Remembering the Past

The 1950s and 60s remain in the living memory of residents and church members of South Hills. This time is frequently described as a vibrant time in neighborhood life. The neighborhood was diverse, and residents threw block parties and hosted cake walks.  Many elderly or older Dutch families lived alongside younger, new African American families.

Many African Americans originally moved to the South East Side in the early 1900s because they could afford to leave the West Side, but even though the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the New Deal clarified in the 1930s that “Negroes in the area are of a better type,” they gave the area the lowest security rating. Such ratings from the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s affected African American access to housing across the country. A low rating affected your eligibility for federal assistance to purchase your home. You can look at some very interesting maps on the subject here: Mapping Inequality

Home Owners Loans Corporation, November 5, 1937.  Clarifying Notes for the D4 area specify: "Negros of the area are of a better type. They are concentrated on Sherman, Bates, and Thomas between Union and Eastern Streets." 

Redlining, combined with realtor practices, deeply segregated our city and affected access to wealth on racial lines. The same New Deal program rated suburban neighborhoods with high security ratings, offering affordable loans for white residents of South Hills to move out to the suburbs. Susan D. Greenbaum’s article “Housing Abandonment in Inner-City Black Neighborhoods: A Case Study of the Effects of the Dual Housing Market” explains how perception of a place can affect the values of the properties: “If a banker believes that a property has less value solely because of the race of the occupant, then the real valuation of that property is less in fact” (140). While many whites were subsidized to invest in homes as population grew and the city expanded, African Americans were steered to buy homes or rent homes where value and safety were perceived to be less because of skin color.

In the last 10 years, the neighborhood has flipped. Many African Americans have moved away and young white families have moved in. We have the opposite of what we had in the 1950s and 1960s, where we have African Americans who have carried this place through the hardest times of the drug crisis living next to younger white singles and families hoping to build a future. Abandoned houses have been bought up and re-built, and rent prices in the neighborhood have been rising.

The story is of course, more complicated than that. More Latinos and Africans have joined the area. Indians and Middle Easterners own many of the stores on Eastern. The neighborhood is rather international, and gives me hope for what America could be. Or rather, the neighborhood is what America is. If we can work together to make sure this is a place that welcomes people regardless of skin color or bank account, perhaps America can too.

Please share your comments on what you remember about the neighborhood and ideas about what you think it will take to keep a neighborhood in which everyone belongs. If possible, be specific and name actions that you or someone you know can take.

Sources:

Greenbaum, Susan D. "Housing Abandonment in Inner City Black Neighborhoods: A

Case Study of the Effects of the Dual Housing Market." The Cultural Meaning of

Urban Space. Ed. Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonough. Westport,

Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1993. 139-56. Print.

Mapping Inequality: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=15/42.9507/-85.6532&opacity=0.8&city=grand-rapids-mi&sort=73&area=D4&adimage=3/39/-12

Tatum's Bookbinding

From the outside, the building looks unused, but Tatum’s Bookbinding is still going strong after over 50 years of service on the corner of Wealthy and Henry. The company was originally purchased in 1912 from Powell, making it over 100 years old. Owners and brothers Jim and Mark McMullen still run their family business, binding and printing books for individual and small publishers.

As far as local businesses go, Tatum is from another era. Their property is no longer even zoned for a bookbinding business, but they haven’t left yet and aren’t planning on it. They still print everything from children’s books to specialty business cards, shipping their products to as far as Miami, Florida and San Antonio, Texas. To do their work, they use some machines over 100 years old. On their website, they explain, “We offer quality cover materials including cloth, imitation leather, and bonded leather. We stamp the titles on the cover with gold and silver foil.”

Jim and Mark’s father bought the current building in 1962 and they moved in 1965. They used to be on the 6^th floor of a building on Ottawa St, but Jim was too young to remember the move. “It was not fun my dad told me. They were on the 6^th floor near where the BOB is now, on Ottawa St. They had to disassemble the machines, take them down the elevator, truck them out, and reassemble them.”

Shortly after they moved, the drug crisis struck the neighborhood. “It got bad,” Jim says, “but it’s really improved. We’re not scared to go into the street anymore. At the time, we couldn’t get rid of the building if we wanted to.” Now property values are rising, and Wealthy Street feels a little safer.

Theirs is a specialty trade that not many know how to do anymore. Their grandfather taught their father who taught them. How did they learn? “Family business,” Jim explained. “We learned through the school of hard knocks, the hard way.”

They are clearly committed to their craft, and anyone who wants to learn it better ask them quick. Committed more to the craft than looks, they want the neighborhood to know, “We’re a bookbindery and print shop. We’re not a commercial establishment.”

Jim McMullen with bookbinding glue

You can check out their website at http://tatumbookbinding.com.

Robert Bunch

“I suspect that were kinship our goal—we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it.”  --Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart

Several years ago, I was walking to an evening service at First Community AME, and I met a man crying and staggering on Sherman Street. I knew him from community meals at First CRC. His name was Robert, and he told me he was hungry. He told me his sister had just died, and he was deep in the throes of grief. Rarely do I know what to do in these situations, but I was going to church, so I invited him to church. He didn’t want to go into the service, a joint service between Methodist Churches and the AME church. We sat in the basement kitchen, while church ladies prepared the after service snacks around us, and he ate a meal we found in the freezer.

Several weeks later, the same thing happened as I walked to First AME on a Sunday morning. He
kept telling me about his sister and how sad he was. He wasn’t thinking straight. But he stumbled along with me to church and sat down next to me. He smelled of alcohol, and enjoyed the service so much that he stood up at the wrong times and shouted out at the wrong times. None of us really knew what to do with him. Afterwards, he kept telling me, “I want to come back. I really liked that.”

Another Sunday morning earlier this year, Rob stumbled into St. Philips late and sat down near the front, weeping and making a scene. He was still mourning the death of his sister. Someone asked me if I knew him, and I said yes. A lady led him to sit down next to me. Before the service was over, he left. If I remember right, he walked out during the Prayers of the People. They can be a little long.

In October, Rob was killed by a car while crossing 28^th Street. His family and friends have no idea why he was down by 28^th Street as he almost never spent time there. Several short MLivearticles documented the event, but it was important to me to hear a bit more of his story and to hear from his family and friends. 

His nephew, Steve, recently reopened his restaurant, Chicago Hoodspot, just down the street from First CRC on the corner of Franklin and Union. Steve shared a bit of Rob’s life story.

Rob had lived in Grand Rapids for 18 years, but he was from Chicago. He told just about everyone he met that he was from Chicago.

He grew up on the South Side, working in a grocery store. He spent a lot of time with his family and especially his nephews and nieces. Steve has good memories of Rob taking 10-12 of them on the bus to see Bruce Lee movies in the theater. They would sit on his lap on the bus and laugh a lot.

Rob taught Steve how to iron clothes so that “the creases could cut butter,” paying him 50 cents to a dollar for every job.  

After working in a grocery store for many years, Rob found a full-time job working in a factory in Grand Rapids and moved away. He got married and started a family. Three years later, he encouraged Steve to join him in what he saw as a safer environment with better opportunities. Rob knew that Steve had a lifelong dream of starting a restaurant, and Grand Rapids was the place to do it. Within three days of the move, Rob got Steve a job in the factory, and they began making plans to start the restaurant. When the dream came true, Steve taught Rob to grill, and they ran it together.

The restaurant has opened and closed several times over the years, but without Rob, we wouldn’t have an excellent hang out spot in the neighborhood.

In the past several years, Rob had several deaths in the family, which have been very hard on him. He found it harder to keep a job and spent a lot of time grieving. Through it all, he stayed a very kind person.

His friends in the neighborhood describe him as a really nice guy. According to Lamont, “He knew basically everybody in the neighborhood.”

Todd would sit with Rob on the porch, and they would spend the afternoons after work joking and ragging on one another. “It was friendly,” Todd said, “I never knew him to get into it with anybody.”

Doug, who met Rob about 10 years ago at a community event, said, “He was a good guy. He’d help people out if he had the money. He was an all around good person.”

We miss him, and the neighborhood is better because he was here.

Hoop Roots and The Christian Imagination

This post is inspired by the introduction of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, by Willie James Jennings. You can read it at the link above.

In the parking lot of First Christian Reformed Church, the post of an old basketball hoop watches the seasons come and go. The hoop was taken down several years ago because it was on the boundary of several gang territories, and wasn’t serving the peace of the neighborhood.  Now, the post is regularly bumped into by the cars of Calvin College students living in First CRC’s old parsonage.

Many years ago, before the hoop was taken down, a young African American boy named Willie Jennings played basketball in the First CRC parking lot. He lived just down the road on Franklin Street. He attended New Hope Baptist Church and spent time helping his mother garden in his back yard. Later, he grew up to attend Calvin College—the college started by the CRC denomination—and go on to become a theologian at Duke and then Yale.

As a theologian and professor, Dr. Willie Jennings wrote a book titled The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. The introduction of the book tells a story of his childhood, including how he laid his “hoop roots” in the parking lot of First CRC. He begins by describing his mother and father and their intimate connection with Jesus.

“The stories of Jesus and Israel were so tightly woven into the stories my parents told of themselves, their lives in the South and in the North and then with their youngest children in the North, that it took me years to separate the biblical figures from extended family members, biblical sinners from the sinners all around us, and biblical places of pain from their places of pain. I was never able to separate biblical hopes from their real hopes.” (Jennings 2)

One day as he was gardening with his mother in their back yard, two men from First CRC approached them up their gravel driveway. His mother instinctively stood in-between him and the strangers. The older man began talking about the church, its programs, and their hopes for the neighborhood. The younger man got tired of the other talking and bent down to try to talk to the future Dr. Jennings, asking him if he liked school. The whole experience made the future Dr. Jennings very uncomfortable. He thought it very strange that they never asked if his mother was Christian or already had a church. The rest of his book traces key theological figures in colonial history to try to understand why the missionaries from First CRC did not know them—fellow Christians who lived down the street and whose children played in the church parking lot. You can read the full description of the interaction in the introduction here: The Christian Imagination

If you don’t have time for that, I want you to at least read the point Jennings is trying to make with this story. He is not condemning First CRC in particular but just trying to understand why that interaction was so awkward and why Christians at First CRC didn’t know the black Christians of the neighborhood. He writes,

“I am not asking why they weren’t familiar with us, and I am certainly not asking about the logistics of their mission operations. The foreignness and formality of their speech in our backyard signaled a wider and deeper order of not knowing, of not sensing, of not imagining…. In the small space of a backyard I witnessed a Christianity familiar to most of us, enclosed in racial and cultural difference, inconsequentially related to its geography, often imaginatively detached from its surroundings of both people and places, but one yet bound to compelling gestures of connection, belonging, and invitation.” (Jennings 4)

Jennings sees the branch of something good and beautiful in the actions of the two men from First CRC, something rooted in what it means to be Christian. He sees the Christian social imagination, if it can be healed to transcend racial and cultural difference and commit itself to a geographic area and place, as hope for a disconnected world.

“There is within Christianity a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging. I could sense that power not only in the courageous yet wooden display of those neighborhood missionaries but also in the beauty and ease of my mother as she worked the ground, the earth.” (Jennings 4)

If you have been reading the other posts, notice the connections to the God Dance. Our identity is formed in God who draws us into community and connection with the people of God in the place that we find ourselves. Jennings argues later in the book that our identity must be formed more powerfully by our identity in Christ and the places that we are in than by our race and culture. We cannot be connected in the abstract, but must root ourselves in a real place just as Christ became flesh and blood in Bethlehem. 

And what if our identity in Christ rooted in our relationships with the particular people of a particular place was more powerful in shaping our fellowship than where we make money or the color of our skin? Maybe it's time we laid our roots together in a particular soil and see what grows come springtime. 

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Ann Arbor, Sheridan, 2010.

The God Dance: Economy

Like ecology and theology, economy is a word that attempts to represent the totality—if we let it. The economy focuses on money and through the lens of money sees the whole world. In economic terms, something is significant when it has a price tag. More and more, our relationship with money is the means by which we interact with other people and with our environment. Just as seeking to understand ecology reveals our participation in the cosmos, seeking to understand our global and local economy reveals how we relate to one another and to the environment. The economy is a merely a part of the environment and another step in the God-Dance.

The divine community described in the last post can also be thought of as a divine economy, in which all things of value are a gift and each gift multiplies in giving. Out of God’s creation, we draw what we need for food, shelter, and living as a gift. The modern economic narrative claims that what we draw out of the land is the right of the owner, but this has never been the case. If we participate in the divine economy, we take from the land as a gift and we re-create what we take for the benefit of others and for the land itself. In short, we glorify God.

When we spend our money in a thriving local economy, every dollar spent multiplies. If I decide to sell the radishes I planted in my new garden box and earn 2$, I have 2$ of income. If I use those same dollars to pay my neighbor for moving the dirt (which we did), my neighbor has 2$ of income. If he gets a haircut with a local barber and the barber buys food from the local corner store, both the barber and the shopkeeper have 2$ of income. This can continue until the money ends up in the bank or is spent outside the neighborhood. If the money circulates 10 times, the 2$ that my radishes earned do 20$ of work. We can garden the land to make it richer and spend the money to make our neighbors richer. When money serves relationships among people and the land, the economy takes its place within the God-Dance. 

In an urban neighborhood like South Hills, money flows in through wages and social services and flows almost immediately out to suburban businesses. The monetary value coming in presumably comes from somewhere--some environmental resource or someone's labor. The money going out is invested in other places. According to cridata.org, while residents of the South Hill neighborhood spent $4,525,145 in 2014, businesses in the neighborhood only sold $209, 647 worth of goods and services. These are the lowest of any neighborhood in the city, largely because of its size, but it is also the lowest ratio in the city of sales fulfilled by resident purchase. Only 4.63% of the money residents are spending in South Hill actually goes to local businesses on Franklin Street. This means that only 4.63% of my 2$ or only 4 cents out of every dollar stays in the neighborhood. As 95% of money spent in South Hill is spent outside the area, the multiplier effect goes to places such as the mall or big box stores or car dealerships.  This is evident merely looking at the landscape—the quality and size of the buildings and space businesses in the suburbs can afford compared to an urban area. 

Abandoned home in 2013, before it was fixed up
and re-valued by the market. 

In 2013, 54.1% of people in South Hill were below the poverty level, the highest percentage of any neighborhood in Grand Rapids (also one of the smallest neighborhoods in Grand Rapids). Though we are in need of each other, we could provide for each other. People who are labeled poor by statistics have talents and abilities, and many of them are running small businesses or working odd jobs. If we spent our money to value our neighbor’s gifts rather than our corporation’s products, perhaps we could begin to rebuild trust in one another and participate in a place in which we all belong.

Of course, getting to know one another and what each person has to offer takes time and context—board game nights, potlucks, and shopping locally. Getting to know the ecology in which we participate and what this land and this place offer freely takes time as well. We do not need to be disheartened that the neighborhood is not what we want it to be, but can celebrate what it already is. If money passes over this place, perhaps that is because we have failed to see what is valuable here and failed to invest in what is good. Participating in the God-Dance also involves participating in the pattern of Jesus Christ, facing rejection and humiliation with confidence in resurrection. But every part of this pattern is another step. The invitation to participate, wherever you are, is open.