(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) - [Barbara Johnson] She's looking for the selfies picture.

Where is that?

- [James Johnson] You mean in the car?

- [Barbara] I guess so.

- [James] That was at the beginning.

- [Barbara] It must be at, oh, must be yeah, right here.

This one here.

[Barbara] I don't know how he did that.

- [James] Me either.

- [Barbara] Selfies.

The first time.

- [Narrator] People don't just live on blocks.

They create identities, senses of self based on memories of what happened on a certain summer day.

Watching a university do away with those things has a psychological, spiritual, personal impact that we can't fully capture.

(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (lawnmower whirring) (lawnmower continues whirring) - [Barbara] You got it, babe?

- Oh, you're talking about the homes, right?

- [Barbara] Mm-hmm.

- [James] Growing up here and running through the field over to our neighbors' houses, and we all were one big family.

- [Barbara] Mm-hmm.

- [James] It's a picture journal of the homes that were here.

Some were old and some were new.

I was born right up the street and I grew up right here.

We all lived with my grandfather when I was born, and, well, he had this farm.

And as time went by, my dad was given property to build a home.

- A lot of the neighbors were his family, you know?

They were related to him.

His aunt lived on Prince Drew Road.

He had an aunt that lived up at the beginning of Shoe Lane, and he had cousins on this street.

I got to know all of them.

If a family needed something, we all worked together to help that family.

(gentle piano music) - [James] After I was married, my dad deeded me half of his lot so that I could build a home, and we did.

- People have asked me, "Well, the college is there.

Why would you build your home there?"

I say "Excuse me.

This property was here before the college and we had no idea that the college was going to be there."

- [James] I grew up on this property and I would never have wanted to leave under those circumstances, being forced out, and, fortunately, I'm still here.

I know, one day, that all of this is going to be, even where I am, part of the college.

(bell tolling) - That is another fear we have, if we can live our lifetime in the house that we built ourselves.

We don't know.

We still don't know.

(numbers whirring) (lively music) - [Announcer] Sept. 2, 1945, and America's joy bubbled over into unrestrained jubilation.

Three and one-half years of all-out war had come to an end.

A civilian army would soon be allowed to swap their khaki for mufti.

- The expansion of higher educational institutions is one of the great accomplishments of the post-World War II generation.

- [Announcer] The GI Bill of Rights is not a reward, but rather an American way for each man to get some of those things for which he went to war, a job, an education, a home.

(triumphant music) - [Hamilton] At the same time, we had this backward-looking attempt to thwart the advancement of civil rights.

- The racial harms of universities extends far beyond slavery and into the 20th century and into our present, and it can be situated within the story of urban renewal, eminent domain.

You have the flight of capital, money, industry, leaving the city to the periphery of what was being called the suburbs, and you have white workers being the only ones able to follow.

At the same time, you have largely Black and brown working-poor families moving into cities.

One of the major forms of federal response to that was what we call urban renewal.

- Black Journal now reports on the question of urban renewal, or is it Black removal?

- [Announcer] The American urban universities feel the need to expand their green to the adjoining Black communities of Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Boston, Hartford, New Haven.

The power of the university affords them the privilege of tax exemption and the use of another power, urban renewal, which aids them in their search for land to take.

- The major policy and fulcrum that we have to focus on here is the federal Housing Act of 1949.

In 1959, that act was amended because a group of 14-plus colleges and universities made the appeal to the federal government.

What this program did is that it provided a two-to-one federal matching grant, so two federal dollars for every one dollar invested by the city into an urban renewal project, if it was tied to a college or university.

Two to one.

Cities flocked to their local schools to come together to create these partnerships to build our urban renewal projects.

But many times, the neighborhoods that were deemed blighted were actually Black middle class, so these neighborhoods were the ones targeted to enact eminent domain, which then allowed the city or government or the state to come in.

(engine rumbling) And in this new arrangement, it was Black communities that were sacrificed at the altar of prosperity.

(somber music) - In the early 1960s, Newport News was a segregated society.

Not only were Blacks deprived of civil rights, but they were also deprived of their housing rights.

There were not many areas where middle-class Black families could relocate out of downtown Newport News.

The Black community here had come into existence in the 1880s, and they and their children stayed here until the 1960s.

(somber music continues) - Oh, this is the Johnson Terrace.

- This is Johnson Terrace, where we are.

People of color couldn't have property, couldn't buy property anywhere that they could build homes.

It was very limited, so my dad and his siblings decided that we would take this end of the property subdivide it so that people of color could buy homes.

The principal of my high school and three teachers that were in my high school bought lots and built homes, and so it became a neighborhood.

- The Johnsons found this little area where we could have our own little space.

They said, "Well, we got all this land, farmland.

You know, let's all build a community for Black people.

We have 30-some-odd acres.

Let's start, you know, dividing it up and creating little plots, and we can create Johnson Terrace."

The city of Newport News had other plans.

- My grandfather had passed, and the farm was not anymore.

The land was sitting here, so they wanted to divide that and maybe offer homes there, but what happened was that the state was moving in with eminent domain.

- Word began to spread that a real estate developer, a Black real estate developer, was interested in placing a suburban subdivision for Black residents of Newport News.

The location here, I believe, set off alarm bells in the white community because of our close proximity to the James River Country Club.

When Christopher Newport was established by the state, that was the perfect excuse that the city had to place the campus here and to take this property.

- They had to stop it, and I think that's what it was all about, stopping this development.

We went to the city council and we talked and it fell on deaf ears.

- The city attempted to state that the Black community here was attempting to stop the creation of a new college, and so they tried to portray them as kind of anti-education, and that wasn't the case.

They made forceful statements about how unfair this was, how there were alternative, cheaper properties.

None of those pleas were heard.

- There were other properties that were available that they could have built the school, but they chose the core of this community.

- And no matter how much the two attorneys tried to convince the city council that this was not the moral nor the legal thing to do, they pressed on anyway, because the city already knew what it wanted to do.

They knew they had Black people fighting with their hands behind their back and they pressed on anyway.

City council voted 5-2 to select Shoe Lane for Christopher Newport College.

- It was a deal that was sealed by the time the council meeting even began.

(somber music) It was clear to the city officials that the property owners on the Shoe Lane properties did not want to sell, and so they utilized eminent domain in order to forcibly take those properties.

(solemn music) (solemn music continues) (solemn music continues) - I grew up here, and it has more than just a piece of property.

It's a lifestyle.

It's a a means of ownership, and I have a right to ownership, but it was taken away from me.

- Historically, the city has to own up to the fact that this was a deliberate attempt to get rid of a Black community, because there were many places that this school could have been built.

And I think they would've taken everything if they could have gotten - I mean, I was told that, that that was the plan.

It was to erase the Black spot.

They called it a Black spot.

- They felt, and they were made to feel, isolated, that it was just their community.

It was just West Philadelphia.

It was just East Baltimore.

It was just South Berkeley.

And what we don't understand fully enough is that, alongside of struggles over lunch counters or jobs or equitable housing, a key fulcrum in student activism and community activism was fighting against the encroachment of universities into their communities.

- [Colvin] Even after that initial defeat, Black people still came.

They still built and lived in the periphery around CNU.

(gentle music) - [James Johnson] Other people started coming in and blending in and building homes and it made the neighborhood grow.

Everybody in the neighborhood just about knew everyone else.

We weren't just like neighbors.

We were like relatives.

That's how close this neighborhood was.

(numbers whirring) - I was taking my break at school, and I was looking through the paper, and when I opened the paper, first thing, big letters, that's what it was.

Christopher Newport has extended their boundaries to Shoe Lane.

Matter of fact, one of my coworkers came running in and she said, "Barbara, did you know Christopher Newport's thinking about moving their boundaries to Shoe Lane?"

I said, "No, no, we didn't know anything about it."

- The property line had moved from the back of my house to the front of house without any notification, and I only found out when I saw it in the paper.

- So that's when we got together and we formed a community group to look into the matter and see what we could do.

- I had been at the [New Journal and] Guide for about two years.

The Guide, like most Black newspapers, was the newspaper of record for the Black community.

I was tabula rasa when it came to the history, and they came over to my office one day, as a contingent, and they said, "Well, maybe you can do a better job than what the Daily Press had done."

And they had these reams of paper.

I said, "Oh my God, what is all of this?"

So they walked me through for about three hours.

They were very angry at Christopher Newport University, and it took me about two days to write this story, calling and verifying what was going on, and then calling President Anthony Santoro.

- I came to Christopher Newport then-College in 1987.

I knew that the center of this campus had been the farmland for all the houses that were around it and there was a Black church, a prominent church, on Warwick Boulevard, and businesses and so on.

I don't think they even knew that we were thinking of expanding.

I said to the board, "Well, if we're going to expand, we're going to have to make attractive offers to people."

- He was there to expand the school, and he didn't mention it in so many words, but he knew what his goal was, and subsequent presidents after him, he knew what their job was to do.

- [James Johnson] We wanted everybody to know how we felt and the only way we could get our voice out was to go to court.

No one would listen to us any other way.

- There was a case that ended up in Norfolk in the federal court.

I was represented by the state attorney general.

I remember it as being a tense time for me because I didn't know how it was going to come out, but I knew that I didn't have any prejudice in my heart and I wasn't doing it for that reason.

- The odds are against us, the state versus individuals, and that's a tough fight.

- We knew that we couldn't win, but we really wanted them to get an idea of how we really felt as a community, and we were together as a community for this.

We were not going to take it sitting down.

- [Colvin] Even before the trial went forth, the court dismissed it altogether.

- People just just gave up and sold their property, and those of us that stayed to fight this thing off, gradually, it got taken one by one.

- We didn't apply pressure.

All we did was offer more money, and most of the people took it, and so that's how we expanded.

(solemn music) We built the first dormitory, which they kindly named after my wife and me, and then we doubled the size of the campus.

Most of the real problems were dealt with before President Trible came.

- [Trible] How are you?

- Good.

- Nice to see you.

- Well, good to see you.

- Thank you for letting me come by today.

- Well, I'm pleased to have you.

Come on in.

- How are you?

- Paul Trible was a Republican political operative, U.S. senator, and his task was to continue what Santoro and what the other presidents did do, which was expand.

(solemn music) - You said you hope to have, instead of 500 or 300 or 500, maybe a thousand residential students.

- And that will require constructing an additional residential building.

We have a fine complex now, the Santoro complex, that serves and will serve up to 400 students.

We will need to replicate that building, and that will permit us then to serve and house about a thousand residential students.

(solemn music) Almost 22 years ago, some of us began to build another great university for America.

We say we reject the notion of incremental progress.

We're in the business of dramatic transformation, and together, we've come a long way.

Indeed, few schools, if any, have come so far so quickly.

(solemn music) (solemn music continues) We've completed over a billion dollars of capital construction and built a beautiful campus with world-class facilities.

Just in the last weeks, Princeton Review ranked our campus the 17th most beautiful in America.

(audience applauds) - What he did was very quiet, very deliberate, but he got the job done.

- Paul Trible was a builder.

Look at the place.

(solemn music) (car rumbling) - There were neighborhoods that just disappeared and no record of it, when there are other communities and other parts of the city, and their kids can stay generation after generation.

Well, that's what my grandfather had in mind for us, and many of my neighbors.

My generation, they didn't have that opportunity.

But the property was here, they could have, if it hadn't been taken away through eminent domain.

I did pictures of all the homes in the neighborhood.

That helped me to get through that phase where the homes were going to disappear and people would never know that we had a neighborhood, that people loved each other and they were neighbors.

I mean, not just neighbors, they were friends, close-knit, and that's why I documented it.

All that was going away.

That was a memory I wanted to have.

It helped me to get through the pain of losing my buddies who I grew up with, forced away.

(gentle music) - I have to look at the school as an entity by itself and the school is the center of cultural and educational activities in the community, and I think it enhances the community.

There's always a price for progress, and sometimes people feel hurt by the progress, and I can accept that that is part of this progress, but I think, on the whole, the pendulum swings towards positive.

(solemn music) - This has happened all over the country, not only here.

The college, it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful campus, and I think it has added to the area, but, there again, we had to give up something for that, and so we have to, you know, take that as it is.

It just seems like, wherever Black people have property, and if it's something that they want, they take it.

(solemn music) (solemn music continues) (solemn music continues) (solemn music continues) (solemn music continues) (gentle music) (gentle music continues)