Cindy Stratton grew up more than 30 years ago in Westhaven, the City housing project located in the 10th and Page neighborhood. Raised in a poor and racially segregated environment, Stratton says that, nevertheless, she “had no problem with white children.” But Stratton can’t advance that claim for the black kids growing up in Charlottesville nowadays. Nor would she presume inter-racial comfort for the current generation of white children here, either.
Motivated by the prevalence of segregation and weary of unfulfilled good intentions to fix Charlottesville’s race issue, Stratton is one in a small group of locals organizing an April forum to talk about the City’s racial and ethnic divisions. But Stratton wants more than just talk to come out of “Many Races—One Community,” the half-day program slated for April 12 at Buford Middle School.
“We’re saying there have to be small groups to talk about what people see as the issues that prevent us from being one community,” says Stratton, who is an administrative secretary with the Commission on Children and Families and formerly directed Barrett Day Care Center for 12 years. “What is the ideal community and how do you make that happen?
“Beyond that we need a mechanism to put those ideas in place. We need to make sure we continue this dialogue and things are dealt with—and not 20 years later.”
Citizens for a United Community, as the sponsoring group calls itself, grew out of the series of black-on-white assaults by a group of 10 Charlottesville High School students on UVA students in 2001 and 2002. When the racial nature of the attacks became widely known last year, a support group for the attackers and their victims emerged at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. After the controversy subsided and the perpetrators had their day in court, three spin-off support groups surfaced. One of them is Citizens for a United Community. Other members of the ad hoc group include local activists like Ida Lee Wooten, Nancy O’Brien, John McCutcheon, Mt. Zion’s Rev. Alvin Edwards and Mayor Maurice Cox.
But even with this relatively star-studded line-up and co-sponsorship from the NAACP and the Martin Luther King Community Celebration Committee, which for 19 years has hosted an inter-racial community Mass in Charlottesville, Stratton has good reason to be concerned that all the talk on April 12 will amount to…well, talk. The three-hour forum, she says, will be “the ‘hello’ part of the conversation.”
The way Stratton sees it, Charlottesville has a poor track record when it comes to implementing past suggestions from similar-minded citizen’s groups. “There have been five reports on race in 25 years,” she says, “and they’ve just been shelved. Not many recommendations have come to fruition.”
The range of issues that Citizens for a United Community has identified amount to a daunting task list for any city to tackle: neighborhood segregation, economic disparity, racial and economic achievement gaps in the public schools, and general cultural ignorance. Pointing to the problems has always been the easy part, of course. But even Stratton’s group has not, as of yet, defined the actions that should follow. Were April’s community conversation to beat the odds and bear some real fruit, what would Charlottesville look like in 25 years, Stratton was asked.
“For me, it would be a community that cares about its children and places a high value on them and shows it,” she says. “A place that is nurturing and supportive for all children. A place where there aren’t segregated lunchrooms and segregated neighborhoods. Where you couldn’t tell what was a public housing site from what wasn’t.”
Charlottesville would become, Stratton says, “a place where my children would want to come back and raise their kids.”
—Cathryn Harding
Battle cries
Poets weigh in against war
Untangle this,” went the accusatory refrain laced through Jett McAlister’s poem. “This” was the mixture of grief and skepticism toward government many people have felt since September 11. By participating in a February 12 poetry forum, McAlister aimed his words specifically at the current debate over war in Iraq. The creative writing student was in line with the evening’s prevailing sentiment: Invited to read poems on any side of the discussion, Charlottesville bards overwhelmingly came out for peace.
An audience of about 60 showed up for the forum in UVA’s Minor Hall, organized by Jim Cocola, a Ph.D. candidate in English. Titled “American Voices, or, The War,” the forum was the local installment of a national event. After Laura Bush cancelled a poetry symposium at the White House out of fear that it would become a political platform, poet Sam Hamill (who’d caused the First Lady’s jitters by refusing her invitation) declared February 12 a national day of anti-war poetry.
Cocola found that reaction intriguing, but somewhat reductive. “Just as Mrs. Bush was trying to avoid conflict in her reading by having a single program for it, Sam Hamill too seemed to be advancing a single program that wouldn’t provide for a full range of voices,” he says.
Hoping to widen the debate and avoid, as he put it, “exclusive monologues,” Cocola invited readers to present poems for, against, or just about the coming war. A dozen people, mostly UVA faculty and students, answered the call and approached the lectern—some clutching their own lines, others verses by Whitman, Ginsberg and Yeats.
Either poets are all a peace-loving bunch, or Charlottesville’s pro-war poets congregated elsewhere. One undergraduate addressed her poem to a “blue-eyed girl,” an Iraqi counterpart whom the speaker wished could experience American peacetime. The poem turned on descriptions of daily life, grocery shopping and sled riding—“this, my anti-war.” Elegiac tones pervaded many selections, including Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (written after Abraham Lincoln’s death), in which the speaker realizes the war’s dead no longer felt pain, but “the living remain’d and suffer’d.”
The event also raised questions regarding the role of poetry in politics, and vice-versa. Both Cocola and his co-organizer Bryan Maxwell made brief speeches rejecting the notion that art and politics are best kept segregated. Creative writing professor Gregory Orr introduced his poem, a short piece directly addressing the White House poetry snafu, by saying that poetry positions intimacy against “worship of human power and military all.” Judging by the heads nodding in agreement throughout the room, the readers seemed mostly to be preaching to the converted—and to be falling in line with Sam Hamill’s original plan.
Still, an anti-war stance can be more complex than sloganeering would suggest, and the evening’s 12 poems were hardly clones of each other. One selection offered hope, hinting that human creativity—including poetry—is an inevitable force even in the face of destruction. In William Butler Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli,” even though “if nothing drastic is done/Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,” in the end there is always “gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”
—Erika Howsare
Welcome to ’Hoo-ville
City banks on higher enrollments
By order of the Board of Visitors, UVA’s enrollment is projected to swell over the next several years. While this means more traffic in City neighborhoods, more barf in the alleys and louder “not gay!” chants during home football games, City Hall appears to consider UVA’s growth a tax bonanza.
City planners say they expect UVA to grow by between 3,000 and 6,000 students over the next seven to 10 years. That’s a dramatic increase––from 1989 to 1998, the school’s enrollment only increased by 553 students to 18,463. As part of his plan to stimulate the State economy, Democratic Governor Mark Warner is asking all Virginia’s public colleges to enroll more students.
One of the City’s beefs with UVA is that the school only builds enough on-Grounds housing for about 35 percent of its students. City officials say they expect that ratio to hold even as enrollment expands. The other two-thirds of the students rent rooms in the surrounding Jefferson Park Avenue and Venable neighborhoods, prompting a litany of oft-heard complaints from residents: The students take up all the parking spaces, trash the houses, drive up the rents and so on.
Naturally, many homeowners in JPA and Venable were dismayed to learn of the City’s plans to triple the legal density in some parts of those neighborhoods. So-called University Precincts will permit buildings as tall as seven stories with up to 64 units and 150 bedrooms per acre. Developers will not, however, be required to provide on-site parking for each rental unit.
City planners say higher density will actually relieve traffic congestion, because students living close to Grounds will not want to keep cars at their apartments. Yeah, right, say residents. They’ll just ride to class on their flying pigs.
In some states, cities can approve or deny university construction projects, and local governments can—and do—use that authority to force schools to build more housing. In Virginia, however, cities and counties have little say over State schools.
Yet even as the age-old complaints about student rentals pile up, City Hall is not terribly agitated about UVA pumping millions of dollars into a basketball arena and parking garage instead of student housing.
A majority of the new University Precinct housing units will be built and maintained by professional property managers, says Wade Tremblay, general manager of Wade Apartments, which owns existing properties around Grounds.
“When student housing is privately held, it’s a win for the City because the owners are paying property taxes,” says Tremblay. An added bonus, he says, is that students don’t cost the City money because they typically don’t use social services or send kids to local schools.
The more pressing question, however, is how thousands of new ’Hoos wielding Daddy’s Discover card will impact already skyrocketing rents. City planners say the University Precincts will contain students and prevent them from spreading out into other City neighborhoods.
Tremblay, whose 300 apartment units are mostly situated near the University, says the new University Precinct apartments will satisfy students’ taste for fine living.
“The students have grown up in nice homes, and the general trend is that they want nicer housing, more features, high-speed Internet connections,” he says. “And they’re willing to pay for it.
“We know we can get $2,000 for a nice four-bedroom apartment. This is the first year we’ve reached that $500 per bedroom threshold,” he says.
With local landlords expected to rake in at least $75,000 per acre in the University Precincts every month, City leaders are evidently quite happy to pick up UVA’s housing slack. –John Borgmeyer