“Anybody know the story on this place on Oakwood,” asked Jer Warren on his Facebook page. The question was accompanied with a pixelated photo depicting a small red building with a sagging roof. The building in question is hidden behind a white lattice fence that’s covered by an array of knick knacks, hiding most of the building and completely covering the front door. Stools and chairs and tables are stacked high with everything from vases to mirrors to blankets and pillows. A “Biden Harris” campaign sign and a spiderman mask stand to the right, while an impotent fountain and old gazebo are on the left. Tiny sculptures of rabbits, angels, nutcrackers and buddhas fill the middle. It’s nestled in the historically black neighborhood of East College Park, a longstanding and close-knit community made up of cozy, one-story homes and small black-owned businesses.
Comments quickly began rolling in from friends of Warren’s similarly curious about what hides behind the building’s intriguing facade. “I just assume that the guy’s nuts,” said Russell DeSena. “Art,” speculated Ted Kelley. “Bout to be a high-rise,” predicted Johnny Mack.
Mack may be right. East College Park is one of the most rapidly developing areas in Raleigh. Black citizens are being pushed out on every side: affluent white individuals looking to move closer to downtown are scooping up homes for cheap and remodeling or rebuilding them. Real estate investors are lowballing black homeowners and flipping their properties for a massive profit. And even the city itself is in the process of a “redevelopment plan.”
With questions arising about the future of the neighborhood, Daniel Chavis was quick to join Warren’s Facebook thread to shed a little light on details about the neighborhood he knows and loves. His family was brought from Zaire and Portugal to North Carolina in the early 1600s as indentured servants. Like many formerly enslaved individuals, freedom provided the chance to make a life for themselves and future generations. As the population of free black individuals grew in the years leading up to the Civil War, distinct black settlements began to pop up all over Raleigh. These typically surrounded what was considered the “less desirable bottomland” closer to downtown.
After the war, free black individuals fled from the hostility in the country and into the city, dramatically increasing the black population in the state's capital. One report estimates that between 1860 and 1870, Raleigh’s population grew to be nearly 53% black. Areas that were once considered “fashionable white residential areas” became a focus for black settlement. This wave of migration cemented the segregated neighborhoods that encircled the capital.
For nearly 60 years, the community prospered thanks to institutions like St. Augustine’s University, one of the nation’s oldest HBCU’s which was founded in 1867. The college was dedicated to educating black teachers. On its campus, St. Agnes Hospital was constructed with the intent of providing care for and by black individuals.
By the early 20th century, the community had created a new urban district. There were more than twice the number of black operated businesses than white establishments. Daniel Chavis’ grandfather owned one of those businesses: he ran a window cleaning company responsible for the businesses in downtown Raleigh. By 1938, the Chavis Community Center, named after Daniel Chavis’ family, was established to offer recreation opportunities for black citizens.
Born into a small home at 315 Hill St in the 1950’s, Chavis grew up surrounded by this lively community. Most of his family lived in the home: himself and his twin brother, Denny, his mother, three aunts, and his grandmother. His grandfather refused to live in the house because there were too many girls but came home on weekends.
Chavis’ mother was young when she had her sons, so her sister, Chavis’ aunt, helped raise them. The family was poor and depended upon a wood-burning stove and coal. Their space cramped; as babies, Chavis and his brother slept in dresser drawers lined with pillows and hidden beneath blankets.
While he was growing up, his mother worked just up the street - in fact, at the mysterious building on Oakwood. It was once a burger joint, following in the style of a 50s diner. It was small, just big enough for three cars to drive in and out. It had big yellow posts in the front and the ordering window was made of stainless steel. Inside, Chavis remembers being entranced by the spinning of the ice cream maker and the juice dispenser, producing green and red drinks rich with sugar. As kids, he and Denny would order burgers and ice cream and these sweet drinks at the walk-up window of the eatery.
However, thanks to the passage of the GI bill, middle class white Americans began their return to the area. Black and white Americans began to live in reintegrated neighborhoods and resources flooded into the community. The city’s first integrated high school, William G Enloe High School, was opened in 1962 and celebrated its first graduating class in 1964. It became the first fully integrated secondary school in the city to hire a black principal in 1973.
While Chavis fondly remembers a childhood marked for him by memories of go-karting down the hilly streets with the new kids, he also remembers times when prejudice was quick to appear.
One Friday afternoon when Chavis and Denny were just 10 years old, they ran around playing in their front yard. They lived beside an all-white apartment complex and on this particular morning, Chavis noticed clothes littering the front lawn of the building. They heard screaming and turned to see a white woman storming up to them. She grabbed Denny’s arm and shrieked, “There’s been some break-ins over here! And you’re the reason why the property value is going down!”
She began dragging Denny towards the building while Chavis rushed inside, “Momma!” he yelled, “This lady’s got Denny!”
Their mother had been toiling over dinner - fish in typical Baptist tradition - but when she heard this, she rushed outside. She was decked in the look of the era: blonde afro bouncing atop her head as she stormed out in a pair of daisy duke pants, the knife she had been using to prepare the fish forgotten in her hand.
As she reached the other woman, she grabbed back her son and yelled, “Look!” Remembering the knife, she raised it to eye level, “My boys don’t steal. If you ever fucking touch my sons again, you’re gonna meet the end of this blade.”
Reflecting on it now, Chavis booms with laughter and with his southern drawl says, “And within a matter of years, all the white folks were gone.”
The mid-20th century saw another period of “white flight.” Resources were drained from urban areas as white families moved to suburbia. Though he was too young to enter, Chavis remembers the diner transforming into a club. His mother forbade him from going, “She thought it was a juke joint so she didn’t want me in there,” says Chavis. Housing in the area deteriorated and became dilapidated. Crime, drugs, prostitution and sounds of gunfire pervaded the community. Police officers bought houses in the area in order to more quickly respond to emergencies. By 1974, Raleigh’s City Council slated the area for redevelopment.
It took nearly 20 years for any progress to be made on this front, however. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Raleigh made another push in the form of rezoning the neighborhood for revitalization. Over the next three decades, this revitalization changed the perception of the area; the land upon which the community was built became a hot commodity as the Raleigh population soared and white families began hunting for cheap property close to downtown. The city’s effort to help citizens in the area seems to have done a lot more for the incoming white families than for the longstanding black ones. For black families, the increasing property taxes and the thriving real estate market has forced many of them to abandon their homes and leave behind the historic community.
Today, the building on Oakwood is vacant. It’s gone from serving as the heart of the East College Park neighborhood to a mere curiosity for white families who are coming in droves to the area. It stands beside the underfunded and underperforming St. Augustine University, which now features a graduation rate of just 26 percent. The once life changing St. Agnes Hospital is now a shell of its former self: long since abandoned, its stone walls have crumbled and are choked in ivy. The strip mall at the entrance of the neighborhood is rarely visited and the beauty parlor up the street is empty. Long, skinny, brightly colored houses with beachy, pastel doors serve as a siren for the incoming tide of gentrification that’s lapping at the steps of this community.
Chavis has since moved out of his childhood home, but he still returns to check on the area. While on a jog one day, he stumbled across the man who purchased the home he was born in.
The house had changed: The black businesses that once flanked the home were replaced by shuttered windows. The black family who had lived in it for decades was replaced by a white hippie. The black toddlers who had once played in the front lawn were replaced by giant white daisies.
“It’s very sad,” says Chavis, “To see someone still living in this house was...not heartbreaking...but thinking about the memories you had, it’s kind of jarring.”
For Chavis, his home and the surrounding neighborhood were the nucleus of black society. He fondly remembers the sense of community he had: visits with the neighbors he knew well, strolling past the flock of chickens next door, visiting the local stores and attending the church down the street.
That kind of community is being bulldozed by the brightly colored craftsmen that are rapidly replacing small colonials. Worn down houses on highly valued land surrounding downtown Raleigh are being snatched up by real estate investors, flipped and transformed for the affluent families ready for their “white return.”
Even so, Chavis attested to the value of a revitalized neighborhood, “I can joke about gentrification but I do like that the neighborhood is beginning to be integrated for several reasons,” says Chavis, “Because with that comes upkeep of the neighborhood.” The City of Raleigh argues that not only is this good for the area, but for the residents too, as it offers income-restricted houses alongside market-rate ones.
But in all the controversy surrounding land use, Chavis says people are forgetting the most important thing: these are people’s homes. Chavis admired the work that the new owner of his old home had put in, “He was loving the place,” says Chavis, “It didn’t matter who the guy was, just as long as somebody was loving the place because there was a lot of love in that house.”