In Chattanooga, University Housing Revives a Decaying Neighborhood

But some residents of the once-vibrant black district are asking, at what cost?

By MARTIN VAN DER WERF

Why is it in every city where there is a street named after Martin Luther King, it is the poorest, most neglected street in the city?"

Leroy Henderson icily poses the question from inside the Chattanooga African American Museum, where he works as education director. There are no visitors. The cool lobby echoes with his words.

Just beyond the lawn out front, cars are racing down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard like they are fleeing artillery fire. Thirty years ago, it was turned into a one-way street, making escape to the suburbs even faster, and giving people even fewer reasons to stop at any of the shops that once thrived here, in what was then the commercial and cultural center for African-Americans in a segregated city. Now those shops, a stone's throw from busy downtown Chattanooga, are in full decay.

"Closed" signs hang redundantly on paintless doors and greasy windows. A couple of nightclubs heat up on Friday night, and a numbers racket, according to local residents, still operates out of some members-only drinking clubs. After years of fires and neglect, however, there are nearly as many vacant lots on the boulevard as buildings.

Enter the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which, like a haughty aunt, has watched over this neighborhood from atop a rise two blocks away. Hemmed in by downtown and another historic neighborhood, the university has only had one direction to grow. So a wealthy local philanthropist has been not-so-quietly buying every piece of property that has come open between King Boulevard and the university, and has donated the land to a foundation that supports the college.

The institution is now building $70-million worth of new student apartments on that land and is also planning to build a new neighborhood elementary school. It will be the first new school here in decades -- local kids have long been bused elsewhere -- and may serve as a training ground for university students in a planned doctoral program in educational administration.

For the people in the 25-square-block M. L. King District, however, there are demons associated with the institution, and they are not easily dispelled. Until 1969 it was the University of Chattanooga, an elitist, segregated place. Local African-Americans shied away from the campus rather than face racial taunts. It became a branch of the state system that year, merging with all-black Chattanooga City College. But the mistrust lingered, and even as recently as 10 years ago, barely a tenth of the student body was African-American, and most of those students came from Memphis.

As the campus now threatens to absorb it, the African-American neighborhood is torn by conflicting emotions. Yes, there are those who hope to profit from the construction boomlet the new housing will set off, but many are saddened that it is taking the university's expansion plans to awaken locals to the value of the neighborhood.

Some, like Mr. Henderson, say that, if residents feel threatened by the university's encroachment, they have no one to blame but themselves. "We were spending $50 a night on liquor, we were smoking pot, we were enjoying the party, like everyone else," says Mr. Henderson. "We went to sleep."

With a newfound humility and a commitment to protecting the interests of the African-Americans who remain in the M. L. King District, the university is looking to bury its racist past.

"I told them we won't come into your neighborhood unless we are invited," says Bill W. Stacy, who is in his fourth year as chancellor of the university, and is the architect of the improved relations with the African-American neighborhood. "That put a lot of power in the hands of the local community."

The power of the M. L. King District reached it peak 50 years ago. At mid-century, families from as far as Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., took buses here for the day to picnic. Chattanooga boasted the largest swimming pool in the South built for "coloreds." Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, then called Ninth Street, rivaled Memphis's Beale Street in the number and quality of businesses operated by African-Americans.

Residents remember tailors selling silk suits, jewelry stores, confectioneries, diners, white-linen restaurants, and two movie houses.

By night, this street was "the Big Nine," a strutting showcase of dress-up nightclubs that gave birth to the blues singer Bessie Smith, and lowdown jazz stomps that beat out a rhythm until dawn.

Compared with many Southern cities, Chattanooga has had peaceful racial relations. In the mid-'60's, "we demonstrated one week, we had integration the next," says William R. Cotton Jr., a Hamilton County commissioner and former Chattanooga city councilman.

That very freedom, though, diminished the neighborhood. As African-American families began to live, eat, and shop wherever they wanted, the businesses that had been their whole lives began to break down.

Mr. Cotton attended the university in its first year as a state institution, as an open member of the Black Panthers, but quickly learned that "this was not a place where African-Americans feel welcome." He transferred to Tennessee State University, a historically black institution in Nashville.

As time went on, the M. L. King District continued to deteriorate. Today, little is left from that era. About 40 percent of the land in the district is vacant, and, of the buildings that exist, about 90 percent need some rehabilitation, according to Chattanooga's Inner-City Development Corporation.

When Mr. Stacy became chancellor in 1997, he sought out Mr. Cotton, whose county district includes both the university and the M. L. King neighborhood. The chancellor told the commissioner, who was known for his intransigence in the face of anything the university sought from the city, that the university was intent on improving relations and helping people in the neighborhood.

Standing in a conference room in the Hamilton County Courthouse, Mr. Cotton looks at a pen-and-ink drawing of Chattanooga's modest downtown skyline. "This is my district," he says, pointing out the offices of banks and insurance companies. "I represent all of that. But while they were there, I was over here." He walks across the conference room and leans against a bookshelf.

"I was marginalized, and I did it to myself. I had to find something they loved as much as I hated -- this university. We began to talk, and we realized we had a lot in common. Their kids were growing up here, but they weren't staying."

Mr. Cotton was suspicious of Mr. Stacy, but then he began to hear from his constituents.

"He was getting his hair cut in a black barbershop. What could be a more effective way of getting your message out?" Mr. Cotton says. "I was getting a call every night. 'Why is he here?' 'Who is this white man, and what do he want?' I knew where he was, I knew what he was saying. I just wanted to see if he was going to be consistent."

Over time, Mr. Cotton says, he was won over. Now he and the president walk through the district together.

Mr. Stacy is a tall bear of a man with huge hands and a smile that could charm the lacquer off a desk.

He blends into Chattanooga like sour-mash whiskey.

He was born outside Bristol, Tenn., deep in the Appalachians, then moved to Missouri as a youth to work a family farm of stony soil and scrub timber. He left for college with a couple of pencils and one pair of shoes, the first member of his family to attend college -- Southeast Missouri State University.

He grew up to become the institution's president. Now, he's thrilled to be back in Tennessee, visiting cousins in the hills, and trying to pry back the barriers to higher education. "I feel I was meant to be here," he says, describing how closely he identifies with his students, many of whom come from lower-middle-class backgrounds. A few call him "Uncle Bill."

"The state of Tennessee is still -- embarrassingly -- under a court directive to end segregation," he says. "Commissioner Cotton's history is a microcosm of the black experience in Chattanooga. I deal with parents all the time who interacted with the university in such a way as to not feel welcome here."

He's been listening. At first, the university planned to build an engineering building on its newly acquired land. But neighbors objected, saying what the area needed was housing. The planned engineering building was moved. Neighbors also objected to plans to build a track-and-field complex, and the idea was shelved.

When the University of Chattanooga Foundation, which was formed when the university was private, approached a church about buying its parking lot, it wound up cutting a deal for the lot and the church itself.

"African-Americans have a built-in suspicion because of our experiences," says the Rev. Virgil J. Caldwell, pastor of the New Monumental Baptist Church, which has one of the largest congregations in the city. He says of Mr. Stacy, "We have had some very good heart-to-heart sessions with him. So far, he has been true to his word."

Mr. Caldwell was willing to swallow a big pill. The university wanted to buy his church's parking lot to make room for the housing, but for the deal to work, he insisted that the institution buy his church, too, and move him and his congregation to a new one. The university agreed, and the University of Chattanooga Foundation paid $2-million for an existing church closer to where most members of his congregation live.

The three-story apartment buildings for 400 that are now being built are already sold out, three months before they will be occupied. The university is now starting to clear the site for apartments for 600 more residents. The institution has traditionally been a commuter college, but students have told administrators for years that they would live on campus if they could.

Still, there remain many doubters in the M.L.K. neighborhood.

Chattanooga has always been "a Bible-toting town where there is a lot of racism under cover," says James R. Mapp, who runs an insurance and real-estate agency, one of the few offices on King.

Take the new neighborhood school. It is "just another means of segregating," says Mr. Mapp, who for 26 years was president of the Chattanooga chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Neighborhood children will fill only about a quarter of the school's seats. The rest will be taken by the children of downtown workers, who will get places if they are chosen in a lottery. Meanwhile, other primarily African-American neighborhoods don't have schools, and the children are bused to other areas.

Mary Poston Tanner, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies, which will have a role in the administration of this and another new school, says the county school district has decided not to build new schools specifically for high poverty areas. Instead, it is redrawing attendance boundaries to assemble children of different races and economic backgrounds. As for the school near the university, "the idea is that, as families move back downtown, the kids in the schools via lottery will be eased out," she says.

On campus, Mr. Stacy has also focused on increasing the number of African-American students. There were 1,203 black undergraduates in the fall of 2000, about 17.2 percent of the student body. While the undergraduate enrollment has remained relatively steady for the last 10 years, at about 7,000 students, the count for black students has grown by about 500.

Slowly, hometown black students are coming around to the university, with the 1999-2000 academic year marking the first time the majority of the African-American students came from the Chattanooga area.

Black students have had consistently higher retention rates than the overall student body in recent years. This year, about 77.7 percent of African-American students returned for their sophomore year, almost 8 percentage points higher than the rate for the entire student body. The Chattanooga campus is also the only one of Tennessee's 22 state-run two- and four-year colleges that has met its court-prescribed goals for percentages of African-American students, faculty, and staff members. The goals were set in 1984 as part of a settlement of a 1969 case that alleged a segregated, dual system of higher education in the state.

Verbie L. Prevost, the acting chairwoman of the English department, says the university has added more African-American employees to its recruiting and counseling offices, and they have made retention of students easier. Harder, she says, has been recruiting and retaining African-American faculty members. They are frequently lured away by universities that pay better.

Richard L. Brown Jr., the vice chancellor for finance and operations, is the first high-ranking African-American official at the university to play a visible role in the community. He frequently attends neighborhood meetings and tries to convince business owners that the university does not intend to drive them from the neighborhood.

"While we've made some major gains in terms of trust, we've got to continue," he says. "We've got to walk the talk."

Mr. Cotton confirms that the N.A.A.C.P. and other African-American groups are "watching very closely," but he believes that the university's engagement of the neighborhood is the best path.

"When you are an elected official, if you are black, that is one of the things that you fear most -- hearing from your people that you have sold them out," he says. "It all comes down to Dr. Stacy's word. He says he wants to make it better, and I believe him."

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