S1E1 - Port City, from Generation to Generation

So Mrs. Johnson owns this house, she owns this property. It's like a mix of houses. Some of them are kind of that like four apartments in one building. And then the other buildings are these like nice little colonial-style single-family homes. Pointy Ruth, they're all vinyl, and here we are. I'll ring the doorbell. I was on the way to visit with Mrs. Sharon Johnson of Norfolk, Virginia to ask her about her family home. My grandfather built this house. He said, "I'm building it for my daughter, got nine kids, and I don't want them to ever now have a place to live." And so that's what this house means, generation, generation, that hits will always have a place to stay. Sharon Johnson grew up in Norfolk, Virginia. She still lives in the house her grandfather built in the 1950s. He was a contractor, he used to tell them houses and build houses, he built this one. Let's see. The last roof you can see, when I was five years old, I prayed in the sand that they put down. To build that house. That was our property. My grandfather's property needed all the way over to the roof of that house. Mrs. Johnson's home is only blocks away from Booker T. Washington High School, a historic African American school and community center. Norfolk is one of half a dozen cities in Virginia's most populous region, Hampton Roads. It sits on the southern corner of Virginia's east coast, right down at sea level, where the human and the ocean meet. You have to cross water to get to Norfolk. There is the vast opening of sparkling tributary waters, where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay. There's seagulls, people with boats in front of their house. It feels like a beach town, somewhere people's grandparents retire too. Sunny and not a cool, but without the pretentiousness that seaside cities sometimes have. It feels like a industrial, not a palm beecher at Cape Cod. It feels like a hometown on the water. Every time it rained in this neighborhood, it flooded. And I was lucky, and my grandfather, he was smart. So he built some bricks. I grew up in his neighborhood. We used to swim home from school. Every time, out of the week, we swim town. And we swim like swim like, yeah, look here. Water, walk home to water. The ocean is Norfolk's greatest ally and worst enemy. It bore enslaved Africans to the city shore and hit them as they escaped bondage. The ocean supports the region's biggest industry, naval defense. And the ocean creeps into the homes of Norfolk residents, as well as the naval station, the largest in the world, threatening livelihoods, histories, and futures. Two shadows cast by giants fall over a Miss Johnson's family home, though the flooding in her neighborhood has improved due to city interventions in the past decade. She's now shadowed by the risk of development and resulting gentrification. This is waiting between two Titans from the repair lab. We are an initiative from the University of Virginia focused on racial justice and climate change. The two Titans were waiting between our sea level rise and the housing crisis. I am producer Adrian Wood. I'm a white trans queer millennial sound artist, gardener, and community member. I don't live in Norfolk. Matter of fact, residents had to teach me to pronounce it. It's spelled N-O-R-F-O-L-K. But I've been instructed to pronounce it Norfolk, though really people from different parts of the city say it different ways. Even though I don't live in Norfolk, I've seen the kinds of flooding that Miss Johnson is talking about. The floods that visited her Norfolk neighborhood regularly continue to disproportionately affect Norfolk's black residents. Due to climate change in Virginia, we're dealing with more and more flooding, displacement from hurricanes, even rain bombs. Virginia has the highest rate of sea level rise on the east coast. But it's different in Norfolk. Let's start off with the fact that Norfolk has 144 miles of coastline. Norfolk and our region is second only to New Orleans in terms of flood risk. We're driving. We're driving. People are living in filth and wall-pulled rust in the bathtub. Water that ain't running right. These are some of the voices that we'll get to know over the course of this series. Outside of the large, more catastrophic storms, nuisance or sunny day flooding occurs regularly. So when you have that and you have precipitation events that we're seeing, these rain bombs, excessive rain, more frequent as a result of climate change, it is literally the perfect storm. The ways that Norfolk deals with the effects of climate change and sea level rise are felt differently among different communities in the city. Proposed solutions threaten to reinforce racism. Norfolk is about 44 percent white. It's about 40 percent black and it's about 20 percent poverty rate. Not everyone is going to be able to live with the water. And then you get into some very difficult choices about who gets to live with the water and who doesn't. So there's a whole lot of equity issues that are going to come up really, really quickly. At some point, there will be people who are projected and there will be people who won't. I just bought a house. I'd hate for the property values to be diminished because, you know, only crap, we're not going to protect this property. Water is taking care of it, the speed of redevelopment. Water is taking care of there at the rate of convenient displacement. Otherwise, they make it inconvenient for you and they'll flood you out. People in Norfolk are working to build safe, healthy and dignified housing in the places where they live and hope to remain. They're experiencing the same housing crisis as the rest of the country right now. Sky high rent, evictions, poor quality public housing, and a lack of effective solutions from the government. In the past, Norfolk set historic precedents around neighborhood engineering and displacement. Now, other cities in and beyond the U.S. are looking at Norfolk's response to sea level rise. If we were to save our city, we're going to have to throw everything at it. Through this series, we'll investigate how sea level rise, racism, and housing are intertwined in coastal Norfolk, Virginia. We'll hear from scholars, advocates, elected officials, and residents about the past, present, and future of housing in the mermaid city. What are the people who currently live here going to do between the water and the housing crisis? Just waiting between two Titans. Episode one is the deep history of Norfolk as a port city. And what that offered and didn't offer in terms of employment and housing for black people from the colonial era up until the turn of the 20th century. Norfolk is not an island, but it feels like one. Water curls around the city like a snail, forming a natural harbor. Several streams and rivulets glow into the city's center, and all of the land is within 12 feet of sea level. That's a big part of Norfolk's blood risk. There's water everywhere, and there always has been. The early town of Norfolk, it was, as most sea towns, a nasty place to be, rough and ragged, slow to develop, because the focus was about the waterways and transporting goods as opposed to developing an infrastructure to support all of that. Cassandra Newby Alexander is an endowed professor of Virginia black history and culture at Norfolk State University, a historically black university founded in the early 1900s. The waterways patterns always result in the area flooding, the town of Norfolk. That was originally an Indian town of the Chesapean, so the town was called Skiak, and that was essentially where MacArthur Mall is located today. It's a piece of land that is high ground, and by high ground, you know, it's at least 12 feet above sea level. The Chesapean were already gone from the area by the time the English arrived. The record showed the first free black people in the area only a few years later, including Anthony Johnson, who bought his freedom from indentured servitude in 1621. He started a tobacco farm of his own. Other free black communities throughout Hampton rose the answer is yes. There were pockets of free blacks everywhere. In fact, there were some people who had never really been enslaved. And then, of course, they had children, and their children's children's children continued to be free. In the earliest days of Norfolk, many of those free black families lived intermingled with other groups in the town. They lived with the flooding and its byproducts just like Norfolk residents do today. Many blacks lived in tenements along the dots, very undesirable damp, muddy and damp. It was a very unhealthy area to live in. It was always a marshland. It was a very, very undesirable, unhealthy place also. And epidemics would prove that the deaf toll would be high in those areas for blacks. My name is Tommy L. Boger, and I'm presently serving as the acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Norfolk State University. According to Dean Boger, the rest of Virginia looked down on Norfolk in the early days of the United States' pre-revolution. They always detested the Norfolkians because local soil was not very conducive to cotton growing, so from very beginning, Norfolk developed an economy very different from that of the rest of Virginia. And Norfolk had always been somewhat cut off from the rest of the state by water. A different economy in Norfolk meant different paths within the institution of slavery. In the time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, Norfolk's trade-based economy was useful for black people living there for several reasons. They returned to break down in the city, and that was true for just about every city in the South. But especially for those driving cities that had a lot of trades in which the lights couldn't make a good living. Norfolk, thank goodness, had these shipyards, and of course one of those cities in which there were many opportunities for enslaved persons to gain extra work. And over a period of time, they were able to purchase their freedom. During the 1780s and 1850s, a scarcity of housing in Norfolk actually improved living spaces for some black people. Prominent white families, for instance, didn't have a lot of room to house enslaved people. Though they might have owned land, there are lots were limited because Norfolk was just too swampy. So enslaved people went out on their own and found places to live within the black community. And blacks were very happy to do that. That would give them sense of privacy away from their owners, away from their watchful eye. They were able to build up their sense of community and social activities. The city's relationship to water also supported black people's lives from pre-revolution up until the Civil War through employment opportunities in the merchant marine industry. You had black jacks, these were African-American men who were operating as semen. So what we call merchant marines today. This is Professor Newby Alexander again. And they were coming in and out. Some were part of the British naval vessels coming in and out or on friendships, coming in and out. Of all the different kinds of maritime labor available to black people in Norfolk during this time, being a sailor offered the most relative freedom. Sailors could buy their own labor, begin to accumulate capital. Many supported families back on shore. This led to many households being run by women while the men were away on the high seas. There was also something of a quote unquote colorblind culture and sailing that valued experience over race. Sometimes black sailors received equal pay to their white counterparts. If they were more experienced, sometimes they would even be paid more than white sailors. There were a lot of black sailors. It's estimated about 20% of semen between 1700 and 1820 were free black men. About half of that number were sailors, not fishermen or longshoremen. John Thompson was one of them. In his 1853 memoir, he wrote about how he escaped enslavement by pretending to be a sailor and getting employed on a whaling ship as a steward, a kitchen worker. "I became very seasick, hand. The captain now came into the cabin very angry and said to me, 'What is the matter with you?' "I told him I was sick. Have you ever been at sea before?" He asked. "I told him I never had upon which he asked how I came to ship, I answered. I am a fugitive slave. I thought I would go a whaling voyage as being the place where I stood at least chance of being arrested by slave honours. This narrative seemed to touch his heart, for his contentess had once, assuming a pleasing expression. Thus God stood between me and him and worked in my defense." Throughout experience later in his life, Thompson became a very accomplished sailor. For the same reason, traders and merchants valued the area, Nafec and its surrounding region were a key point in the underground railroad. It was a nexus for northern and southern states. "Regards of how bad the situation was for blacks here in Nafec, this was utopia for enslaved people in the outland counties." This is Dean Bozier from Nafec State again. "You see, runaways and the rude counties will always be suspected of having somewhere in Nafec." Nafec's position on the water was in some ways a boon for black people living in the city. Nafec's position on the water was also a weakness for the plantation system because enslaved people used it to run away. The countless creeks, streams and rivulets that crisscrossed the city made it possible to steal away on a boat or slip into the water in the night. Almost 100 years before John Thompson wrote those memoirs about being a blackjack on the high seas and being caught seasick by the captain. In 1778, Ishmael was one of those people. His newspaper advertisement in the Virginia Gazette speculates that Nafec may be his destination. "Runaway, a very likely Negro man named Ishmael, 27 or 28 years old, very black, and bred to sea by Cornelius Calvert, it is very probable he may change his clothes and make for Nafec, as he wants much to get on board some of the ships of war." "Not only did they seek refuge among these slaves and free blacks in Nafec, but for many this soil as a temporary situation where these slave persons and free blacks would eventually help them book passage to the Nafec by sneaking them on board when the numerous ships lived in the Nafec harbour." Black sailors helped run away slaves and fugitives escape, but it was a serious risk for everyone involved. In this 1939 interview, formerly enslaved Hampton Roads resident Fannie Nicholson recalls. "Some of the slaves was put in wooden boxes and was sent by the boat to the Yankees. Some of them ain't never got there, because if a master went on the boat looking for his slaves, the people had to dump them in the water to keep the monsters from getting them. And too, some of them died in the boxes for they reached the Yankees." Whether a sailors, draman, their onshore families, runaways, fishermen, or marine merchants, black peoples' relationship to water in Nafec bore lingering elements of the importance of water and the ocean in African spirituality. Most New and Slaived Africans, landing in Virginia, between 17 and 1800, were from Angola and the Congo. There were many Africans and African Americans who trusted the sea so deeply they chose to commit their bodies to it, rather than be enslaved. For example, an enslaved person named Tom attempted to return home two and a half years after landing on American soil. He sailed into the Atlantic on an open boat in 1761, and that's the last that was heard of him. For cultural reasons and spiritual reasons, as well as the growing economic and racial dynamics, Nafec was a unique place for African Americans before the Civil War. It made employment more accessible for free black people living in the area, it made housing more accessible for enslaved black people living in the area, and at the same time, the area grew in value to the U.S. government as it began to expand its navy. The history of the U.S. navy and naval station Nafec in particular carry some complex intersections with the history of race in the U.S. Today, naval station Nafec is the largest in the world. But before the Civil War, the U.S. navy was very small, very small, with most statesmen being like, "Why would we try to compete with European navy?" They are so big and old, and we are so small and easy. But one loud proponent was Secretary of the Navy, Abel P. Upsher, who lived in Virginia's Eastern Shore, Nothig's Rural. to the north. In the mid 1800s, Upture wanted to expand the Navy to grab Hawaii, extract resources from South America and police Africa. John Quincy Adams opposed this, writing in 1842. This sudden Virginia overflow of zeal for the patronage of the Navy comes wreaking hot from the furnace of slavery. It is a wholesome stream from a polluted fountain. In the next 20 years leading up to the Civil War, the growth of the U.S. Navy went hand in hand with practices that exploited black labor, including slavery, and Jim Crow employment that kept black workers in the hardest, most dangerous and lowest paid positions. Very early into the Civil War, the Union took control of Norfolk for its Navy yard, which is now Naval Station Norfolk. This presented a major opportunity for black people in the area, including enslaved folks, fugitives, refugees, and free people, because enlisting in the Navy doesn't just mean a job. It is also obliged to feed, clothe, and house you. And if you're lucky, you're family too. Charles Grande escaped slavery during the chaos of the Civil War's outbreak, and was literally picked up on the side of the road by the Union Army, where he chose to enlist. I was in the Army, I weren't near, no fighting. I was a cook for a white army, didn't see but one or two colored soldiers. During the whole war, then I get tired of the field, always a running and never get no risk. So I listened to Navy one year, they pay you $6 a month in the Navy, because you guess you're clothe and then bored. Black men have shown up in the Navy since the American Revolution. Black women, not until much later. After reconstruction, black men were only allowed to be cooks, stewards, or coal-heavers. African-American representation in the Navy dropped way down until almost a hundred years later. Though naval station Norfolk is a major force in the city today, residents report that they haven't been very involved in the housing and flooding conversations. So for now, we'll move on from the Navy, and we'll look briefly at housing and land for Black people in Norfolk, from reconstruction onward, when many Black people move to Norfolk as part of the Great Migration. Here's Charles Grande again. After the war, nobody owned, so they all come to Norfolk, looked like to me. Hundred, hungry, and without house asleep, was walking round begging. The army fed a lot of them, but it couldn't feed all. We used to steal bread and stuff it in our shirts when we come off duty. When we get out, we wouldn't give it to the hungry women and babies. The army didn't have no food at all. Women and children used to die two and three a day from being hungry. In the wreckage of reconstruction, many people were starving because they no longer had access to means through which they could provide basics for themselves, like food and shelter. Basics that perhaps had used to be provided by their previous owners during enslavement. White backlash against Black Americans during reconstruction ensured that Black people would not be able to access the economic growth that they needed. And after Lincoln's presidency, the federal government started giving land back to former Confederates, and there were a lot of those in Hampton Roads. Matilda Carter, a formerly enslaved woman in Hampton Roads, recounted in a 1939 interview. After Lincoln, Johnson went in office. Then she'll change then. Johnson gave them rebels that land back and gave them all the privileges they had for the war. One day, a committee of three men came around. Towards Jeff Sinclair, a big old red rebel. Rev. Taylor, he was the most powerful colored man in town and an officer too. These men went to all the Negro houses, mine too, and made them people sign a paper saying they property wasn't theirs. They couldn't buy it, so they had to pay $10 a year for rent. For living on the land. Rev. Taylor was there to make them folk sign. What he said to a Negro was a lot. It was only 15 years after this interview with Matilda Carter was recorded and writing by a Works Progress Administration interviewer that Sharon Johnson's house was built by her grandfather. He built it in 1954. And just like Matilda Carter's land was seized, Sharon Johnson's home is also under threat of being taken from her. It does if nothing has changed, but the vessels that carry these threats. Every day somebody went about this house, I get a letter in a mail or phone call. Everybody wanted to be close to town now. But this was always a middle class black manhood. In 2021, the City of Naufok constructed a major stormwater intervention in Miss Johnson's neighborhood. It's really helped prevent the flooding. City improvements like the stormwater project have raised the value of Miss Johnson's home. They've also made black neighborhoods like hers a target for developers. Okay, the flooding, the flooding, they spent the last year working on the street and they said that our water would be better. They taught the street, they taught the grass, they taught the Greek. I haven't seen the flood. Monet Johnson is the other voice in this conversation. She's Miss Johnson's granddaughter and lead organizer for Environmental and Housing Justice with new Virginia majority. My grandma's house, she's like in between the two circles of downtown and Midtown. I'm sure one day she's going to wake up her house is going to be like on a flatbed truck. I get this out of here, we need this land lady. They're revitalizing everything, which means tear down, turning into something else. We'll hear more from her in future episodes. Next time on Waiting Between Two Titans, we'll learn more about the marks of Norfolk's segregated housing of the 20th century and its relationship through recurrent flooding. I'm 74 years old and have lived here my entire life when anybody asked me about living in Norfolk. My response is that I've only lived where white folks have allowed me to live. How racialized fear became embedded in Norfolk's real estate market. Norfolk has a very, very dismal, unpopular history of gentrifying communities. The neighborhood is not adversely affected by the adjacent Negro sections. Just displaced people will figure it out later. And all about one policy with a notorious legacy that continues to limit options for black people seeking relief from flooding in Norfolk. What really hurt African Americans was when the federal government stepped in and instituted essentially redlining. That's what hurt. African American communities then were put in harm's way. Systems had their foots on our necks and were not able to build in the same way other folks work. Find us online at two Titans.org T-W-O-T-I-T-A-N-S.org. This episode was written, recorded, produced, edited, mixed mastered and hosted by Me, Adrian Wood, show art by Adrian Wood, music by Sugarlift, and Reggie Reisa Harrison on Jembe and percussion. The story editing by Kelly Jones, thanks to the repair lab, was support from the Transjournalist Association, Music Theory Studios, and Downtown Norfolk, WTJU, the UVA Race Religion and Democracy Lab, and the Carch Institute of Democracy. The interviews of Fannie Nicholson, Charles Grandi, and Matilda Carter were all originally recorded in writing through the Works Progress Administration Virginia Writers Project. Thompson and Charles Grandi were read by Marcus Anderson. Matilda Carter and Fannie Nicholson were read by Barbara Fazon. John Quincy Adams and the Runaway Advertisement and the Virginia Gazette were read by Jeremy Albert. Thanks for listening.