7.1.2001 00:30
R.I. blacks migrating away from segregation
• Behind the exodus from urban neighborhoods is a mix of forces, including rising incomes and concerns about poor schools.

BY ARIEL SABAR, SCOTT MacKAY, AND DAVID HERZOG
Journal Staff Writers

During the 1990s, blacks left Providence's inner city by the hundreds, moving to leafier neighborhoods and the suburbs, and reducing segregation in the capital city to its lowest level since at least 1930.

The 2000 census shows that the city's historically black South Side no longer has a single census tract in which more than half the residents are black. Meanwhile, historically white enclaves in Providence, Pawtucket, Cranston, and North Providence have seen a sharp increase in black residents.

Sheila Metts, 43, an executive assistant at a state agency, grew up in a South Side housing project and was raising her children in South Providence. But she grew weary, she says, of hearing gunfire as she lay in bed at night; at one point, a boy was murdered on his way to a neighborhood church.

So she moved across town and, last year, bought her first house -- in traditionally Italian-American Silver Lake.

"It just seemed quiet and, you know, well kept," says Metts, who is black, of her new neighborhood. "And it wasn't too far from work or my daughter's school. And it was in my price range."

To help pay the mortgage and her youngest child's private-school tuition, Metts supplements her salary by working nights as a store cashier.

BEHIND THE black exodus from urban neighborhoods is a mix of forces, say the experts. Among them are residents' rising incomes; their concerns about poor schools; white flight from other neighborhoods, opening up housing in those areas; and the restoration of some South Side houses, pushing the rents beyond some residents' means.

Another factor is the Hispanic population, whose numbers on the South Side are soaring and thus heightening competition for housing.

Although its causes are complicated, the disappearance of a definable black "ghetto" has both surprised and cheered civil-rights activists, who say it is a milestone in the quest for racial integration.

"It's reaching what was hoped for when we passed the fair-housing act," says Frederick C. Williamson, now in his 80s, who helped lead the fight for the 1968 state law that barred discrimination in housing. "This is a realization of our objective: that people would have an equal opportunity to live where they desire."

The shift in the state's black population is, says Asata Tigrai, "a significant change." An affordable-housing advocate for 16 years, Tigrai says: "There's been an opening of doors -- a slight crack in terms of opening doors for people of color to live outside of Providence."

In 1980, two out of three black Rhode Islanders lived in Providence; today, the number is just one out of two.

Meanwhile, during the '90s Cranston's black population grew nearly 60 percent, to about 2,900 (the city's population is 79,000). And Pawtucket's black population more than doubled, to 5,300 (that city's population is 73,000). Indeed, although Providence is more than twice as populous as Pawtucket, Pawtucket gained nearly twice as many black residents during the '90s as did Providence.

Kenneth McGill, government-affairs aide to Pawtucket Mayor James E. Doyle, says that low-cost housing in the Woodlawn and Pleasant View sections has drawn black people in search of an affordable suburban life.

"Those are the neigborhoods where working people -- way back to the time of the Irish and French -- came to build a life for themselves," says McGill. "Those people have moved on to other parts of the city, or to Cumberland or Lincoln," opening up housing for others.

Many of the new arrivals, says McGill, are immigrants from such strife-riven African countries as Liberia and Nigeria.

Two years ago, in response to Pawtucket's growing black population, Mayor Doyle appointed the city's first affirmative-action committee, to promote the hiring of minorities at City Hall.

THE DISPERSAL of the state's black population is more than a Rhode Island trend.

A study of the 2000 census by the Brookings Institution found that throughout the country during the '90s urban racial segregation had declined to its lowest point since 1920.

But Rhode Island stands out. The study found that in the Providence - Warwick - Fall River metropolitan area, segregation fell twice as fast as the national average.

In 1990, the average black resident here lived in a census tract with a concentration of blacks that was 22-percent higher than if blacks had been evenly spread across the metropolitan area; by 2000, that number had fallen by more than half, to about 10 percent.

In the 1980s Judge Edward C. Clifton was a black resident of a racially integrated part of Providence's Elmwood section. His neighbors threw block parties. His children went to school with the other kids on the street, and knew their next-door neighbors so well they called them Auntie and Uncle.

So it was with mixed feelings that in 1989 Clifton, now a Superior Court judge, and his wife, Audrey Clifton, now a Fleet Bank benefits coordinater, moved away. Needing more space for their family, they found a four-bedroom ranch house with a yard; it was on a mostly white Providence street, near Cranston's Edgewood neighborhood.

"One of our biggest concerns was taking our kids away from a lot of their playmates," Edward Clifton recalled in his office the other day.

A few years after the move, the Cliftons took their son and daughter out of the public schools and sent them to the private Wheeler School.

"There was some inconsistency among the teachers," Clifton says of the children's experience in the Providence system. "We felt that we owed them the best education we could provide -- so we bit the bullet."

THE DISAPPEARANCE of Rhode Island's black "ghettos" is a mile marker in the state's history. Yet segregation does persist: most white Rhode Islanders live near other whites; most black Rhode Islanders live near other blacks, or other minorities.

Numbering 47,000, blacks make up about 41/2 percent of Rhode Island's million people, yet in more than half the municipalities they make up less than 1 percent of the population. As of 2000, for example, 14 black people lived in West Greenwich; 9, in Foster; and 2, in Little Compton.

And though the state's black population grew during the '90s by 21 percent, eight communities saw a decrease in black residents. The largest decrease was in Newport: this city's black population, one of the state's most established, declined by 10 percent -- bringing the number down to 2,053, out of 26,500 Newporters.

There is ample evidence that despite the state's 33-year-old Fair Housing Practices Act, black Rhode Islanders still face obstacles to living where they choose. Just last month, the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights ruled that the reason the Town of Cumberland had denied a black couple's request to subdivide their property was their race.

In April, the commission fined a Newport property owner $2,000 for having changed the terms of her rental agreement after she found out that her new tenants, David and Stephanie Brown and their two teenage daughters, were black. "I've had some really bad luck with black people," said Debra Holden, the owner, in an answering-machine message to the rental agent. The recording became evidence in the case.

David Brown, 49, the revenue director at the Fenway Community Health Center, in Boston, says that he expected bigotry in the Southern cities where he grew up, but he was startled to find it in Rhode Island.

"I was sort of surprised, because you don't really expect too much [of it] in the North," Brown said recently. "You know it's there, but you just don't expect it to be so bold and forward."

In January, the Browns bought a three-bedroom house a few blocks from the rental property.

Holden, the property owner who was fined, says through her lawyer that she plans to appeal the decision. She says she has rented to minorities both before and after the Browns. "This has devastated her," says her lawyer, Stephen Rodio. "She doesn't have a prejudiced bone in her body."

Many complaints from minorities involve a similar scenario, says Angela V. Lovegrove, the Human Rights Commission's fair-housing project director. "Although they're qualified to either purchase or rent, they're being turned away. At one point they're being told it's available, and when they show up, all of a sudden it's not available -- and then they find out it was later sold to a Caucasian."

This year, the commission plans an undercover operation in which equally qualified applicants -- one white, one minority -- will attempt to rent or buy the same properties.

THE HISTORY of segregation in Providence goes back to at least the 1820s, when the city's first black neighborhood, Hard Scrabble, was forming off North Main Street. Tensions between whites and blacks arose, and on an October evening in 1824 hundreds of white rioters ravaged and looted the neighborhood -- and auctioned off the booty in Pawtucket.

Black neighborhoods continued to emerge here and there in Providence, but before long black people were concentrated in just a few sections of the city. By the 1940s, three-quarters of the city's blacks lived in fewer than one-quarter of its political wards.

In the 1960s two nationwide movements furthered the segregation within Providence: "urban renewal" and the interstate highway system.

With the belief that old houses should be torn down and replaced, the city razed Lippitt Hill, a long-established black neighborhood on the East Side. Expelled from their homes, most of the residents had no choice but to move to the South Side and the West End: they could not afford -- or hurdle the housing discrimination in -- other parts of the city.

The construction of Interstate 95 then placed a physical barrier between the black communities and the rest of the city.

These migrations within Providence were coupled with the midcentury's Great Migration of Southern blacks to the North, so that by 1970 the city's racial segregation had reached a peak.

The growing segregation coincided with a growing national awareness of racism, and one of the outcomes of the civil-rights movement was Rhode Island's Fair Housing Practices Act. Passed in 1968 -- over the objection of the real-estate industry -- it was among the country's toughest anti-discrimination laws. And it seemed to work.

Ultimately, by 2000, census tracts with a majority of black residents had ceased to exist in Rhode Island. According to a Providence Journal analysis of census figures, the last time the average black resident of Providence lived among so few other blacks was 1930.

"That black people are moving to [Providence's] Wanskuck, Charles Street -- well, that's remarkable," says Clifford Montiero, president of the Providence NAACP, referring to once all-white neighborhoods. "When I was a kid, you could get beaten up just walking in that part of the city."

THE ROLE that income plays in the departure of black residents from Providence's South Side won't be known until next year, when the Census Bureau releases its figures on income. But other studies have shown an increase in the percentage of black Americans who own houses, and local experts say that black Rhode Islanders typically leave the inner city when they buy their first house; both of these trends suggest a connection between rising income and movement away from the South Side.

In 1990, blacks made up more than half the residents of Providence's public housing for families; today, they make up about a quarter of such residents.

Yet the opposite situation -- modest incomes -- is also fueling the departure of black residents from the inner city. When "gentrification" happens, outsiders restore houses in a poor neighborhood and then sell or rent them for much more than before -- making the neighborhood too expensive for longtime residents.

"Some [blacks] have been driven away," says Anastasia Williams, a state representative who lives in Providence's West End, which over the '90s saw its black population fall 27 percent, from 4,245 to 3,089. "In some instances, rents have risen to the point of keeping low-income minorities out."

WHILE THE DECREASE in the state's racial segregation has been applauded, there has also been handwringing by some prominent black Rhode Islanders.

They say that as black Rhode Islanders disperse throughout the state, they will lose the concentrations needed to elect black leaders. This could happen as soon as next year, when the legislative districts are redrawn to reflect the 2000 census.

Former state Rep. Marsha E. Carpenter, who is black, blames the shifting demographics for her defeat in last year's election. During the 1990s, the black population in the Elmwood neighborhood she represented dropped 35 percent, to about 2,700. Meanwhile, the Latino population grew by about 41 percent, to 6,500.

After six years in office, Carpenter, a retired social-services professional, lost her House seat to Leon F. Tejada, a computer-systems analyst, who is Latino.

"A Latino ran and the Latinos voted for a Latino -- it's plain and simple as that," says Carpenter. "And you move on."

The loss of black political clout is not the only potential side effect of reduced segregation. The decline in community institutions -- despite some strong black churches -- also worries some black leaders.

"I'm somewhat sad that there isn't a community anymore," says the NAACP's Montiero. "Those who wanted to live in an ethnic community really cannot do so anymore."

Another concern is that the departure of high-achieving blacks from the inner city deprives the residents of role models.

Dennis Langley, the Jamaican-born executive director of the Urban League of Rhode Island, speaks of having been criticized for leaving Elmwood for East Greenwich.

When he did so, in 1990, some people said it was unseemly for the leader of an urban black-advocacy group to leave a 37-percent-black neighborhood for an affluent suburb where blacks make up less than 1 percent of the population.

Langley says that he moved his family so that his children could go to East Greenwich's well-regarded public schools. He had also worried about safety in Elmwood; shortly before the move, he spotted crack-cocaine vials in Sackett Street Park and forbade his teenage son to play there.

"I said, 'It's either fight or flight,' " says Langley. "And I could not keep up with the fight. So I moved on.

"The older you get," he says, "you need to have an area where you can detox. I feel like I want to be more in tune with nature. I don't want to see just asphalt. I need to see some trees -- I need to see some birds singing."

CHRISTINE ROUNDTREE, executive director of the Providence Human Relations Commission, remembers castigating a black acquaintance -- whom she will not name -- who left Providence for a town with better schools:

"I said, 'You traitor.' It's sad, because while his children are being taken care of, we have to worry about the rest of our children."

But three years ago even Roundtree, whose father is black and mother is white, left Providence's West End for a predominantly white street in the less urban Mount Pleasant. The turning point had come, she says, on the morning when she had to step over drug paraphernalia to get to her car.

"Initially, the neighborhood was low- to moderate-income, but good working people were there," she says of the racially mixed West End street where she used to live. "And it ended up being kind of a drug dealers' paradise. That's the main reason I got out of there -- that, and the violence."

But Roundtree's satisfaction with her calmer new neighborhood is mingled with regret. She had fought to bring new traffic signs and sidewalks to her West End street, and had tried to lend her professional know-how to the troubled neighborhood. Change proved difficult, though, and many of her neighbors were leaving for Mount Pleasant or Cranston.

Nevertheless, says Roundtree, "my personal feeling was like I was abandoning the neighborhood."

For his part, Dennis Langley dismisses the idea that he has turned his back on the city. He continues to press the Urban League's cause, and says that his move to East Greenwich should be viewed not as an abdication but as a model:

"For me, you not only verbalize leadership; you demonstrate leadership. If I can't show that I can be upwardly mobile . . . how can you set an example?"

THE GREENERY in front of Sheila Metts's trim white Elmdale Avenue house is so well shaped it could adorn a golf course. On most afternoons Metts is outside, tending to her garden.

Red geraniums decorate her front steps; pink roses climb a nearby trellis. Tall cherry trees watch over her backyard.

A few years ago Metts, an executive assistant at the state Department of Transportation, decided that South Providence was no longer a safe place for her and her children to live. "I couldn't take the gunshots in the middle of the night anymore," she says.

She wanted to live in one of the majestic restored Victorians in Elmwood, near her former neighborhood, but they were out of her price range. So about a year ago she took a first-time house buyers' class, and then bought her $68,000 ranch house in Silver Lake. The once Italian neighborhood of modest houses lies at the western edge of the city.

"I really liked South Providence," said Metts one recent evening, reflecting on the neighborhood where she had spent most of her life.

"I grew up there," she said. "I know a lot of really nice people back there, and I visit . . . Other than the gunshots, I felt perfectly safe.

"If they ever fixed that area," she added, "I'd move back."

But for now, Metts is content to raise her youngest child in a new home on a peaceful street.

DIGITAL EXTRA:

Visit projo.com's census section to view maps showing the change in Providence's black population:

http://projo.com/news/census/

Back to: Census Printer-Friendly Version Read/Post to our Bulletin Board on this topic