 My name is Daniel Golden and I'm a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. At today's event held in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Reporting at WHO and the Chronicle of Higher Education, reporters and editors will discuss how university expansion has uprooted communities of color across the country. At the end of the program will take some time to answer audience questions. Before we get started, I want to note a few housekeeping items. This event is being recorded and a link to the video will be emailed to everyone who registered. Close captioning of the program is also available and can be enabled by clicking on the closed caption option on the bar towards the bottom of your screen. It's been my privilege to serve as the editor on this investigation. My participation actually began a year ago. I was reviewing proposals for ProPublica's local reporting network when I came across a fascinating one from Lou Hansen and Brandy Kellam at FECIJ. They proposed an in-depth look at a largely forgotten episode in Virginia history. In the early 1960s, the then all-white city council of Newport News, Virginia decided to establish a public college in the middle of a thriving black middle-class community, even though more suitable and less expensive locations were available. The city sees the core of that neighborhood by eminent domain forcing families to leave the area. Over the ensuing decades as the university expanded, it acquired almost all of the remaining homes. It struck me that this project was very relevant to political debates today about systemic racism and its impact on our society and about how race relations in American history should be taught. And that what happened at Christopher Newport University and Newport News has likely been replicated at campuses across the country, suggesting that even universities normally considered bastions of liberalism bear a responsibility for black land loss and lagging rates of black home ownership. Partly of my urging, we green-lighted the project, which I'm happy to say has resulted in several compelling articles and a documentary film. In response, a Virginia state representative has called for establishing a commission to investigate the issue. And other elected officials have started talking about potential redress for dislodged families such as free tuition for their children. Christopher Newport president Bill Kelly has acknowledged that the university's progress, quote, has come at a human cost, and we must continue to learn about and understand our complicated history. I'm going to turn this over to Lou and Brandy, who will host and the panel discussion and talk with our experts. Thanks for attending. Hi, I'm Lou Hansen, co-founder and senior editor at the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. Thank you panelists for being here. And thank you to Brandy who will introduce yourself. Let me unmute myself that is, that's a Zoom issue. But okay, so yes, as Dan mentioned, the story that was initially pitched was about a local university in Newport, New Virginia, Christopher Newport University. And through reporting, we had discovered that there were several dozen families who had been displaced in the 1950s and 60s, and this had been widely, well, not widely was reported at the time during the 1950s and 60s. However, what interested at least me and even starting this investigation about two years ago is that there were still houses left in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. So what led to the investigation was the fact that there were still families that remained in the area, even after the initial blow to the community, which was essentially the city of Newport News, seizing the core of the community, which was about 100 acres at the time. They took about 60 acres in the middle of that to establish a location for Christopher Newport. And what we learned over time was that not only did this happen in the 1960s, but there were families still there and then they had also fought to save the community in the 1980s and even now as you read in our story. There are only five houses left the Johnson's who we were able to access they were very gracious and giving us access to their entire archives. We were able to fully tell the story of the shoe lane community, as it had never been told before, because of what the Johnson's had saved to show evidence that people really did live there and have for it to save their community over time. And Lou had done a large part of the research in terms of over renewal and imminent domain which we know was a big part of how this was able to happen so Lou I'll turn it over to you for the broader scope of imminent domain and urban renewal and what you told and how it played a role in this being able to happen to this community and other communities across the country. Sure. What interested me about this story is I'd been a reporter in Virginia for nearly 20 years and written a lot of land use stories property stories about new development coming and going. When Brandy had this idea for a project, it was something that was a bigger scope, it was telling a bigger story through one family's eyes in Newport News, and we were able to look at what really this displacement and loss of homes meant for a community and for a very personal story. It was more than just the dollars and cents. And as we started reporting this story. Over a year ago, we started to learn that this didn't just happen in Newport News this happened in Norfolk, Virginia. This happened in Boston this happened in Chicago this happened in Philadelphia this happened in Berkeley. Not an isolated incident, even though many communities felt like these were isolated incidents and it was only happening to their neighborhood. This was really part of urban renewal writ large and 50s and 60s and 70s and continued. This was a well established playbook by a group of leading universities that other universities and colleges latched on to over the years. And they sold themselves as economic development drivers in cities that were desperate for good paying jobs and growth, and they did bring growth and they did bring good paying jobs, but our stories looked at, at what costs, and the other side of that narrative. Really fascinating to learn a lot of the details about how this happened in the 50s and 60s, and how it's still happening today. So, I think we have a great panel to share even more expertise on these stories. And so, Brandy, do you want to start the introductions and we'll just kind of take turns. Yes, so very excited to have four amazing people, experts and scholars on our panel today. As Lou said, we have a great discussion lined up so I'm going to get right into it with introducing two panelists here. We have Mr James Burling he is with the Pacific legal foundation he's the vice president there for legal affairs. And he's a leading eminent domain lawyer and expert. The Pacific legal foundation has represented property owners, plaintiffs before the US Supreme Court. So we are looking forward to Mr Burling's knowledge about as Lou was saying eminent domain and urban renewal. And we're going to get into. Dr Cassandra Nubia Alexander who was from Norfolk, Virginia, has a lot of knowledge and expertise about local communities and the seasonal property, especially with communities of color black communities in the area here. She is a Norfolk State endowed professor of Virginia and black history and culture and she's the emeritus director of the Joseph Jenkins Robert Center for African for African diaspora studies. So those are two of our elite expert panelists and I'll let Lou introduce the other two. Sure. We also have Liddell winling and Liddell is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech University. He's the author of building the ivory tower universities and metropolitan development and the 20th century. Liddell is also the co creator of the online project, mapping inequality, redlining in New Deal America, which was a vital resource for us in our research. Liddell is also director of the Chicago Covenants project. Welcome Liddell. And our fourth panelist is no Albert Chavez. He is an elected member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents. He's also chief of external initiatives and community engagement at CU Denver. He's a former four term member of the Colorado House of Representatives. And he has been instrumental in gaining recognition and funding for the descendants of the families displaced by the construction of CU Denver campus. And that's been a long effort and a long process. So, Brandy, why don't you kick it off with the first question and panelists will start off with a question for each of you. And then we will keep the conversation flowing. All right, so let's get right into it. James, we'll start with you because we talked a lot about imminent domain and urban renewal. And I think it would be a good idea to define that for the audience here and sort of explain imminent domain, how it works in practice, and how it has played a role in urban renewal policies that took shape during the 50s and 60s. The early English common law had a great deal of solicitude for private property rights. This is where you get the language that a man's home is his castle, and not even the king can go into a man's castle no matter how rude the castle may be how small the city, it may be a shack the wind may go through it but the king cannot. But there's one exception. A great scholar and jurist of the 19 of the 18th century, gentlemen named William Blackstone wrote that there is one exception and that is imminent according to the great despotic power, if the government and the legislature need private property for a public use, badly enough, they can take it, they have to pay just compensation for it but it can be taken, because there are times when the government needs are so great that the great power of private property has to stand aside. Now the problem is that that sounds well and good and indeed that was put into the fifth amendment of the Constitution where it says, nor shall private property be taken for public use except for the payment of just compensation. So the idea of public use of the property being taken was very very important, but over time that got to be changed a bit as necessity got in the way and of private property needed property and mills needed property next to rivers for example for a water wheel. It became more and more that private property could be taken for semi public uses railroads that would allow members of the public on, and that actually got transmogrified in a case in 1954 out of Washington DC, where Justice William O. Douglas said that you can take property, not just for a public use but for a public purpose, because a public purpose is equivalent he said to a public use. And that was in an eminent domain project where portions of Washington DC were slated to be redeveloped. It was a heavily African American area of Washington DC, there were Jewish businesses there but it didn't look terribly bladed, and people complained said look my property my department store is not bladed why are you taking it. And the Supreme Court said, because the entire neighborhood is run down is somewhat lighted this property can be taken. And that leads to the question of what, what is the excuse you can use to take property for redevelopment to essentially a private use serving a public purpose I suppose. So when you get questions of, well how run down is a neighborhood have bladed is, but the fundamentalist question who decides that. And there's back and forth as a Supreme Court joking about well your neighborhoods played it know your neighborhoods played it that kind of thing. But the fact is, people that look like me would go into majority minority neighborhoods, and what they see was this not look like my neighborhood. This looks like a run down neighborhood of course is bladed the best thing is to, to save it is to destroy it. And so eminent domain is taking this long path down from a rather noble use to a really an excuse to get property for higher purposes of the development redevelopment. And if you're dealing with neighborhoods that one isn't familiar with then you think those neighborhoods are worth less than they should be and that's how eminent domain has spun its history in the last century or so. You know that's really, that was a great overview of eminent domain how it has essentially evolved over years to be to have had so that more entities can have access to it essentially. And that kind of leads me to Ladel who has a lot of knowledge and experience and how colleges and universities have been able to utilize this tool, you know our investigation centered on one family Newport news and they live there for over 80 years and live through eminent domain and the, the remnants of it and by way of making way for college and university. I think most people when they think eminent domain don't think colleges and universities so if you could explain to us how colleges are able to take advantages of that and how widespread it was for colleges and universities to do so. Sure. So first I'll say, there is nothing special about a college or university in the way that it relates to urban development or as an economic economic driver in metropolitan regions. We certainly have this idea of an ivory tower and that there's something like separate or an urban about them but it's not the case for like the last 150 years at least universities have been providing jobs and economic growth just as for example factories would and hospitals do sometimes now in conjunction with universities. And so we need to think of them as not a like special case, but like one that we should recognize is much like, much like any of these other kind of urban urban development issues and urban institutions. There's specific work in taking advantage of urban renewal. Federal legislation comes out of the 1950s. There's federal programs there had been federal policies and urban renewal legislation the 1940s and the 1950s and a number of universities, largely in large industrial cities, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, were concerned about kind of the transformation of their cities, one, and demographic changes, largely with second wave of the great migration, but also after the kind of disinvestment of the Great Depression, and of the of World War two. The university leaders said like we're trying to educate the public we're trying to make the world safe for democracy we're trying to win the space race. We're doing it in surrounded by neighborhoods that faculty don't want to live in that students don't feel comfortable in. And they were overstating their, their case, but they kind of worked collectively to lobby the legislators and presidents to pass and sign urban renewal legislation that basically incentivized and put them in the driver seat that the drove urban renewal money to cities, if they kind of worked in favor of demolishing neighborhoods and parcels that that that universities wanted to redevelop for campus expansion for research centers and so forth. The University of Chicago was like the key leader of this but basically any major research university took took advantage of this. And what has happened since then is that like these leading universities and leading administrators like they share information, someone like starts work as an administrator at like say the University of Pennsylvania, and then later on they get a better job more powerful across the street at Drexel University, and they employ many of the same kind of redevelopment strategies that they did at at places like Penn and so we see is this information being shared and through institutions like the American Council on Education, the Association of American universities. And we see these practices, not just how to get research funds, or how to educate undergraduates but how to take land, how to redevelop, how to employ kind of like financial techniques in order to kind of expand throughout the city the host city. You know, one of the things that I found fascinating about your work Liddell and also should mention your colleague Rob Nelson at the University of Richmond, who also did a lot of work on this in just one federal program between 1959 and 1965. 8000 families across the US were disrupted by university and college expansions. 8000 of those families were were were black or Hispanic. So, over representation of of minority communities being displaced by these college expansions. And there really was a playbook that was going on in the early 50s and the 50s and 60s. You know, Dr. Newby Alexander, I'd like to, to ask you a little bit about when colleges and universities were, were coming at this time to expand and looking for for land and property. Often they were coming into black neighborhoods as we saw in Newport News as we saw in Norfolk, Virginia. What was the power structure like for black families in the 50s and 60s. What was the effect of these fights on those families and those communities. Thank you so much. You know, one of the things that we have to do is put the 1950s and 60s into the context of what was happening in America. In 1954, Brown versus Board of Education decision, for example, really put the framework of how governments were going to respond, especially governments that were directly impacted by that decision and for the most part, it was in the south Midwest, where the majority of those cities and counties would be impacted. So we would see a huge movement, for example, of counties that were suddenly starting to consolidate into cities to provide the separation, because they, you know, in Virginia, of course, they incorporated counties. And so you would have a city and all of the, all of the, the students would go to that particular city schools. All the counties would go to unlike in North Carolina, for example, where you have a county and you have all these cities in a county. Instead, you had a county and the students would only go to the schools within that county. So we would see the creation of Chesapeake, we would see the creation of Virginia Beach here in Hampton Roads, but that would be duplicated throughout Virginia. You would see some other things going on in other states that had a very different setup and this influenced the direction that they would take. So you would see the use of eminent domain to wipe out black neighborhoods to prevent any kind of integration. You would see, for example, in Norfolk, an individual who was a realtor, this was a black realtor and he wanted to create middle class black neighborhoods in the way that government was funding middle class white neighborhoods and suburbs. He did this with his own dollars and the consortium of other investors and the city stopped him using the threat of eminent domain and paying him literally pennies on the dollar if he did not sell for a much lower price than what he actually was planning on getting as he developed that property. And counties were and counties were using eminent domain as a vehicle to stop integration to forestall the, the, the any opportunity that integration would occur naturally for example in a section in Norfolk call Atlantic City. That was an area that was inhabited by both blacks and whites. Norfolk wiped out that area entirely claiming it was disadvantaged and of course, this also ties into a lot of redlining policies. They wiped it out because that would have been Virginia's first area that would be integrated naturally because people were living, almost side by side, both blacks and whites. So this is an area that they decided would, would eventually become home to Norfolk General Hospital and it's now part of the centera complex EVMS is complex. And so they took land from both blacks and whites but mostly from blacks. And that land then was given to these other institutions to grow and developed in African Americans were essentially pay pennies on the dollar for their land. So we would see this kind of process being used in the 50s, and then in the 60s as well, always a fear. To accompany the fight of school integration, but you would also see this, this, I guess, effort on the part of a lot of cities to simply erase blacks from the landscape so in Virginia Beach, for example, areas that used to be Princess Anne County where you had a high number of African Americans who were owning property. Virginia Beach would pass laws, saying that the owner the landowner had to improve their property had to pay for water and sewage to be brought into their property in order either to renovate their property build on it, or expand. And of course that price was too high for them to pay so a lot of African Americans sold their property because they simply could not do anything with the current property as it existed. So we see a lot of different avenues for for cities and counties to force black families communities into certain places, or to force them out altogether. To force them out of places and this also accompanied the laws that that were passed beginning in in the 1930s to restrict basically blacks to the inner cities as whites were able to get property in suburban communities. We get no bird involved in the conversation to and no bird you have a really interesting story. And can you tell us a little bit about where the University of Colorado at Denver was was situated, and the orarian community that was once a thriving place. What is it now, tell us that story. So the area redevelopment project is very similar to to ones you've heard of already, except that it happened in Denver, and it happened to a largely Latino neighborhood. 95% of the neighborhood was Latino at the time. And it was a very close knit community. And he had done its best to discourage folks from living there and trying to get folks to move out by zoning the, the entire neighborhood is industrial. And anything would happen to one of the residences they couldn't rebuild, which is also part of the game. The gamesmanship that is associated with paying fair market when when a community is displaced, and it's out of all the homes are properly zoned, they're worthless and therefore the, the city or the government has to pay less for those folks who are forced to leave. But they were, there were 343 families, 900 people, the largest displacement in the city's history occurred in order to create the area campus, which is home to three institutions. The Community College of Denver Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Denver, and at the time promises were made to the, to the neighbors in the community that that their children and grandchildren would be able to go to school for the community. And, and then over the subsequent years, those promises were, were largely unkept, they, they, all three institutions used every, you know, barrier they could think of to, to, to get folks not to to try and, and avail themselves of that scholarship and, and so in 2020, November of 2020. Colorado, Denver, Metropolitan State and the Community College Denver we all got together and extended that scholarship in perpetuity and, and we did so. To fulfill the promise that was made to the, to the neighbors and, and to try and go from truth, telling the truth to reconciliation and, and that really is the is, is where we're headed and, and, and that's the work that, that I do on a daily basis it's also this, the subject of my doctoral dissertation on, on how universities can and should reconcile with, with communities that are affected. And, and since then we went to the state legislature, and, and got $2 million of scholarship money because, frankly, the state was who was responsible for the displacement as well everyone was, was really responsible the federal government through, through, through HUD and, and, and the city, the church, the courts and, and ultimately the state so our first step was going to the legislature for, for help with that scholarship fund and, and we'll continue to do so at the city level and, and anywhere else where those responsible should be held to account. So that's an incredible story and my reporting and looking at other communities that have been displaced. I was unable to find any more recognition than beyond, I think, maybe plaques and letters of commendation for displaced communities. So the fact that you were able to get $2 million in scholarships for displaced families is an incredible feat. Well, you know, it, thank you, it was, it was a lot of work and we all came together to do it all the community and all three institutions but it did help that I had served in the legislature knew how the process worked in and was able to, to, to lead us to, to that, that eventuality but, but there's actually more than, more than that because one of the other panelists was talking about the five remaining homes. We actually have 13 homes that were saved at that time in the, in the 70s by historic Denver. And they went to the city and they said, you know, we want to save something of this neighborhood. And the city said, sure, as long as you do all the work and raise all the money you can do that. And so they did. And they, they took one single block and I'm sitting in one of the houses that was saved. And, and, and today we have a park nine street historic park with 13 homes. Now, they've not been well maintained and for the last 50 years that's been sort of benign neglect. And so one of the other things that we've done is, is to invest our resources and private fundraising to restore and honor the sacrifice that was made by those families, and to invest in it in a way that folks can see and connect and visit, and, and remember what they, what they had and so the, those 13 homes were lucky to have that, because in most other instances, there's really nothing left. Well, that's, that's a, that's a great segue into a question that will we got we're going to get into some questions that were submitted but and that was me that mentioned the five homes left by the way there are five homes left in Newport news that in this area and Newport news that were of this largely black community that essentially the name of our story is erasing the black spot. We essentially were erased because of the expansion of the university there, which is actually going to get into a question that we quite so often that was submitted in some of the pre questions sent to us which was how was it able to happen. And I know we get into a we got into a little bit of eminent domain and the tools that were used but I would love for someone or a few people on the panel to kind of illuminate this aspect of power. Maybe I was going to you talked about power structure a little bit earlier in these communities who were up against more rigid policy that was established and widely used during the 50s and 60s urban renewal. And so I love for you all to talk about the power structure in terms of who benefited from what type of people or entities benefited from this the most, and how were they able to do this, during that time period, given what we know about that time period and know that it was, as you said Dr newbie Alexander highly segregated on time period in the country, but beyond that. How was this able to become so widespread giving the power dynamics of that time, and who paid who mainly paid for this. I would like to jump in very quickly. I'm sorry James did you want to say something first. No, no you go right in. It really wasn't until the 1960s that you would begin to see African Americans being either appointed to the planning commissions, or in the later latter part of the 1960s and I'm talking about here in Virginia, or in the south in general, or, or winning elections and it was usually only one African American either getting appointed or winning an election on the city council so for the most part, these decisions of urban renewal, which way the railroads would go what land they would take and where would the interstates be placed. All of these decisions were made exclusively by whites, and even when you had a few African Americans either on city council or in the state legislature. They would be the bureaucrats who are all white who would make those decisions as to the routes that would be taken, whose land would be taken, and they were still using and it's interesting that the Army Corps of engineers still uses these old very racist ways of evaluating property value based on what realtors which are almost exclusively white, what they would determine is the value of property and so you still have these these very old policies and templates that are are really the wedded in a lot of racist thought and evaluations are being used today by and in the past by officials when they're making decisions about how to take what property to take how to take it. Planning commissions, someone mentioned the whole idea of rezoning areas. So a lot of properties that were initially scheduled like you know you know this and with Christopher Newport a lot of those properties were were for residential and then they rezoned that area to as a way of facilitating not only taking the property much more easily but also paying less on the dollar. So follow up by that's an excellent history and if you look at the way the legal structure was put together, and what it takes to go into a community and take that community over. It's very much makes it easy for the power structures you call it to take over a neighborhood to be declared one of the prerequisites and many instances of the property has to be blighted. So if you look at what light means it's well the definition that's common in all 50 states is where it's pretty much similar to this, you have to find properties detrimental to the safety health, morals and welfare of the community. And there are factors that you look at, or is there a diversity of ownership meaning that different people own different homes so that's my neighborhood is it is the infrastructure inefficient for development and transportation. But you're not going to find anybody finding my neighborhood to be blighted, except with rare occasions or as a congresswoman in San Jose, who had leads on her tennis court and she was called blighted but they wanted to get it other property. So this definition of blight is very, very loose. It requires factors such as, you know, peeling paint we've heard before about grass growing in a street. That's a city street. So you have all these factors that go into determining something is blighted, but the fundamental problem is the bureaucrats is Cassandra call them that determine blight are people who do not understand the value and worth of a community. They do not get out of their car and get off the checklist and start asking people who live in these homes. What's it like to live here. Do you feel a sense of connectedness to this community. They don't ask those kind of questions. You don't go to the pastors or the churches and saying what's this community like you look at this community doesn't look anything like something that I want to live in. Therefore, what an excellent place to put the superhighway through. And, you know, I just like to add on to that. There's a myth that city leaders and urban renewal folks want you to believe and that is that they're saving people from blight and squalor as as one person shared with me and and helping them out of that situation. That is not true the research is clear, folks that are that are displaced are moved to other areas that are considered blighted, and they are not helped by this process and, and that is a that is a myth that that they continue to perpetuate and not even refer to what is lost, which is that sense of community which is, which is the biggest trauma to to folks that are displaced is their sense of community and connection to, to those that they lived with before. It's like during Vietnam era, in order to save a village, you had to destroy it very much the same thing here in the first great Washington DC case that I mentioned from 1954. There were over 1400 families displaced of the 5900 new residences that were built in an area that was 99% black only 310 units were affordable. People were just moved out. But I also pile on a little bit here and that is that today you see cities still using the demographics of an area to say oh we need federal funding to help uplift this community etc etc. You have, there's no policy in place that says, you have to, you have to create housing for the people you are displacing so that they can return, or so that you can restore them to that location. And most of the laws are Lucy goosey and that's my word Lucy goosey when it comes to that, and they're just suggesting that they need to create affordable housing but after a short period of time, they move away from that completely, or in the kind of cities, they will promise one thing but the law and the agreement said something completely different so they lie to their, the population that's about to be displacing that they will be able to return. Yeah, I want to bring Liddell into this because Liddell, you've done a lot of work and research on the power structure, particularly as it refers to colleges and universities. Can you talk a little bit about how colleges and universities align themselves with realtors with the business community to really have their to reach their goals there of expansion. And so I'll say the leading thinker in higher education in the 1960s Clark Kerr gave a famed series of lectures in which he said the ideal location for a university campus is between a research park on one side and a slum on the other. And he said, the faculty will consult in the research park and the students will live in the slums and he kind of, he says it tongue in cheek. Really just kind of half joking universities are like dedicated to expansion. Right like all of the leading corporations from a century ago are transformed or swallowed up or gone or bankrupt. And we have the very same leading universities that are bigger and wealthier than ever they're dedicated to growth, now even international and as a result, like that expansion has to happen somewhere right and so universities in fact kind of like slums and deterioration they even in many cases created. And one of the ways that they do it is through the threat of eminent domain, whether in the case of the University of California where the university itself had powers of eminent domain, it would. It would say, here are the neighborhoods that are the blocks that we're going to take in five years and in 10 years. And in fact, it created worse blighted and slum like conditions, because no one would invest in like rehabilitation of their property and it would only be exploitation of the property, because they knew that the neighborhood had no future other than being taken by the university in places like Chicago and in Boston. Universities would buy property and hold on to it they would in Chicago with the daily administration, the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology developed an agreement where code enforcement would be reduced, basically because they said we want to be able to we want people to move out. And so it's less of a fight, right when universities expand. Either they expand into expensive politically power neighborhoods on one side, or they move into poorer or less politically powerful neighborhoods on the other side, right, like, which do you think that's going to be. It's always the least politically empowered and the least wealthy neighborhoods, which are largely neighborhoods of color and neighborhoods of with less political representation. And so the kind of systemic nature and the kind of ongoing legacy of racial discrimination and racial inequality plays out in real estate. And then I would also say to the specific point about your question, like, look at any board of regents or board of trustees or board of visitors in the country, and you will see a major real estate developer on the board, or as a major part of the institution, and you will also see like ongoing kind of real estate development activities with university foundations, for example, or these kind of public private partnerships like it's baked into the system that there is a kind of exploitative relationship in the nature of university expansion. That's another thing to include in that too and that's the incentive, at least in our case and in many others, of federal funding, right you can choose. In our case there were 19 sites that were considered for a campus. So why wouldn't you pick the site that brings 13 at that time $13 million of federal funds, as opposed to another site where the city would have to pay, or the state would have to pay the entire, the entire amount so. And then you couple that with the lax rules that went along with the local match to, to, to allow them to, to claim that things that they were already doing counted toward the match so it further put the put the bill on the, on the federal government and allow, allow them to steer it towards communities of color. So that's actually a great segue to a question I have for you no work about the work that you are doing. And you said earlier that you're literally sitting in a house right that was that was essentially saved. One of the things that I found the most interesting in the reporting that was done in Newport news is that when the city council described or when people who were very prominent during that time we talked about power structures. They were describing the neighborhood from the outside looking in. They tried to describe it as a poor slum looking community. Even though we know from our reporting that they were doctors and lawyers there was a NASA scientist so these were black, very prominent members of society living in these homes and building them. And I wanted to ask you based on your experience talking to some of the families, as we we also talked to the families in Newport news and we talked about what they essentially felt like was lost was the destruction of their community and the opportunity to continue to build those middle homes, using to be able to have been able to at least preserve some of the homes, but I would love for you to speak to the now aspect of this, based on how they were, what was what happened to the community, and the cultural and financial loss and how the people who you're speaking to now in the community feel about that. And essentially what they feel like was lost, based on their personal experiences. One question that there was a about a year ago, history Colorado came to the campus and invited descendants who had been been displaced whose families had been displaced to come and talk about. Museum of memories where they were invited to come and talk about what they remember about it, so that that could be saved for historical purposes, and the families themselves called it the reunion, and what was so special about it I thought that it was going to be a painful recalling of that time and it really it wasn't it was them sharing the connections that they had with their neighbors and their, their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and cousins who lived around here. It was the community the sense of community that camaraderie that that they lost. They were all dispersed all over the city and they lost that. And that's the thing that they wanted the most. And you can see behind me, a painting of a church, that church was saved. It's not a church anymore it's an event center but it's still on the campus. And that's where the event was held. And that's the piece that we're focused on the now that that is the focus of the now, and it is finding ways to work with the community to sacrifice and to demonstrate on nine street and in other places, what that means. And so one of the things that we plan to do this month. There's a there's another wall it's the only wall in this house that has drywall on it, and we're painting a mural on it, depicting what the community described in in that event, the Museum of Memories, and that sense of community. And the reason we're doing a mural instead of a painting is because, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 years from now. I won't be here somebody you know the whole everyone will change. I don't want somebody to come and say you know what I don't like that anymore take it down. I want people to say, you're going to have to paint over it. To get rid of it. It's as much permanence as we can get, but it's going to be violent, right that act of getting rid of that image is going to be a violent act, instead of simply taking down a painting. We want to make sure that we do what we do last another 50 years. And, and stands the test of time. Well thank you so much for sharing that and it is at least a question to documentably Alexander since you have done a lot with history, and you know no work describe the preserving of stories. Can you talk about how storytelling plays a big role and earn the understanding the history of what happened the stories that we tell now play a big role in understanding the history of what happened before. You know, one of the most important sources for storytelling, when it comes to people of color, and especially to African Americans are the black newspapers, because their perspective of what existed in the community of what people were doing was recorded there, unlike most white newspapers, who only wanted to report negative things about African Americans. It's in the black newspapers that you read about the those individuals who established communities who, who did exploits and you know who contributed significantly to the area, those individuals who are middle class upper middle class community leaders etc etc that's where you hear and read about these important stories like Laura Titus who was born in Norfolk County and she attended Hampton Institute in the 1890s. In the 1880s as she was born right there during the Civil War, and so her, she was essentially born a slave as a as a child and, and became a community leader became a teacher, and even though she married and the law said that she couldn't teach and be married at the same time. But the city officials allowed her to continue to teach because she and her husband never had any children and she eventually gave her her home to be a place in the community as a community center. You don't see those stories anywhere else, but in black newspapers in the, in the materials that were collected the oral stories that were collected and so I'm encouraged by those universities that have been getting that took property and let me just say, I have never heard any stories about any HBC use historically black colleges and universities who are involved in taking property from African Americans, if anything, the properties that they had were either public properties they were land agricultural land that was not owned by African Americans this was land that was actually given to the institution by African Americans who wanted to see the growth and development of HBC use. You know, you would see these, these universities like UVA, who, who years ago took property and now they have an oral history project that go back and try to recount those stories, because there's something powerful about when people are talking about the loss of their community. You don't get that anywhere else you don't get that in the, in the very sterile city council records or, you know, in the poll of the planning Commission records or in the court records. It's in those oral accounts, some of which have been passed down that you hear the passion, you hear and sense the loss. You hear what the community was really like, and those are critical to us understanding the impact that these policies have had, and it goes far beyond a monetary impact. It goes into a very human very real impact that it had on how people view their place in society and view their role in society. Yeah, that's, that's great because Sandra, you know, we've gotten a lot of audience questions and Brandy and I have done a number of these talks about our series we've been fortunate to get the word out. One of the things that always comes up from the audience has been, what can a community do, and when I get that question, I immediately turn to a lawyer so Jim, could you talk a little bit about what communities can do, and others can jump in as well as to what sort of organizing and efforts can happen. Yeah, I'll take it from two different aspects. First of all, some of the underlying legislation laws need to be changed. The light statutes, for example, need to be changed so it's not somebody checking off everything along with the community. There has to be a way of putting in what is right about a community before it's declared blighted before a light study is put on to the public and a public hearing when it's too late. And then the second part of this equation is the community when it is faced with a blight can get together and must get together and fight it every way they can. You can get attorneys that can help for very little cost sometimes if it's a just cause, but more importantly, if you make enough noise before the planning commission, before the permitting agencies that have to permit the process, the funders who fund this process, whether it's the federal government or state government, people need to have delegations to go to us, make noise, be loud, and do it as often as you can. I think it's incredibly important that the community that is trying to better the society by having a new highway or a new redevelopment or an expanded university makes it clear that the community might not be on board. But if you create enough political friction, it's not going to happen as easily. So reform the law and make yourself known. I do want to go back to one thing that Cassandra said, and, and it reminded me of another issue that is being reported. It came out in the high country news, how land grant universities were established and the myth that public lands free public lands were given to land grant universities. Not so right those those public lands were Native American tribal lands, many, many, many of the hundreds of millions of acres were taken from Native American tribes for public use and then given to families for their benefit. And so it's not true everywhere but it is certainly true across the country, and states, states all over the country, and specifically for, for university benefit. Thank you. So we have, before we get into our audience Q&A we have one more question for the panelists. I think it's a great question to sort of capture everything we've talked about. And the question is, you know, we got a lot of inquiries about what universities can do. And I think James you did a great job of sort of explaining what people can do. I would love for everyone to sort of tackle this question we don't have a lot of time so he can kind of maybe devote like one or two minutes to answering it so we can devote a little to the Q&A. But you know how can universities meaningfully address these circumstances that occurred in communities of color, where they were displaced by the expansions of these institutions decades ago how can they address meaningfully address these today, this issue today. I mean, I would just say a community needs a lawyer but a community also needs like a local historian. All of this is like pretty well documented, and that with work in the archives, you a community can make the case that there were wrongful wrongful and exploitative transactions. And like, I think that that is part of the process of building public support and I think building like shame, like pushing universities to action right there has to be sort of concerted and multifaceted pressure upon universities. No university is going to do like take reparative public policy out of the goodness of their hearts right they have to be pushed. And you got to bring the receipts. That's not true in our case. Today, today. Let me, let me say today that's not true today. And we, when we made the announcement. It was, it was not because of public pressure. It wasn't, it was the right thing to do. It was the recognition there was the right thing to do. And it took folks at the highest levels of the university to recognize that before it happened certainly. But, but it didn't happen like that in our case. I think in, in cases like that, you get the least amount back, right, they'll do the, they'll do just enough to shut you up, as opposed to the most that they can do. And so for in our, for our case, we did the most we could do to begin with the most we could do is free tuition for their in perpetuity, right. And, and, and we'll figure it out as we go but in other communities where that isn't the case where you don't have advocates at the highest levels, then, then you have to have a different approach, you do have to have a different approach. You know, I'll jump in and in thinking about reparative justice, I think a lot of these universities need to think about the image that they're projecting. You've taken land from people, you've erased their presence. What, what are you, who are you representing on these campuses what images are you projecting. Are you projecting an image that says that these people never existed here. And I'm not talking about a little monument here or there, or a little plaque someplace that to me is insulting. But, you know, if I, if I go on campus, whose images am I seeing on that campus, who's being represented who's being welcomed into that campus because, yes it's fine to have scholarships, but I went to a predominantly white institution and I can tell you that I was not welcomed. I got called inward all the time. Yes, it was a long time ago, but I've heard that things like that still exists today. And so you, you have to create a different environment that reflects a different culture, other than the one that took over that property in order to, to begin a reparative justice and then you have to think about the land that was taken from people. You know, where, where is now the inheritable wealth for that family. And I think that, that we have to stop saying well I wasn't alive during that period. So, you know, it doesn't matter if you were alive or or not alive during that period you're still in many cases, either the benefactor of what happened, or you are being harmed by what happened. And so, in order to stop this cycle, we have to shift and really engage in some reparative justice when it comes to how do we restore what was lost. I'm not talking about tear down the university to give the land back, but I'm saying that you destroyed a community, how do you restore that community, and that sense of, of together and belonging, and instead of saying well you know I wash my hands because it was in the past. And so I think that, that we definitely need to push that conversation in that direction, and then begin to work out a plan for how do we restore what was taken and lost so that, that there can be a repairing. And you also need to set up a plan for fixing the law so it doesn't happen in the future, because we don't want to have a panel 50 years from now saying we're horrible things were done starting in the 2020s. Law schools, for example, I think have a responsibility for looking very deeply into the nature of the law that allowed this to happen in the first place, and then work for ways of fixing the law, not only blight statutes but the entire structure of using imminent domain for redevelopment purposes, where the people benefiting from it are not the people that are being affected the most. So I think there's a full range of things that could be done by the university campuses, starting with looking at the structure, starting about what do we do with the people in the past as Cassandra said, and then moving forward from there but we can't let this continue and certainly can't let it happen again. Thank you. Thank you all. We only have maybe like a minute or so for a question I think we kind of got to some of the questions through some of your answers, but does anybody just have any quick last thoughts before we wrap up this discussion today. I'd like to know if you see quickly, what the future of of university development is, and, and is there a right way for universities to do it, or governments to do it. Good question. In a minute, you can't possibly answer that question to get at that question right, but I think if nothing else. Now is the time to start looking into it and exploring all possibilities. And I would just say having this conversation, I think is very valuable. It's not, it's not common to have this kind of kind of conversation, and it has to happen in a more widespread way and folks need to hear it, all the variations of it. And that's how we get to, to reconciliation. I would say that the, the recognition, the increasing recognition that this is as you said at the outset, not simply an isolated case, but then fact that there's widespread and in shared strategies among universities, I think can help communities kind of organize and more effective conversations with universities. And a book I always recommend DeVarion Baldwin's in the shadow of the ivory tower kind of works through kind of recent cases of university expansion and the kind of relationship between universities and their local local communities like we look to universities for a wide range of public benefits, individual development, like regional national economic development. But that is that cost is always born by the communities immediately around right the benefits are widespread, and the people who are in opposition and who bear the cost of that growth that expansion are the neighborhoods right around as I think recognizing how to help shift the balance of power in these kind of community negotiations. And I think that we should stop talking about the, the raucous behavior and attitudes and perspectives of people today, dividing people along racial ethnic religious lines, and, and really begin to recognize that either we find a solution or we go down the tubes together is going to be one or the other. We are a single society we are not a bifurcated society though we have behaved that way in the past, and it's to our harm, not to our good. And so we're at a very important crossroads, as we are heading into 2024. This is really the official beginning of the 21st century and we have to make a decision. Are we going to be a society that can move forward and you cannot move forward with all of the things that we have done to harm people in the past. And if you, we find a way to work to work together. That is how we create reconciliation, not someone from the outside, who wasn't harmed, telling the people who were harmed, what they will do to fix the situation that's never a good step to move forward.