Urban renewal drives blacks from homes and businesses
Adams describes the black neighborhood in Savannah where he lived and worked as a boy. Urban renewal destroyed the black community he believes, allowing "white and Jewish" investors in as families and businesses struggled to relocate.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Floyd Adams, August 16, 2002. Interview R-0168. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
KIERAN TAYLOR
Did you work out of the West Broad office then? Your father moved to
Montgomeryߞ
FLOYD ADAMS, JR.
My father when I was a child, they had already moved over to the
Montgomery Street office, and that was my earliest relationship with
that, when the Herald was on Montgomery Street.
KIERAN TAYLOR
Montgomery was an extension in some ways of Broad Street.
FLOYD ADAMS, JR.
Yes it was, because all the African American businesses and black
businesses, what ever you want to call it, were located on Montgomery
and Martin Luther King Boulevard or West Broad Street. Montgomery Street
is only a block away, and as a child one of my duties in working with my
father in the business, he had other. The Tribune was
our competition. It was friendly competition. If they needed something
from us, we would give it to them. If we needed something, we would hear
back and forth like mostly pictures or something of that nature. I was
the go-for.
KIERAN TAYLOR
The runner.
FLOYD ADAMS, JR.
The runner, go-for or whatever you want to. I had to walk around the
corner on Park Avenue to there, and by then you'd walk past
most of the black businesses, the fish market, Mr. McLaughlins you would
call it confectionery-type thing but more than that went on in there.
Across the street you had Robins Department Store. They had all those
type of businesses there. The Sims Fish Store and all those. It was a
whole cavalry of businesses that catered to the black folk who lived in
Currytown and all those behind West Broad Street. They provided the
income base for most of those businesses, and we didn't have
the transportation that we do now. Everybody didn't have two
cars in the garage and a driveway. Everyone walked and so convenience
stores now, the M and M supermarkets, the Foodtown supermarkets, all
those Krogers have bought them out now. But those grocery stores, people
like the Sadlers, the Malavers, they had grocery stores on the bottom
floor, and they lived upstairs on the second floor. That's
how my father got to know a lot of those people because he eventually,
we had a printing company as well. We would print their flyers for them,
and they called them circulars or flyers back in those days and let
people know what was going on in the sales and what
was going to come up. We did that for many, many years until they grew
and started doing other things with their distribution points.
A lot of people, urban renewal as I say tore out Currytown, they tore out
the businesses, but that enabled the white or Jewish businesses, the
money that they received from that to expand into other aspects of real
estate development and everything else. But on the other part, it
destroyed quite a few of the black businesses because they
didn't relocate. Some of them relocated, but they
didn't have the clientele to deal with it like they do today.
It's a major difference in that respect.
KIERAN TAYLOR
By many accounts Currytown was falling down, and the effort to
revitalize the housing doesn't seem bad in and of itself. Did
anyone foresee the dramatic negative consequences that it would have on
the long-term health of the street?
FLOYD ADAMS, JR.
I don't think they did. If they did back in the attitude back
in those days, they didn't give a damn about it, excuse the
expression. There was an excess of gathering land. They saw an
opportunity for federal grants and what have you and improve the
situation. But what, the people who owned the land made the money, and
they took the money and reinvested it because most of it came to be
federal property of the housing authority. Unfortunately there were
quite a few people who regardless of the fact thatߞ[To
security officers at Savannah airport] good morning gentlemen, how
y'all doing. Doing good. Everything okay. Good. I know
y'all enjoy this cool comfort. Thank you. I guess the city
fathers saw it was an opportunity to make some improvements, but also
you have to understand that the urban renewal project extended not
necessarily in Currytown, but extended all the way through the whole
quote historic district itself. That gave them the opportunity to get
low interest money to refurbish those houses.