Allan Appel Photo
Lillian Brown listened intently to a scene from a play about white flight in a mythical American town in 1959.
It didn’t take the 95-year-old veteran Newhallville political activist long to add some lines of painful autobiographical fact to the compelling fiction she’d just heard: “When we came in [to Division Street] to purchase our house [60 years ago], the white families all put their houses up for sale.”
Brown (at right in above photo) wasn’t the only one present Saturday at the Stetson Branch Library in Newhallville to have such painful memories.
The memories surfaced during an hour-and-a-half discussion about why the Dixwell corridor, which used to have vibrant African-American businesses and professional offices, is now struggling.
The discussion was the first of several neighborhood talks about race, class and real estate, and white flight and gentrification, organized in conjunction with Clybourne Park, a play currently at Long Wharf Theatre on those very subjects. (Click here for Josh Mamis’ review of the play.)
The events kick off Stage. Page. Engage, a new collaborative program between the Long Wharf and the New Haven Free Public Library.
Vanessa Butler and Dexter Singleton played the black couple.
It debuted at Stetson with local actors reading a scene from the theater’s current production, which runs through June 2.
Local mavens, in this case media entrepreneur Tom Ficklin and 2011 mayoral candidate Clifton Graves, led the discussion from the play’s dialogue to a dialogue among attendees.
Three more neighborhood-specific discussions are scheduled: Monday May 20 at 6 p.m. at the Mitchell Branch in Westville; Tuesday May 28 at 6 p.m. at the Wilson Branch in the Hill; and Saturday June 1 at 1 p.m. at the Fair Haven library.
Brown said in 1936 she arrived in New Haven from Virginia with a good high school education.
At first she found work only as a domestic on McKinley Avenue in Westville. She eventually got a job at the Winchester Repeating Arms factory. Her family scratched and saved money every week, working their way up from the Elm Haven projects (now Monterey Place) to a cold water flat on Lloyd Street and finally to the house on Division, where Brown lived until two years ago.
She’s now living with her daughter Diane, the Stetson Branch librarian, who was one of the organizers of the event.
People remembered with sweet and proud nostalgia the black doctors and other professionals along Dixwell and the long-gone Proctor’s Pharmacy, which used to stand cheek by jowl with Dixwell Plaza.
Hampton, with Long Wharf Managing Director Josh Borenstein.
Gerald Hampton, now a minister in Bridgeport, also had bitter memories. When his father George Hampton moved his Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church from Bassett Street to Lawrence, there was a peculiar welcome: “The white folks did welcome us. They sold their houses.”
Hampton and other audience members such as Independent regular commentator Three-fifths bemoaned the lack of entrepreneurship among blacks and the failure of the current generation of parents to instill history and pride of neighborhood in the kids.
The entire conversation pivoted from the anguish of the past to the present-day challenge when Ann Greene threw down a gauntlet: “We get stuck in the outrage and injustice of the past. We cannot undo outrages of the past. Stolen is stolen. Unfair is unfair. Screwed is screwed.”
A New Yorker who has been living in West River for just five years, Greene (pictured) said, “I’ve been on both sides of gentrification. My husband and I say when the chicken joint on the corner becomes a Starbucks, we’ll sell [our house]. What do we want New Haven to be?”
3/5ths replied: “I still want to fight it. I don’t want my son to be harassed [by the police].”
Gerald Hampton said: “I want to take a page from the Hispanics. I want to see ownership. I want to see our community keep the money.”
Aleta Staton, a member of the historic Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church, said, “We want a say in how these communities are developed. Our community is perishing for lack of knowledge and commitment.”
The meeting ended with pledges to create tours of historic Dixwell, to bring friends back to the library, and to carry on the dialog.
Both Diane Brown and Ann Greene pronounced the meeting positive. “The play was useful. There has to be a distancing vehicle to start conversation,” Greene said.
Whites leave an area and it's white flight. Whites enter an area and it's gentrification. What should whites do?