KNOXVILLE, Tenn.. (AP) - Daniel Brown has always had an affinity for Dr. Walter Hardy Park in East Knoxville. He says it feels like home. It should.
Brown’s family was forced out of their home before it was acquired and torn down by the city in the late 1960s as part of the sweeping urban removal program that displaced thousands, mostly for civic projects and new infrastructure. After the site sat vacant for nearly two decades, the city built the park, dedicated to local Black physicians, where his family home once stood.
Those memories fill Brown’s mind, but the former interim mayor and two-term city councilman pays them little attention. He told Knox News recently he’s just happy action is being taken to right the wrong. It’s a great step in the right direction, he said.
In December, the Knoxville City Council unanimously approved a milestone resolution issuing an apology and a plan for making amends for decades of urban removal. The process deeply harmed the city’s Black communities.
As a way to start to make it right, the city committed to a funding plan of $100 million, paid largely through grants that must be secured, over the next seven years for those whose lives and livelihoods were disrupted.
To Brown, 75, the lasting impacts of urban removal are twofold. There is the wealth gap created when the city forced families to move and didn’t provide fair market value for the property. The loss can’t be determined, he said, and can never be recouped.
“It can really effect the inner cities. Once something like that comes through they never recover,” Brown said, “or they’re so far behind they can’t recover, I’m speaking economically.”
The removal also further segregated the city as an almost entirely Black population pushed east and white families moved west.
Separately, he said, the historical impact is deep. There are no landmarks. How do you tell your history without landmarks?
“I don’t have a single place, in terms of a house or where I grew up or around, it’s all gone. I don’t have any landmarks …”
In a 2017 interview, he described the loss of his home simply. “The whole little area there was just done away with. I still have problems with that today. Because the only thing you put there was a park. And for a long time, a park wasn’t even there, they just demolished the houses.”
HOUSE WAS ‘NOTHING FANCY’
Brown’s grandparents originally purchased the home on East Vine Avenue in 1932. Brown still has the deed. He moved from across the street, the home he was born in, when he was young after his father died.
He explained the home’s layout: on the first floor was a front porch, a living room (which was reserved for company) and a den and dining room, a kitchen, a pantry and a back porch. The upstairs had three bedrooms and a bathroom as big as any of the bedrooms. It was, he said, the only two-story house on the block on that side of the street.
Outside there was a “nice-sized backyard” with an apple tree, a swing and a flower bed his grandmother planted.
“It was nothing fancy, but it was not run down at all, that’s for sure,” Brown said. “I’m not saying that because I grew up in it.”
As a boy, Brown watched as Tabernacle Baptist Church was built across the street. It was not torn down in urban removal and still stands today across from the park.
Brown was a 20-year-old living at home in 1966 as he worked stints in the Levi Strauss factory and Miller’s Department Store between stops at Tennessee State University.
He doesn’t remember how everyone found out about the plans for urban removal, whether a notice came in the mail or it was just common knowledge, but his family learned their home was to be torn down.
They sold it that year to a relative of a relative, Alonzo Baylor, who bought and sold houses at the time, and he likely eventually sold it to the city, Brown said.
“I always wondered why you’d buy it when you knew it was going to get taken down. … I always wondered why he did that,” Brown said. “But I guess he made something off the transaction.”
Daniel Brown, left, and his brother Warren Brown at home in the 1950’s. The family lived in the home, which belonged to their grandmother Laura McGinnis, until 1966.
Some of the blocks targeted by urban removal were appropriately removed because they were slums, Brown said, but certainly not all of the neighborhoods. The seemingly random mixture of what was razed still puzzles him.
“Probably half of the houses were very nice houses. They weren’t dilapidated at all … they just took everything down in that area,” Brown explained. “You had some nice homes that were just destroyed, not to mention the churches and businesses. Some of them never recovered.”
THE NEW PARK
The roughly three acres that make up the park now include a smattering of picnic tables, an amphitheater and open space. But unlike much of the city’s urban removal plans, it wasn’t turned into a shiny new facility or thoroughfare.
Brown doesn’t know why the homes had to be razed. It doesn’t make sense, he said.
“I don’t know the answer. I’ve never figured out the answer. The (city) didn’t do anything. They didn’t build anything. There’s nothing there now,” he said.
“It was years before they fixed up and made that acreage a park. So, what was the point of tearing all these houses down and having people move and you don’t replace it with anything until the ’80s? So, you had 20 years of that acreage of just sitting there. I’ve never understood that.
“If you’re tearing down something and you’re going to build something to replace it you’ve got some kind of a point. If you’re just tearing it down to tear it down …” he said as his voice trailed off.
Robert Booker, Knoxville Civil Rights icon, former executive director of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center and Knox News columnist, said the city often moved forward with property acquisition even if there was no plan.
“There seems to have been some land speculation from real estate people and since federal monies were going to be used to take people’s properties they all bought into it without any real plans of what they would do with the land later on,” Booker said. “They just wanted to take it and that’s what they did.”
“Simply because there were a few blighted areas that should’ve been taken they decided to wreck blocks and blocks and blocks and acres of property.”
It is not clear when Brown’s home was razed as it appears to remain standing in a 1969 aerial photo on the city’s property website. The next available aerial photo was taken in 1985 and it is gone.
Most of the property for the park was acquired by the city from the Knoxville Housing Authority (now named Knoxville Community Development Corporation) in 1974, but the land largely sat unused and had few improvements until 1991 when the city made it a park and named it after Dr. Walter Hardy.
At that point, amenities were added as part of the city’s bicentennial celebration. Two years later, according to Knox News archives, the city installed the amphitheater.
Brown’s family moved roughly two miles farther east to a home on Ashland Avenue. In January 2011, while serving on city council, he was chosen by members to serve out the unexpired term of Mayor Bill Haslam, who resigned to become governor. Brown served as interim mayor through that December.
Years later, East Vine Avenue was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.
URBAN REMOVAL HISTORY
Knoxville, largely through eminent domain, systematically tore down entire blocks of homes, churches and businesses in Black neighborhoods in the 1950s through 1970s for projects like the Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum and construction of new routes like James White Parkway and Interstate 40, among others.
In Knoxville, the effort displaced more than 2,500 families, more than 70% of whom were Black, according to the Beck Cultural Exchange Center.
Many experts attribute urban removal efforts as a major cause of the generational wealth gap between whites and Blacks in many parts of the country.
Roughly 17% of Knoxville’s population is Black and yet, according to 2019 Census figures, and the city’s Black poverty rate is 31.4%, one of the highest figures in the region.
Census experts put the margin of error for Black poverty in Knoxville as high as 42% and as low as 20%. Still, even at the most optimistic measure, it is one in five families.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.