ALSO BY MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE
Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities
Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents: Institutional Distributed Cognition, Racial Policy and Public Health in the United States (with Rodrick Wallace)
Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power (with Er nest Thompson)
The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place
New Village Press Edition, November 2016
Copyright © 2004, 2016 by Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Foreword Copyright © 2016 by Mary Travis Bassett
Foreword Copyright © 2016 by Carlos F. Peterson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. See chapter and image credits for usage authorization and copyright of individual contributions. Except for brief portions quoted for purposes of review, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, or utilized in any medium now known or hereafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by New Village Press, New York
A division of Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility
Originally published 2004 by Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fullilove, Mindy Thompson.
Root shock: how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America and what we can do about it/Mindy Thompson Fullilove
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-161-332020-4
1. Urban policy—United States—History—20th century. 2. Relocation (Housing)—United States—Psychological aspects. 3. Neighborhood—Psychological aspects. 4. Identity (Psychology) 5. African Americans—Social conditions. I. Title.
HT123.F85 2004
307.76’0973—dc22 2003063926
Front Cover design by Pam Shaw
Text design by Mary A. Wirth
Second Edition
This book is dedicated to
Della Wimbs and Charles Meadows,
who demonstrated through the way they lived their lives
how to love a neighborhood.
CONTENTS
Foreword, by Mary T. Bassett, MD
Foreword, by Carlos F. Peterson
Introduction
1. THE BUTTERFLY IN BEIJING
2. IMAGINING NEON
In Their Own Words: ZENOBIA FERGUSON
3. URBAN RENEWAL . . .
4. . . . MEANS NEGRO REMOVAL
In Their Own Words: CHARLES MEADOWS
5. WHEN THE CENTER FAILS . . .
6. . . . WHAT WILL HOLD?
7. UNCEASING STRUGGLE
In Their Own Words: ERNEST THOMPSON
8. HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE CITY
9. OUR PLACE, OUR HOME
Notes
Bibliography
Technical Note
Acknowledgments
Index
I tell everyone that it is worth listening to anything Mindy Fullilove has to say. For decades, she has pursued her ideas and intuitions with a singular intellect. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts American and What We Can Do About It is an important and timely book that sprang from her work as a public health psychiatrist who thought deeply about her patients and followed their sources of suffering and resilience outward to locate them in communities, traditions, and history. This book marked Fullilove’s emergence as one of the most important urban thinkers of our time, work that continues in her 2013 book Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities. Cities count, not just because they are large, they count because cities are the way humans now live, everywhere. How to make them settings where people not only live but thrive is a challenge that stretches across disciplines and belongs to us all.
In 1995, I was working in Harlem where Fullilove had just begun the work and thinking that would inform this book, first published in 2004 and now opportunely reprinted in a second edition. At the time, she was unravelling what had happened and what was happening in the Bradhurst section of Harlem. This was a devastated pocket of Harlem, itself a community that had lost fully one-third of its housing stock to abandonment and destruction in less than 30 years. We didn’t know it yet, but Fullilove had begun her exploration of “root shock,” a term she coined to capture what happens to a community and its people when its geography—its neighborhood—is destroyed. The telling begins with the end of the World War II and ends with current day 21st century, largely focusing on a retelling of “urban renewal,” a federal project that targeted so-called “urban decay.” Fullilove estimates that, as a consequence of what was billed as “upgrading,” some 2500 city neighborhoods ceased to exist, mainly through large-scale clearances. Of these 2500 communities, fully two-thirds (about 1600 according to Fullilove) were home to African-Americans. “Urban renewal means Negro Removal” was a common catchphrase. The subsequent reconfiguration of cities was devastating to urban African-Americans. To this day, the loss of communities—told here from Roanoke, Pittsburgh, and Newark—still reverberates through families, neighborhoods, and entire cities, affecting all who live and lived there.
It was over 20 years ago that I listened at a Harlem community center as Fullilove wove together the strands from archival research, personal narratives she had collected, and experiences she had had through activities with the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement. The result was a story that included architecture, history, activism, health, and the enduring power of place in our lives. I personally will never forget the way Fullilove described the importance of the entryway to a renovated apartment building and how it can signify respect for community, or not. Most people who listened knew that she had identified something important, really important, though admittedly there were some people who thought she had gone off the deep end. Today, all who care about health, dignity and wellbeing—and that should be everyone—owe Fullilove a great debt for carrying on this work (with others, I am sure she would hasten to add) and writing this book. If you have already read it, read it again. You will be inspired. If you are reading it for the first time, you will be both angered and enlightened. Most of all, Fullilove’s Root Shock is a call to action to consider very carefully any effort that seeks to “protect and promote neighborhoods.” Fullilove is clear that the legacy of urban renewal was that it literally tore up communities, squelching and squandering extraordinarily hard-won sources of