What White Christians did to Black Charlotte

The 20th-century urban renewal movement profoundly impacted most cities across America. Urban renewal gained traction as a federal program to remediate perceived blight by providing funding to demolish urban neighborhoods en masse and spur large-scale redevelopment projects. Due to implicit racism across all levels of government, the program frequently targeted predominantly Black neighborhoods.

Neighborhood advocates and urban planners have long decried urban renewal’s devastating outcomes. In her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs quoted New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury to make plain these tragic effects: “When slum clearance enters an area . . . it does not merely rip out slatternly houses. It uproots the people. It tears out the churches. It destroys the local business man. It sends the neighborhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair.” In recent years, scholars have published a number of resources recounting the history of racial discrimination in housing and urban planning encapsulated in urban renewal, redlining, and the like. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) is one of the most comprehensive and lauded examples.

After years of ministry and nonprofit leadership in neighborhoods impacted by these policies, I am convinced that urban church leaders must be familiar with this history in order to understand the context of their own ministry. Greg Jarrell’s new book, Our Trespasses, leaves no doubt that the racist legacy of urban renewal programs is also a subject of urgency for church historians and theologians.