FIGHTING FOR A NEIGHBORHOOD
Man works to help S.C. city’s black community overcome poverty, racism
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GREENVILLE, S.C. - Darian Blue said he would be walking through Winn-Dixie grocery stores in 1980s Florida and his great-grandmother, born in 1908, would suddenly pull him behind her.
She’d tug at him and tell him to look down at the ground whenever a white person passed in an aisle.
“The years I spent with her, I was seeing the world from her lens,” said Blue, now a reverend at Nicholtown Missionary Baptist Church and the executive director of the Phillis Wheatley Center in Greenville.
“This went on through the ’80s and ’90s,” he said. “I don’t think she ever felt the type of equality she hoped for.”
Blue, 37, said people like his great-grandmother went to the grave with racial scars so deep that they struggled to recognize the changes he saw while growing up.
He sees similar scars in Greenville’s Nicholtown neighborhood, where he moved five years ago to run the Wheatley Center, a nonprofit that has been led by African Americans for nearly 100 years.
Poverty, Blue said, is the main problem in Nicholtown, Greenville’s first black neighborhood established just before the Civil War. The community is about 1.5 miles from the booming downtown business district.
Blue expects downtown growth to push many longtime residents out of the neighborhood. To help them, he is working with developers so they’ll get to know the homeowners. The hope is that developers can talk with homeowners and leverage their stories into bigger sales, meaning more money for those who are being priced out of the neighborhood.
But Blue and others also are working to keep people in Nicholtown.
The Wheatley Center is undergoing renovations to add a cooking school, which Blue hopes will train a generation of people to work at restaurants before owning their own.
Blue is troubled that he still has to have tough conversations about race with his children. He said the solution for racial tension in society is found through Christ: “Love one another.”
Q&A
What does it mean to you to be an American? My great-grandma raised me. She was born in a time that these United States were very segregated. Seeing the world from her lens was somewhat hard, because for her, looking a white person in the face was dangerous. You had to address all white people by “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am.” Growing up, I didn’t understand that because I felt like ... everyone was equal, and I really didn’t understand racism at that point. I am passing on to my kids that the only time you hold your head down is when you pray, when you pray to God out of reverence because there’s no one human being greater than another. So when we pray, we bow our head in reverence to God.
What gives you hope or concerns you? The rhetoric I hear now from the government, that really concerns me. We see a spike in these hate groups ... and it’s just, at one point I thought we were getting better, but we’re kind of going backwards, so that concerns me what I hear . ... I think white America has to stand up against white America. I tell all my friends, if you say you’re really passionate and your heart is there, then you have a conversation with that racist family member, that racist co-worker. This is a battle for white America. White America has to heal white America. Black America can’t heal white America. Hispanic America can’t heal white America.
What do you hope to accomplish through your efforts? Social justice, for one. Two is economic empowerment. And I want to see education for minorities skyrocket through the roof. There’s a direct correlation between education and economics.