How Norfolk became segregated: the century-long roots of the city’s ‘Dividing Lines’

A mob marched on Norfolk in 1923.

A new family had moved onto Corprew Avenue, a “white block” as far as city ordinance was concerned, the northernmost boundary of the well-to-do enclave of Brambleton, which was then on the city’s outskirts.

The family moving in considered themselves white, but the armed crowd, which included a sitting City Council member, saw no place on the block for what whites thought were light-skinned Black people.

“Brambleton is in Eruption Again,” the Norfolk Journal and Guide newspaper reported after the mob descended on the home, intimidating its occupants and trying to force them to move.

The “eruptions” were a relatively new phenomenon. At one point barely a decade before, Black and white families had lived in neighborhoods across the city side by side, literally.

“They called it a keyboard of homes, Black and white homes living side by side,” said Kevin Lang Ringelstein, a white Naval officer who moved to Norfolk on military orders in the mid-2000s and started studying the city’s residential segregation after moving here and experiencing it.

You can see it clearly on maps based on census data from 1910, four years before city leaders put racial residential division into code. In 1910, the area east of Hampton Boulevard that today makes up part of the Larchmont and Edgewater neighborhoods was 47% white, 53% Black. Downtown Norfolk around where McArthur Mall sits now was 49% white, 50% Black — about as close to an even split as it gets. Just north of where Norfolk State University now sits, two-thirds of the residents were Black, one-third white.

Norfolk in 1910 was segregated in many other ways, of course. “Separate but equal” was the law of the land. Black and white children didn’t go to school together; Black people could not eat in most restaurants or enter some businesses.

But those housing patterns reflected, in part, people’s choices about where to live. Some neighborhoods were whiter, some blacker, but in the middle were a lot of neighborhoods that looked like the three above.

That all started to change in 1914 when the City Council formalized racial residential segregation in Norfolk. They changed city code to create the “white blocks” like Corprew Avenue as well as “Black blocks” elsewhere.

The new laws limited people’s choices about where to live. Violators could be fined, or more likely for Black residents, harassed like the family that moved onto Corprew. Just a few years later in 1920, and even more so by 1930, the maps showing where the races lived in Norfolk were starting to look like they do today: largely white neighborhoods, largely Black neighborhoods and not many in between.

That 1914 law was one of the first in a series of deliberate — and successful — actions by city leaders to keep white and Black Norfolk apart. Decade after decade, whenever the color lines dividing the city started to give way or looked to be at risk, white Norfolk erected defenses to limit and control the Black community.

Today, the city is in the early stages of an ambitious overhaul of the St. Paul’s neighborhood, which for decades has been home to thousands of public housing residents, nearly all Black.

The city wants to replace that aging housing with mixed-income neighborhoods, which would likely mean more racial diversity — although, as is so often the case with race, that fact has rarely been talked about publicly. City officials have emphasized economics, though they mentioned “the racial segregation that has divided the St. Paul’s area from the rest of Norfolk for generations” in their successful application for a federal grant to help pay for the redevelopment.

As the city says it wants to undo that segregation, created by decades of racist laws and practices, The Virginian-Pilot is continuing the “Dividing Lines” project, which you can read at PilotOnline.com/dividinglines. A future article will explore in more depth the St. Paul’s plans, but first, a look at how we got here.

Backlash

In the early 1900s, Norfolk’s color lines were blurring fast, fueled by the city’s growth.

After two big land grabs at the end of the 1800s, the city annexed three large swaths of what was then Norfolk County between 1902 and 1911.

Pockets of Black communities were part of every annexed community, and the effect of corralling them all was that Black residents lived spread throughout Norfolk, unlike in other cities that were commonly made up of a concentrated Black residential core.

The 1914 law was a reaction against that, an attempt to keep those pocket communities from expanding by keeping Black residents where they were. Three years later, federal courts would strike down residential segregation ordinances, but Norfolk kept its on the books, insisting it was legal because it didn’t just limit where Black people could live but white people as well.

Norfolk’s law was ruled unconstitutional in the 1920s. But by then, the city’s housing patterns had already shifted. White families moved out of Brambleton, leaving vacant houses in their wake because other white families wouldn’t move in and Black families couldn’t.

Federal “redlining” would deepen the divide created by city leaders in the 1930s and ’40s. The maps, showing banks and mortgage lenders the relative risk of investment, graded white neighborhoods low risk and Black neighborhoods red: a dangerous investment.

That gave Black people far fewer choices for where to live.

After World War II, as white people filled housing built for defense workers during the war, Black residents were increasingly confined to slums that garnered national attention for their poor condition.

In the 1950s, the city used the nation’s first-ever federal public housing funds to raze the slums and erect 1,700 homes in developments that still stand today: Young Terrace, Tidewater Gardens and Calvert Square.

At first, they were integrated. But in part because white people had more options for where to move, over time, the public housing became virtually all Black.

Massive Resistance

The next time Norfolk’s color line was challenged came around the same time, when calls to desegregate schools intensified and, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that it had to be done.

City leaders rapidly began erecting new defenses against school integration.

By and large, the district’s superintendent and other leaders anticipated the ruling would bring about little change because Norfolk’s residential segregation was so pronounced after the previous four decades of racist city ordinances and federal redlining.

“We are all in favor of segregation,” Superintendent John Brewbaker told The Pilot. The school system’s goal? To carry out the Supreme Court’s will with “the least harm to pupils.”

“Least harm” really meant “least disruption of the status quo,” which at the time was represented by two segregated and unequal school systems divided by race. That segregation was precisely what Brown had said was causing harm.

White city leaders kept Norfolk segregated through both housing policy and school policy, as Forest “Hap” White explores at length in his book “Black, White and Brown.”

Despite massive overcrowding in schools following the post-war Baby Boom, after Brown, the school system largely set aside its construction plans for new schools in white areas of town, instead adding wings and annexes to existing buildings. Some white schools that were closest to integrated parts of town, like Patrick Henry Elementary on Colley Avenue, were closed. Meanwhile, the district proceeded with plans for schools in Black areas under the premise that the new buildings might draw families who would otherwise press to attend the white schools that were closer to them. This was how the Southside Campostella junior high school came to be.

Under Mayor W. Fred Duckworth’s orders, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority set its sights on the few integrated residential areas that remained.

More homes were needed. But instead, the city’s housing agency used a new strategy: “buffer zones.”

Black housing in Lamberts Point was bulldozed to make room for Old Dominion University, which conveniently also served to separate white and Black neighborhoods.

Nothing as high-minded as a university was planned for Atlantic City, a bustling neighborhood between Ghent and the Elizabeth River that the Pilot described as having a “Greenwich Village flavor,” where the city’s director of community improvement noted that “integration had happened without any difficulty.”

In fact, nothing much was planned for Atlantic City at all.

The housing authority bought and razed houses, and the lots sat untouched for decades — another defense against the changing color lines.

Today, Eastern Virginia Medical School and the hospital campus are in what was Atlantic City. So are several business and government offices, like PETA’s, on the south side of Brambleton Avenue.

But there is little housing, aside from the Harbor’s Edge retirement towers. And much of the land still sits vacant, a visible reminder of how decades of choices shaped the city.

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This story was based on U.S. census data and interviews with researchers who have studied the history of Norfolk’s housing and school segregation, including Kevin Lang Ringlestein, Charles Ford and Jeffrey Littlejohn. Ford and Littlejohn’s book, “Elusive Equality,” was a resource, as were Ringelstein’s 2015 ODU thesis, “Residential segregation in Norfolk, Virginia,” and Forest “Hap” White’s book “Black, White and Brown: The Battle for Progress in 1950s Norfolk.”