New reparations focus: Black enclaves lost to development

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Terrell Osborne knows well what happens when urban renewal comes to communities of color.

As a child growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1950s and 1960s, huge swaths of his neighborhood of Lippitt Hill, a center of Black life at the foot of the stately homes of the city’s elite East Side, were taken by eminent domain for redevelopment projects.

Hundreds of Black families and dozens of minority small businesses across some 30 acres were bulldozed. In their place rose an apartment complex catering to downtown workers and students and faculty at nearby Brown University, as well as a shopping plaza now anchored by a Whole Foods and a Starbucks.

Meanwhile, Black families like the Osbornes were scattered across the city and never compensated.

“We had stores. People owned things. Money was circulating around,” said Osborne, who now lives on Providence’s South Side. “There was a whole community there, and they just took that neighborhood and we never got anything for it. Not even as much as a thank you.”

As Providence gears up to provide reparations to Black residents for centuries of injustices, city officials are looking beyond the city’s leading role in the Colonial transatlantic slave trade.

They’re looking to atone, at least initially, for what happened during urban renewal efforts of the late 20th century, a period that saw Black and Native American communities such as Lippitt Hill razed to make way for new residential and business developments that paved the way for the city’s modern economy, anchored around its universities and hospitals.

The approach builds off the blueprint in Evanston, a Chicago suburb that became the first in the nation to begin paying reparations last year with a program providing Black residents grants for mortgage payments and home repairs, in acknowledgement of the historic discrimination Black people endured when trying to buy homes.

By making progress on such modern day wrongs, communities can hopefully start to overcome longstanding resistance to reparations, says Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University’s law school who spearheads the African American Redress Network, which tracks reparations efforts nationwide.

Providence’s efforts also notably look to use some $15 million in federal COVID-19 funds to jump-start reparations work, something other city leaders have pursued recently.