Segregated housing and the "projects mentality"
Crews explains how housing was set up during the 1960s, just prior to school desegregation in Birmingham, in order to draw boundaries and keep African Americans out of white schools. Crews explains how this eventually created what she calls a "projects mentality" regarding children's intellectual abilities. She explains, however, how there was never such a mentality during her years teaching at Hayes and she offers anecdotes regarding some of her former students who were able to rise out of this situation and achieve great success.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Willie Mae Lee Crews, June 16, 2005. Interview U-0020. 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
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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Was there a lot of neighborhood transition in the area of Hayes in the
1970's?
- WILLIE MAE CREWS:
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No, the transition happened prior to the 1970's. The majority of the
people in the Hayes zone either rented private homes or owned their own
homes. There were numerous modest home owners in
the area. The city built the two housing projects. They built homes a
block from the main thoroughfare at the airport. If you go into the
airport there is a building with a dome around, that's Hayes, and then
there is a housing project. They built private homes and said other
homes would be built in that entire area. Once the homes were built and
purchased, the other area from here [explaining/drawing layout of
housing project] let's say this is a street, a home is here facing this
way. The housing project is from here to the main thoroughfare, and then
the housing project goes all the way down, cross one street and comes
back this way. These homes are encircled by the housing project and
O'Neil Steel at the back; that was deliberate. Projects have also taken
on and that's what we call a set of government housing, they call it the
projects. [Authentic] was that. Morality is not meted out to the wealthy
or the well educated and denied to the poor. So, there are people in
housing projects who are just as moral and have values just as high, if
sometimes not higher than someone who may live in a mansion. So, it
doesn't matter that you live across the street in a housing project and
somebody else lives in a home. What matters is what you do with what God
has given you. So, those people were there and the Kingston project,
they also took modest private homes and built another one. We just
learned a month ago that the man in charge of the state interstate
[highway system] deliberately [phone rings] with his crew plotted and
planned Interstate 59 and Interstate 60 to break up the Eleventh Quarter
community because part of that group was involved in the Civil Rights
Movement. So, let's run a freeway through some on this side and some on
the other side, and all those houses that are on Eleventh Quarter and
those areas, let's just get rid of those. Then it's easier to control,
because we can bomb Shuttlesworth's house and we can bomb Shore's house,
because Shore's house is now here and somebody else's house is across
there. So that was done, deliberately, so these things were set up.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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The projects were also -
- WILLIE MAE CREWS:
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Set up to do that, if we can get the poor ones and the limited incomes
here, they won't go to Woodlawn. Yet there is this downtown project
where whites live that were students at Woodlawn, that was your city
center, but the projects were segregated. There was Elyton over here,
and those kids would have gone to Parker. There was not what we perceive
now to be a project mentality. You were students and we expected you to
learn, and we will do everything we can to see that you learn. We'd even
scare you into learning. [laughs]
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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The project mentality is that they can't learn?
- WILLIE MAE CREWS:
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Right, and that you are not as good as somebody else, whatever
"good" means. You don't have the abilities, you are
less than. Almost as old George Fitzhugh said. Was he from South
Carolina? He said, "Show me one of them who can speak a word in
Greek or utter a phrase in Latin"-I'm paraphrasing
now - "and I will be forced to believe that he at least has
human potentialities." I should use that and ask them to write
a paper and refute it. See, those are the kinds of things that get kids
going, it gets their juices flowing. What can you say to this man? Are
we going to call him a [whisper and laugh]? He is not saying that he
would believe you are even human, what he is saying is that he believes
that you at least have the potential to become human. You see, there are
people who look on kids, where they live or who their parents are in
that same way. We have to say there are examples that refute that all
along the way, and you need to know that. That is why we became
involved, [as African Americans who were the first to do] A, B, C and D.
Because if that person could do it under those circumstances, then you
can do it.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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And there is more pressure to follow in what they have done.
- WILLIE MAE CREWS:
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Yes, indeed. So, that is a mentality that I don't like, and did not
like. One of my students who lived with a grandmother in a housing
project, who was very poor, turned around a Coca Cola bottling plant.
They were going to close it and Harrison sent me the booklet from the
Communications something, something, not magazines that you find on the
regular news stands, but specific trade magazines that detail what
people are doing in that particular market place. There was a wonderful
write up that he said 'give me a chance' and he turned it around. David
Jackson did not graduate from Hayes, in fact he is from Marion, but he
turned around one Wal-Mart. They then gave him three, then five, then
ten and then the entire West Coast. He was in the February Black
Enterprise as one of the top seventy five African Americans in corporate
America.