The Flooded City:
Five Ways Black Communities
Were Taken

In 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a majority-Black city with a thriving economy. Black residents held elected office, owned businesses, ran the city's newspaper, and formed the professional class. A white supremacist Democratic Party coalition — threatened by this Black political and economic power — organized a coup.

On November 10, a white mob of at least 2,000 men marched on the offices of the Daily Record, the Black-owned newspaper, and burned it to the ground. They then overthrew the legally elected city government at gunpoint — the only documented violent overthrow of a U.S. city government in American history. The Republican mayor and aldermen were forced to resign at gunpoint and replaced by the coup leaders.

Between 60 and 300 Black residents were killed. Thousands fled. Wilmington went from a majority-Black city to a majority-white city within weeks. The business district, the property, the political infrastructure — all transferred to white ownership in a single day. The federal government did nothing. No one was ever prosecuted.

Tulsa's Greenwood District was called "Black Wall Street" for a reason. By 1921 it contained over 300 Black-owned businesses: hotels, law offices, a hospital, two newspapers, grocery stores, a library, and a dozen churches. It was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States — built by the generation of Oklahomans who had migrated after the Civil War and accumulated wealth over 50 years of work.

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob estimated at 10,000 people descended on Greenwood after a Black teenager named Dick Rowland was accused of assaulting a white elevator operator (charges later dropped). Armed Black residents attempted to defend the district. The mob — aided by the Tulsa Police Department and deputized white civilians — burned 35 city blocks in 16 hours. Airplanes circled overhead; eyewitnesses reported they fired on Black residents fleeing the fires.

The scale of destruction was total: 1,256 homes burned, 35 blocks destroyed, a hospital, schools, a library, a hotel. The accumulated wealth of one generation of Black Oklahomans — built over 50 years — was erased in less than a day. Not one white participant was charged. The city then used zoning laws to prevent Black residents from rebuilding on the same land.

Rosewood was a prosperous Black town in Levy County, Florida — home to about 150 Black residents with a school, churches, a Masonic lodge, and more property ownership per capita than the neighboring white town of Sumner. On January 1, 1923, a white woman in Sumner claimed a Black man had assaulted her. (Her husband later privately admitted she had been beaten by her white lover.)

A white mob descended on Rosewood over six days. At least eight people were killed; the real number is unknown because bodies were never fully accounted for. Every building in Rosewood was burned. Every Black resident fled — most never returned. The town of Rosewood was physically erased from the map.

The State of Florida did not acknowledge the massacre until 1994, 71 years later, when it paid $2.1 million in reparations to survivors and descendants — the first such legislative reparations payment by a U.S. state. The acknowledgment came only because survivors, then elderly, organized and testified before the state legislature.

The Housing Act of 1949 gave the federal government the power to designate neighborhoods as "slums," acquire the land through eminent domain, demolish the buildings, and sell the cleared land to private developers — who were almost always white. The program was called "urban renewal." James Baldwin called it "Negro removal." He was not being rhetorical. He was being precise.

In city after city, the neighborhoods designated as "slums" were Black neighborhoods — not because they were objectively worse than adjacent white neighborhoods, but because the land was valuable and the residents lacked political power. The Fillmore District in San Francisco was called "the Harlem of the West" — a jazz hub with thriving Black-owned businesses. Urban renewal demolished it and replaced it with a redeveloped neighborhood that Black residents could not afford to return to.

In Chicago, urban renewal in the South Side displaced tens of thousands of Black residents from Bronzeville — which had been one of the cultural capitals of Black America during the Great Migration. In Washington, D.C., entire neighborhoods in Shaw and Southwest were razed. In Boston, the South End. In New York, Robert Moses demolished the San Juan Hill neighborhood (a Black and Latino community) to build Lincoln Center. He is celebrated as an urban visionary. The 7,000 families he displaced are not mentioned on the Lincoln Center website.

A crucial detail: the Housing Act required that displaced residents be provided with "decent, safe, and sanitary" replacement housing. In practice, this almost never happened. Displaced Black residents were pushed into public housing projects — which were then systematically defunded — or into adjacent neighborhoods that then became overcrowded and labeled as the next slum to be cleared.

The Federal Highway Act of 1956 funded the Interstate Highway System — the largest public works project in American history. The routes were not drawn by geography. They were drawn by politics. In city after city, the highway engineers routed interstates directly through Black neighborhoods when multiple routes were available. This is documented in the Federal Highway Administration's own records and in the congressional testimony of the engineers who did it.

In Nashville, Interstate 40 was routed directly through Jefferson Street — the heart of the city's Black business district, home to Tennessee A&I (now TSU) and Fisk University, the "Black Broadway" of Nashville with 200+ Black-owned businesses. The city's own traffic engineers had proposed an alternative route through a commercial corridor. The highway commission chose Jefferson Street. The businesses were demolished. The university neighborhood was severed. The community never recovered its economic base.

In New Orleans, I-10 was built on top of the Claiborne Avenue neutral ground in Tremé — the heart of one of the oldest Black communities in America. The live oak trees that lined the neutral ground, under which Mardi Gras Indians had paraded for generations, were cut down. The expressway became a concrete wall through the neighborhood. In Miami, I-95 was routed through Overtown — the "Harlem of the South" — destroying a community of 40,000 Black residents. In Birmingham. In Atlanta. In Memphis. In St. Paul.

Transportation historian Joseph DiMento documented that highway planners explicitly discussed Black neighborhoods as acceptable sacrifice zones. The word used internally was "slum clearance" — the same language as urban renewal. The highway was the cheaper and faster version: no replacement housing required, no federal oversight of relocation.

Hurricane Katrina did not affect New Orleans equally. The geography of flooding followed the geography of race with near-perfect precision — and that was not a coincidence of topography. It was the result of fifty years of urban policy.

The lowest-lying areas of New Orleans — the areas that flooded most severely — were the historically Black neighborhoods: the Lower Ninth Ward, Tremé, Gentilly, New Orleans East. The higher-elevation areas, which flooded less or not at all, were the historically white neighborhoods: the French Quarter, the Garden District, Uptown. Black residents had been pushed into low-lying land by decades of redlining, urban renewal, and highway construction. When the levees broke, the floodwaters followed the map that federal housing policy had drawn.

The federal response was documented in real time as catastrophic. The Superdome housed 30,000 evacuees without food, water, or medical care for five days. The Convention Center, where 10,000 people gathered spontaneously, was not visited by federal relief for five days. FEMA Director Michael Brown had no prior emergency management experience. President Bush flew over the city in Air Force One, did not land, and praised Brown's performance. The images — of Black Americans stranded on rooftops in the richest country in the world — were broadcast worldwide.

The aftermath was the fourth displacement. The Road Home program, which distributed federal rebuilding grants, calculated grants based on pre-storm property values — not rebuilding costs. Since Black-owned homes in New Orleans had been systematically undervalued by decades of redlining, Black homeowners received smaller grants to rebuild the same size house. A RAND Corporation study documented this disparity explicitly. New Orleans' Black population — 67% of the city before Katrina — has never returned to pre-storm levels.

Gentrification is often described as a natural market process: wealthier people move to a neighborhood, property values rise, lower-income residents can no longer afford to stay. This description is technically accurate and analytically incomplete. The reason Black residents are the ones displaced — rather than the ones doing the gentrifying — is the direct result of the four previous mechanisms.

Black residents of Harlem, Washington D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood, Atlanta's Sweet Auburn, Chicago's Bronzeville, and Oakland's Flatlands do not have the wealth to buy property when prices rise because: (1) their neighborhoods were redlined, denying them mortgage access for decades; (2) urban renewal demolished their communities and warehoused them in public housing; (3) highway construction further destabilized their neighborhoods; (4) Katrina (in New Orleans) took their homes and paid smaller grants to rebuild. The racial wealth gap — median Black household wealth $24,100 vs. $188,200 for white households — is the accumulated result of these mechanisms. Gentrification is the final transfer: the devalued land becomes valuable again, and Black residents, with no equity cushion, are displaced to make room for the appreciation.

In Washington D.C., Shaw — the historic center of Black Washington, home to Howard University, the Lincoln Theatre, U Street's jazz clubs — lost 135,000 Black residents between 2000 and 2013. The neighborhood that produced Duke Ellington, that was called "the Black Broadway," now has a median home price above $700,000. In Harlem, the neighborhood that produced the Harlem Renaissance, Black residents are a minority for the first time since the 1920s. In Oakland, the displacement of Black residents from West Oakland and the Fruitvale has been tracked block by block by researchers at UC Berkeley — it follows the BART lines, the same infrastructure built through Black neighborhoods in the 1960s.

The cruel irony is documented: cities market the cultural legacy of Black neighborhoods to attract gentrifiers who then displace the people who created that culture. Austin, Texas markets its East Austin music scene — a Black cultural heritage — while its Black population has dropped from 12% to under 7%. New Orleans markets Mardi Gras Indian culture to tourists while the Mardi Gras Indian communities of Tremé are being priced out. The culture stays. The people leave.