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The recipient of honorary doctorates from University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Spalding University and Centre College, Walker is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and serves as Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His most recent collection is Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems.
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April 18, 2023: Local Baseball Legends
Baseball has been an important part of Wheeling’s sporting life since the end of the Civil War. This comprehensive program, presented by Steve Novotney and Sean Duffy, will feature an overview of Wheeling and Ohio Valley baseball from legendary players like John Glasscock, Moses Fleetwood Walker; Sol White; and Jesse Burkett to ; Maz; Gene Freese, and George Brett, and from historic teams like the Standards, to the Nailers, Stogies, and legendary stories like the Rooney brothers, Babe Ruth’s visit, to Fulton Field, and Bauer’s teams vs. the Homestead Grays.
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April 25, 2023: The Fifth Border State
Every history of West Virginia’s creation in 1863 explains the event in similar ways: at the start of the Civil War, political, social, cultural, and economic differences with eastern Virginia motivated the northwestern counties to resist secession from the Union and seek their independence from the rest of the state. In The Fifth Border State, Scott A. MacKenzie offers the first new interpretation of the topic in over a century—one that corrects earlier histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding. Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Like these northernmost slave states, northwestern Virginia supported the institution of slavery out of proportion to the actual presence of enslavement there. The people who became West Virginians built a new state first to protect slavery, but radical Unionists and escaping slaves forced emancipation on the statehood movement. MacKenzie shows how conservatives and radicals clashed over Black freedom, correcting many myths about West Virginia’s origins and making The Fifth Border State an important addition to the literature in Appalachian and Civil War history.
Scott A. MacKenzie received his education at the University of Manitoba, Queens College of the City University of New York, the University of Calgary, and Auburn University. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
