Aya Shabu: Highway Through the Heart

Broken Ground Season 8

Episode 3

Aya Shabu: Highway Through the Heart

 

HOST: Just a heads-up, Broken Ground listeners: this episode contains lots of archival audio, some of which uses very dated language around race, including the word “negro.” We’ve included it because we think it’s an important part of the historical record, in the context of the conversation we’re sharing today. 

 

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HOST: In the wake of emancipation, small Freedmen communities began appearing all over the South, and some – like Hayti in Durham, North Carolina – eventually grew into thriving, Black-led towns. 

Aya Shabu: You had the Regal Theater, the Wonderland Ballroom, the Donut Shop, all manner of service shops.  

HOST: Hayti resident Aya Shabu. 

Aya Shabu: No one had to go anywhere. People could stay right there in Hayti, didn’t have to leave Hayti because everything they had and everything they loved was right there. 

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Narrator, Negro Durham Marches On: With this well rounded variety of services and conveniences already established in Hayti, there should be no limit to the future development and progress of the community. 

HOST:  This 1948 film captured Hayti in its heyday. 

Narrator, Negro Durham Marches On:   Having already established an excellent foundation on which to build a better community of tomorrow, all Negro Durham can march on proudly towards this goal.     

HOST:  Despite Hayti’s early success, a perpetual lack of infrastructure investment by the city of Durham eventually made the neighborhood it eventually became a prime target for quote unquote “urban renewal” in the 1950s. This was the federally funded program with the stated intention of revitalizing inner cities. In effect, though, it destroyed many vibrant Black and Latino neighborhoods, often clearing the way for highway development later on.   

Narrator, The Dynamic American City: From now on, we shall be seeing much demolition, the first step in making our cities better places to work, better places to live. 

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Narrator, The Dynamic American City: It will take great effort and real leadership, but as a people … 

HOST: In Hayti, the construction of highway 147, also known as the Durham Freeway, was the nail in the community’s coffin – cutting it off from the rest of the city, displacing hundreds of families, and introducing a massive new source of environmental harm.  

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ABC 11 News Reporter Akilah Davis:  Experts say where I am now in the historic Hayti community is considered a heat island. It has more pavement than grass, few trees, and overall it’s just one of the hottest areas in the Bull City.  

HOST:  Now, the area that once formed the heart of Hayti is an urban heat island, up to 7 degrees hotter than much of the rest of the city. It also suffers from some of the highest levels of nitrogen oxide pollution, a major toxin in vehicle exhaust.  

Aya Shabu:  Most every time I asked what happened to Hayti, people would say Highway 147.  

HOST: As Hayti residents now confront yet another wave of urban redevelopment, we spend some time with one resident whose unique approach to public history is laying the groundwork for social change.  

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HOST: This is Broken Ground, a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. I’m Leanna First-Arai, your host. Here at Broken Ground, we dig up environmental stories in the South, and introduce you to the people at the heart of them.   

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HOST: This season, we’re exploring the root causes of some of the environmental injustices communities face throughout our region. The digging continues online with SELC’s multimedia storytelling series, “Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward.” I hope you’ll check it out. 

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HOST: The devastation of “urban renewal” and the interstate buildout in Hayti is a chapter shared by many Black neighborhoods across the U.S. This uniquely American tale of race-based displacement and environmental harm at the hands of the federal government was accompanied by cuts to public transit systems and the entrenchment of cars as our primary mode of transportation.  

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HOST: So learning Hayti’s story gets us closer to understanding the origins of environmental injustice in this country.  

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HOST: One of a handful of “Black Wall Streets” a century ago, the Hayti district was home to a college, a hospital, and the largest Black-owned business in the entire country, North Carolina Mutual Insurance.  

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HOST: If you’d been on Hayti’s bustling streets back then, you might have heard the whistle of the tobacco factory where many of its 5,000 residents worked. 

 Aya Shabu: (imitating the tobacco factory whistle) 

HOST: Okay, that’s not actually a whistle. It’s the woman we heard earlier.  She’s the founder and lead guide of Whistle Stop Tours, a company that offers historic walking tours through Hayti and surrounding neighborhoods.  

Aya Shabu: I am Aya Shabu. And I’m an artist, a teaching artist, and a preservationist.  

Leanna First-Arai: As part of your work as a preservationist, um, you’re the founder of Whistle Stop Tours. 

Aya Shabu: Yeah. Even before I started doing the tours, I found great value in little treasures, So I collect paper, I collect texts, I collect books, I collect articles, um, particularly history and artifacts of African-American experiences and brilliance.  

HOST: Those artifacts have allowed Aya to dive deep into Hayti’s history, not just spouting facts and figures to folks on her walking tours, but also “embodying” real people who once lived in Hayti.  

Aya Shabu:  I’ll get hooked in by someone’s story. I usually start with an anchor text. And so the original monologue that I write feels much more like a download. Like, ‘Hey, girl. I want you to let the people know this about me.’ 

Leanna First-Arai: So, you’re not originally from Hayti but you arrived as a practitioner of dance, including Haitian dance. Could you just kind of connect the dots for us in terms of the preservationist work you’re doing in Durham now?  

Aya Shabu: The very first place that we came to when I moved to Durham was where where my dance company had its rehearsals, and that was the Hayti Heritage Center. This is the first time I’ve ever heard this word Hayti. And I’m like, ‘Oh! They mean Haiti. That’s what they mean, they’re just saying it wrong.’ 

Leanna First-Arai: Ha ha! 

Aya Shabu: Ha ha! So there was a lot of ignorance there on my part.  

HOST: Aya wasn’t entirely wrong. While “HAY-tie” IS the correct pronunciation for this Durham neighborhood, the name WAS actually inspired by Haiti, the world’s first independent Black republic. And Aya says it’s not just the name they share, but a sensibility.  

Aya Shabu: It feels to me very much in keeping with the goals of these founding fathers and mothers of Hayti.  

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Aya Shabu: Walking off the plantation after emancipation, settling in places in Durham, like Braggtown and Brookstown, Hickstown, Hayti. And they’re embracing the spirit of self-sufficiency. 

HOST: Durham was actually home to one of the largest plantations in the South. The 30,000-acre Stagville plantation once enslaved over 900 human beings, some of who migrated to Hayti when freed.  

Aya Shabu: White hostility, which was increasing, and the lack of protection African Americans felt from local authorities made them want better for themselves. And so you see folks beginning to migrate off of rural, uh, farms in other parts of North Carolina, coming to industrial centers like Durham. Because of the newness of this city that was developing around its tobacco industry, there was opportunity and there was a little bit of space for the African-American community to create what I call free soil havens for themselves. And Hayti was one of those free soil havens. 

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Leanna First-Arai: What do we know about how some of the founding residents made a living? You’ve mentioned the tobacco economy.  

Aya Shabu: Yeah, well, most African-Americans in Durham were working in tobacco warehouses, hauling tobacco, stemming tobacco. A lot of industrial manual labor.  

Narrator/Tobaccoland USA:   On the outskirts of Durham, Liggett and Meyers vast warehouses stretch out like a city within a city …  

Aya Shabu: And that’s how race and labor intersected. African Americans could work tobacco, but African Americans were not allowed to work in the mills because knitting socks and bags was considered skilled labor. And to maintain the lie of white supremacy, you had to have those distinctions.  

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.  

Aya Shabu: But one of the other institutions foundational to Durham was North Carolina Mutual Insurance.  

 Narrator/NC Mutual’s Success Story: The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, a multimillion dollar enterprise, operated solely by and for negroes. 

Aya Shabu: It was founded by a man who was enslaved … 

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Aya Shabu: … John Merrick. His father was white, his mother was an enslaved Black woman. And N.C. Mutual became the largest African-American business in the world. They were also one of the few places that you could go if you had an advanced degree like a PhD, and be compensated based on your education and your talent and your experience. And so it really made Durham a hub, what we now know as the ‘capital of the Black middle class.’  

Narrator, Negro Durham Marches On: Here in the center of Negro Durham, more commonly called Hayti, the lifeblood of the community is represented in this busy populace, going vigorously about their daily activities. 

HOST: This is from a 1948 film called “Negro Durham Marches On.”  

Narrator, Negro Durham Marches On: You will find many beautiful homes in Hayti, from the large pretentious ones on beautiful, shaded lawns to the smaller, neat bungalows, there vibrates a wholesome substantiality which gives this community a fine dignity. 

Leanna First-Arai: Would you be able to kind of bring us to Hayti in its heyday, like, in more of an embodied way that you use in your work? 

Aya Shabu: Yeah. Everybody loves Bess Whitted.  

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Aya Shabu: And so, um, might say… 

Bess Whitted (aka Aya Shabu): Hey, y’all. Bess Whitted here. I said, Bess Best Whitted. (laughing) Y’all got that? I was known as a math wiz. But here at North Carolina Mutual, it was my penmanship that got me in the door. All us ladies started as clerks, but I worked my way on up to Assistant Treasurer Cashier in 1949. That’s 42 years of service. I mean, more money passed through these hands than any other woman in the country.  

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Bess Whitted (aka Aya Shabu): I started the Mutuals Glee Club singing the spirituals all over Durham to White and Black audiences, advertising the company’s insurance policies. And I played the piano most Saturdays at the Forum making the company’s boring business meetings a national tourist attraction. Eleanor Roosevelt, Adam Clayton Powell Junior? (laughing) Well, that’s me, honey. 

[clapping] 

Leanna First-Arai: I wish I was capable of giving you a, an ample round of more than just one person in a hollow room. (laughing) I think it’s so fascinating how you as a preservationist and, sort of, someone who through dance and embodiment work, you’re able to bring us into another dimension of the work that a historian would do with documents and maps. Especially when we’re talking about a neighborhood that has dealt with displacement, multiple rounds of displacement, and, you know, some of these buildings and structures being disappeared basically, um, along with the people that resided in them. So just wondering if there’s a piece that would bring us to a place that you share through Whistle Stop Tours, or however.  

Aya Shabu: Yeah. One is Highway 147.  

Leanna First-Arai:  Right. So for listeners who might not be familiar with the area, Highway 147 is also known as the Durham Freeway, and that’s the highway built right through Hayti in the late sixties and early seventies, cutting off Hayti from the rest of Durham. 

Aya Shabu: Yeah. 

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Aya Shabu: Highway 147 was one of the first pieces that I wrote because I was honestly asking questions of the community when I moved to Durham. I was hearing the narrative that this was Black Wall Street, and when I was looking in Hayti, I was like, I don’t see what you’re talking about. I don’t see the palatial homes. I don’t see the thriving Black businesses. The response that I got most every time I asked what happened to Hayti, people would say ‘Highway 147.’ And I didn’t understand what they meant. You know, it took reading and talking to people to understand, you know, the story of the Federal Highway Commission. So this is the piece that I wrote.  

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Aya Shabu as Highway 147: You say, I did it. You didn’t even see me pass through here when Hayti first began to go down. You know what? You just looking for somebody to pin it on. Now, ain’t that convenient? Me, highway 147. Durham Freeway, baby! I found Hayti  like this. Barely breathing. Money just bleeding out. You can’t pin three decades of neglect on me. (laughing) Nah. The wheels of Negro removal, excuse me, “urban renewal” been turning a long time. When folks talked about me, they thought about a superhighway. Technology. Dollar signs, millions, trillions, baby, you dig? I was the man’s future. Man, I know you know Haytis all over the country and you blaming me? I’d be a fool to hurt my own people, yo. Man, drive on! I was the freeway, yo. The FREE way.  

Leanna First-Arai: Thank you so much. I definitely have never heard anyone embody an inanimate object. It’s such a, it’s a powerful way of thinking about all of this history. 

Aya Shabu: Yeah. 

Leanna First-Arai: You mentioned urban renewal. Can you bring us to that mid 20th century phase of U.S. history in Hayti, in Durham? What kind of promises and changes could be seen and when did it first impact Hayti? 

Aya Shabu: So that would’ve been in ’52. 

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Aya Shabu: The Redevelopment Commission proposed to the community a revitalization plan. While there was a lot of pride in Hayti, not every home was a palatial home. Many homes needed indoor plumbing. Some folks were like, yes, we need paved roads. We need trash collection. You know, we need basic services. And so, the community voted as a bloc and they voted for urban renewal, hoping to get some of these things that they needed. 

HOST:  These days, the concept of “urban renewal” is viewed with a lot of skepticism because of the prosperity it almost always failed to deliver to the residents it impacted. But back in the 50’s and 60’s, it wasn’t unheard of for neighborhoods to start out hopeful. To some, it must have seemed like their government was finally ready to begin making up for decades of disinvestment and racist housing policy like redlining. That’s the tactic banks came up with in the 1930s in order to deny loans to residents of Black neighborhoods. The banks made color-coded maps, literally drawing lines around “high risk” – aka Black – neighborhoods that they wanted to avoid. In turn, those neighborhoods became starved for investment. Hayti included.  

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Aya Shabu: Hayti was thriving in the sense that there was a community, took care of each other.  

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Aya Shabu: That’s a lot. But, you know, with the death of CC Spalding, who was the president of North Carolina Mutual, you had a shift in the relationship between White lenders and the Black community. So that was a big change. You had a whistleblower from Liggett and Myers who let everyone know that the company knew, the tobacco industry knew, that smoking was detrimental to your health. And so those jobs were shipped overseas. So you have unemployment. After World War II when the soldiers came home, you had a baby boom, (laughing) but you have now overcrowding and already fragile infrastructure. And then you have the push for integration.  

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Aya Shabu: So, whereas the Black dollar would’ve cycled 12 or more times in the Black community now, you know, Black people were shopping in White establishments downtown, you know,  mostly because they could. It was a very mixed message, like, if you’re fighting for integration and fighting for the right to have access, then you practice having access. Uh, but we didn’t see that same kind of return of integration from the White community in terms of patronizing the Black community. And so all of these things really kind of began to erode Hayti as we knew it.  

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HOST:  In the 20 years after urban renewal was first introduced in the Housing Act of 1949, some 2,000 communities – including ones in Atlanta, Birmingham, Durham, Nashville, Richmond, and Norfolk – were essentially bulldozed. Residents were moved out, mainly ending up in new, but poorly built public housing, like the Fayette Place housing project in Hayti. Few saw any of the promised benefits of “renewal.” Of the 300,000 families that were ultimately displaced across the country, a full half were Black – even though African-Americans were only 10 percent of the population at the time. That’s why author James Baldwin said this:  

James Baldwin: It’s something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out. Getting … it means negro removal. That is what it means.  

HOST: Seven years after the Housing Act, the Federal Aid Highway Act was passed, leading to massive investments in highway construction across the country – highways that promised mobility and freedom to drivers, but pollution and displacement to residents.  

Aya Shabu: When the federal government wanted to build these highways, and they were subsidizing the construction of these highways, what they needed was land. And you see this all over the country. And so, while the Black community had some level of economic power, it didn’t have a, a whole lot of political power. And so therefore, wasn’t able to push back. Two hundred of the four hundred acres of land that is Hayti – so that’s half – was torn up to build a road that would connect to the highway. All of these businesses, you know, we lost about five hundred businesses as a result of urban renewal. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Can you describe that a little bit more? Just kind of how many people were more or less displaced and how, you know, how it might’ve felt from your research in the area as that process was unfolding? 

Aya Shabu: Here’s what I’ve heard from people who I’ve talked to. 

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Aya Shabu: Miss Wilma talks about her family coming home one day from school and being told, ‘We’re moving.’ People talk about moving into the shiny new housing projects which, you know, were only shiny and new for a very short period because they’re not well constructed. They used these – what do they call it? – home assessments.  

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm. 

Aya Shabu: And many of the homes were designated slums. And it’s really hard to tell the rubric because there was so much motive to get rid of these houses. And then eminent domain was used to take people’s homes. So people talk about losing connection to place as a result of that displacement and the fracture of networks, these social networks. And so you know who to borrow sugar from and you know who can give you a ride to school. You know the community and the resources and that resource sharing gets fractured when even just one person is pulled out, right? Like that leaves a huge hole. 

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.  

Aya Shabu: And so now you also have people living together who haven’t lived together. Like, just because we’re all, you know, Black or we’re all of the same socioeconomic class, doesn’t mean we have the same cultures and habits of being. And so you’ve got folks from different parts of Durham now living in close proximity. So that creates all other kinds of tension. 

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HOST: On top of the legacy of disrupting these social networks, many of the new public housing projects were later found to be polluted with lead paint. For that and a host of other reasons, Fayette Place in Hayti was torn down in 2009.  

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HOST: Now, if you look at a satellite image of the neighborhood on Google Earth, it’s obvious why this place has become an urban heat island. Between the vast grey ribbons of the Durham highway and the dozens of concrete foundations left behind after demolition, concrete reigns. And so do some big questions about what should be done with those areas as development pressure grows. An estimated 5,000 people are moving to Durham each year. 

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 Aya Shabu: So there’s a need for housing. And so land becomes a huge issue. Hayti is a great place to build because there’s a lot of renters, there isn’t a whole lot of political representation. I think the average income is maybe $20,000. Education is at a high-school level. So it’s a very vulnerable community today.  

Leanna First-Arai: Aya, can I ask you, um, what do residents want now in the midst of another wave of displacement, of, um, gentrification and housing-crisis questions?  

Aya Shabu: There’s a wonderful organization called Hayti Reborn, working in Hayti specifically to reclaim Black land alongside residents who live there, business owners. And right now, the most current fight is the fight to have some say, some autonomy, in the development of Heritage Square. 

 CBS 17 Reporter Ben Bokun:  This fenced-off, now-vacant shopping mall in Durham’s Hayti District could be the site of a new development worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but right now many are rallying against a rezoning request that would move the project forward at Heritage Square.  

 Pastor Julian Pridgen: We’re not anti-development. But what we are asking is, is that the new owners would come and live into the spirit of the community that’s already here. 

 CBS 17 Reporter Ben Bokun:  Hayti Reborn is concerned that the development does not include affordable housing and that it could price out Black-owned businesses and people who live in the community. 

Aya Shabu: The location of Heritage Square’s right there, kind of at the corner of Highway 147 and then the rest of the Hayti neighborhood. It almost acts as a buffer. It has symbolic and sentimental and historical value to the community. And the community has ideas of what they would wanna see there, and so are interested in working with the city, with the county, even wanting to work with developers. But it needs to be a collaboration.  

Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.  

Aya Shabu: What Hayti Reborn is saying is that we will not be silenced. And they have been very strategic in organizing with churches and youth organizations and residents. And so the case is gonna come before City Council. It won unanimously by the Planning Commission. Nine votes said no. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. 

Aya Shabu: Now it goes before City Council. And if we can win this one, then it’s gonna kind of make it hard for other developers. But if we lose this one, there’ll be a lot more fighting that will have to happen.  

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Aya Shabu:  I even think of myself sometimes, like, you know, am I a gentrifier? I ask myself that. And I think what I’ve been able to come to peace with is that  I am interested in seeing this neighborhood thrive. I’m not interested in seeing it turn over. I’m interested in seeing what was here continue to grow. It can’t stay the same but it doesn’t wanna be erased. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Right now in, in the moment in which we’re living, um, you know, in which this iteration of the U.S. Federal government is performing its own version of erasure and cutting environmental justice programs and removing artifacts from museums to re-author very whitewashed versions of history, what further significance does your work hold?  

Aya Shabu: Part of the work is making a connection so that you will care, and if you care, then you’ll become an advocate. 

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Aya Shabu: That’s my theory of change. And so for me, the embodiment is the key. How do we make these stories live inside of us so that we’re not dependent on archives that could be burned, or you know, digital archives that could be erased?  

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm.  

Aya Shabu:  How do we get this in our bones, cause we have to feel it. We have to live it. So walking, storytelling. I’m not just spitting dates and facts. That’s not the point. It’s to be affected by these stories in a way that’s very personal and therefore it’s yours forever.  

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm.  

Aya Shabu: And I think that’s what I’m really excited about is how we encode these stories into our DNA.  

Leanna First-Arai: Thank you so much Aya for everything that you’ve shared today.  

Aya Shabu: Yeah. 

Leanna First-Arai: Really, it’s been a joy to speak with you.  

Aya Shabu: I’m grateful. 

HOST: That was Aya Shabu, founder and lead tour guide of Whistle Stop Tours in Durham, North Carolina. 

HOST:  Just a quick update: after we conducted this interview, but before the Durham City Council could vote, the developer behind the Heritage Square proposal withdrew its rezoning request.  For now, the project appears to be off the table, and folks in Hayti are regrouping.  

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HOST: That does it for this episode of Broken Ground.  If you’d like to learn more about Hayti, or see historic photos from the area, visit our website Broken Ground Podcast dot o-r-g. There, you’ll also find links to SELC’s multimedia storytelling series, “Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward.” Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment, rooted in the South. It’s produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Noa Greenspan, Jennie Daley, and me, Leanna First-Arai. With special thanks to Ko Bragg, Sam Lenga and Pria Mahadevan. Our theme music is by Eric Knutson. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love it if you’d write us a review on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening. 

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