Support TAP’S Dumas Cultural Center project

Last June, I attended the first Art and Soul Celebration on Henry Street. The program was sponsored by TAP and featured presentations by young entertainers and the famous Punky Branch jazz/R&B band from Richmond. Held outdoors on a beautiful summer evening, the Art and Soul Celebration was one of the best organized social and cultural events I’ve attended in the Roanoke Valley in years.

It was also the most diverse. Blacks, whites and Asians came together to enjoy themselves and the festive atmosphere. The celebration was a fitting tribute to a bygone era when Henry Street and jazz were a magnet that brought diverse groups together in spite of Roanoke’s Jim Crow laws.

The event was also the kick-off for next week’s ground breaking for the Dumas Center for Artistic & Cultural Development. Located in the old Dumas Hotel, the renovated building will house the Harrison Museum for African American Culture, Dumas Drama Guild, YOYO Players, Downtown Music Labs and Northwest Jazz Band. The Dumas Center will provide a first-class venue and stage for local artists to hone and exhibit their talents.

Funding for the project has come from many sources. Total Action Against Poverty has raised $1.5 million and borrowed an additional $600,000. Rep. Bob Goodlatte has submitted a request for an additional $1 million from the Housing and Urban Development agency. Del. Onzlee Ware secured $150,000 from the Virginia Transportation Board and Roanoke City Councilman Alfred Dowe was instrumental in getting a $500,000 pledge from the city council. The Rev. Carl Tinsley and John Williamson, president of Roanoke Gas Co. and chair of the Roanoke Chamber of Commerce, have met with key staff members of both Sens. Warner and Allen to secure additional funding.

TAP will start construction on the Dumas Center later this year.

Yet, a number of prominent black Roanokers have not supported the Dumas project. This may seem odd until you understand the social and political context for their opposition. In the 1980s, the city of Roanoke used the power of eminent domain to condemn property on Henry Street. Property owners were supposed to be given fair market value for their land and buildings. However, many believed that city leaders essentially gave them a "take it or leave it" financial deal. Several went to court to challenge these "takings" but lost.

The Barlow family were the long-time owners of the Dumas Hotel. According to a family member, they were offered a below market price for the building. Like most blacks in the Gainsboro/Henry Street area during urban renewal, this family felt victimized by the high-handedness of city administrators. That anger and frustration continues to this day.

In the late 1990s, the city gave control of the Dumas Hotel to TAP. When the Dumas’ deed was transferred to TAP, so was a lot of residual community anger. This organization, despite 40 years of improving the quality of life for the area’s poor, has become the symbolic enemy for many Roanoke blacks because of its ownership of the Dumas. This transfer of anger is both regrettable and understandable — it diverts anger from the city officials who administered the hideous urban renewal policy in the first place but is a classical manifestation of what Sigmund Freud called "displacement."

Freud found that this shifting of negative feelings from one target to a more vulnerable entity is common when people feel disillusioned by powerful, informal bureaucracies. In Freudian analysis, the unconscious becomes the reservoir of repressed impulses and painful memories.

Importantly, these repressed traumas can erupt at any time. The adult person deals with this reservoir of anger in a variety of ways, engaging in a various defense mechanisms to keep repressed feelings in check. However, it appears that the revival of the Dumas has reopened these old psychological and emotional wounds.

Many older black Roanokers now practice an effective forms of "pariah politics" because of past urban-renewal policies. The Dumas Project is a prime example. Support TAP revitalization and, by default, you support the city’s questionable acquisition of the Barlow’s property. In this equation, group loyalty and identity are just below the surface. Many people, emotionally paralyzed by this internal tug-of-war, simply have become apathetic about the whole Dumas enterprise.

Mindy Fullilove is a professor of psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She has recently written a book that focuses on the psychological and medical effect of urban renewal on Roanoke residents. Fullilove believes that for "wounded" communities like Gainsboro/Henry Street to get past public policy traumas like the taking of the Dumas, a healing process is needed. Her ideas make a lot of sense to me.

Fullilove knows from experience that this process works. She facilitated a similar project in New York City after the September 11 attacks. Her project is called "NYC Recovers" and themes have included "Take Heart," a series of seminars that focus on coping strategies in times of adversity; "envisioning" workshops where people in neighborhoods come together to voice their ideas, opinions, concerns, and visions about the future; and "Together We Heal: Community Mobilization for Trauma Recovery," a community-based approach to helping individuals heal after 9/11.

She has often mentioned to me that the citizens of Gainsboro/Henry Street and city administrators/politicians need a framework for reconciliation and healing before projects like the Dumas Revitalization can truly be successful. Moreover, she is available to come to Roanoke to facilitate this recovery process. Because of her intimate knowledge of urban renewal policy in Roanoke, and the people directly impacted by those policies, her proposal provides some needed light at the end of a very long tunnel. It is a proposal that all stakeholders should carefully consider.

The Dumas Project is key to the economic revitalization of the Henry Street area and the final piece in the city’s economic development plan for neighborhoods surrounding Downtown Roanoke. It should not proceed under a dark cloud of anger and mistrust. Moreover, the project will never reach its full potential if valued human and financial resources are withheld because of pariah politics and bureaucratic arrogance. These political processes are self-destructive.

Current city officials have to be part of the healing process. None of the current members of council or public administrators were in positions of power when acquisition of the Dumas Hotel took place. Still, they are living symbols of the power structure that misused its constitutional authority during urban renewal. These administrative elites have to understand that providing economic resources alone does not offer salve to festering psychic wounds inflicted in the past. They have to be active participants in the give and take, rough and tumble world of healing and reconciliation. Otherwise, the stigma attached to the Dumas Center will undermine its success and be blight on other economic development projects in the city.

Ted Edlich is TAP’s executive director. He has a wonderful vision for the Dumas. He is also caught between the twin dynamics of bureaucratic and pariah politics. He must feel like the guys who looks to the heavens and thinks, "No good deed goes unpunished."

In my estimation, Fullilove offers the only possible way out of this seemingly intractable social and political morass. Her recommendation provides a proven path through the red-hot anger, alienation, and resentment that continues to plague the Dumas Project.

As citizens and taxpayers, we all deserve better than the status quo on this issue. The time is past for finger pointing from both sides. Either we will be part of the problem or part of the solution. For the Dumas project’s sake, let’s hope that the majority of politicians, administrators, and citizens see the necessity of belonging to the latter group.