The Hayti Heritage Center sits at the heart of a systematically divided community.

A building that was once St. Joseph’s AME Church now preserves and advances the culture of a Black community forever changed by the “Urban Renewal” of the 1960s and 1970s, the same project that caused the original church to relocate.

Journalist and Author Ta-Nehisi Coates visited the Heritage Center on Aug. 19 to engage in discussion with community members. When asked about the history of both the Center and the surrounding community, Coates said the disruptions and changes the Hayti area experienced are not unprecedented.

“What happened in Durham occupies a very dark place in American history,” Coates said.

The dark place Coates refers to began in 1958 when the Durham Redevelopment Commission launched projects focused on removing urban blight. Most of the projects targeted downtown Durham, in turn affecting many historically Black neighborhoods.

“It definitely forced people out,” Marc Lee, the site historian at the Hayti Heritage Center, said.

Previously, Hayti was anchored by Black financial institutions and a number of commercial and cultural institutions. Nicknamed “Black Wall Street,” Parrish Street cuts through downtown Durham. Mutual Community Savings, N.C. Mutual Life Insurance and Mechanics & Farmers Bank were located along the street, but have since closed.

In addition to the financial institutions, Lee said that there was a bustling social district with clubs such as Ringside and the Corcoran as well as retail establishments like Woolworth’s.

Durham’s urban renewal, which has since been coined “Black Removal,” is estimated to have uprooted 4,057 households and 502 businesses, with one of the largest displacements being the Durham Freeway.

The freeway started construction in 1968, but support began to grow in 1962 with the creation of the urban renewal bond, a financial measure to clear urban decay.

The bond then gained the endorsement of Louis Alston, the then-editor of the Carolina Times, a Black newspaper published in Durham beginning in the 1920s. Alston said that the bond was the only way to bring investment into the community given white voters’ unwillingness to fund improvements to a Black neighborhood.

“In the original urban renewal process, people went out to the community with an end goal and an end design in mind,” Community Consultant on the Reimagine Durham Freeway project Aidil Ortiz said. “They weren’t interested in hearing what would be best. They were wanting to gain the consent, or at least manufacture the consent, of people who would be deeply impacted by it.”

Lee also said the methods used to gather community consent and the pledges made to those living and working on the impacted land were not honest.

“There were promises made that were not kept by both city officials as well as state officials. There were people that were made promises that they would be protected, whether that was people that were in houses or whether that was their businesses,” Lee said.

The freeway remains dividing downtown Durham, splitting what was once a more physically connected community with an estimated 200 acres of Hayti land uprooted for the freeway’s construction.

In early 2024, the Reimagine Durham Freeway project launched in hopes of acknowledging and evaluating the impacts of the freeway, as well as reimagining the future of the corridor and reconnecting communities in the heart of Durham.

The project is headlined by a report that outlines three options for the future of the freeway: its conversion into a boulevard, a freeway cap or land bridge and freeway modernization. The estimated cost of these options ranges from $400-800 million.

Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams said that because the city isn’t the sole owner of the freeway, it cannot fund that large of a project individually.

“Meaningful collaboration with the state and the federal government will be essential,” Williams said. “The city just cannot, and we should not, do it alone.”

Furthermore, Williams said his goals for the freeway’s reimagining go beyond just compensation, saying that objectives include the righting of past wrongs, economic investment in the area and putting the same creativity into rebuilding as the federal government showed in tearing it down.

Williams, however, said that relationships with the state and federal governments could prove to be a difficult bottleneck.

“Right now, their priorities don’t align with ours,” he said.

Durham City Council member Nate Baker expressed similar concerns.

“This is a beautiful dream that I think the plan that was put together was born out of a time when there was more federal money coming down,” Baker said. “Obviously, under our current circumstances, there’s really not much of a chance of this plan moving forward.”

Baker also said having this plan in place makes sense in case the country is willing to invest in large infrastructure projects or if North Carolina reprioritizes its transportation spending in the future.

The new project proposal emphasized community outreach and consensus before reaching final stages. Ortiz said that other projects in the past have failed without community support.

“It behooves elected officials and leaders to consider how much alignment their ideas actually have with people who are going to be directly impacted, because lack of alignment will cause the more rigorous levels of approval to be very difficult for you,” Ortiz said.

Lee shared similar sentiments.

“I hope there’s not another case of them only listening to the developers and not listening to the voices of the community itself,” he said.

For now, the three options remain just that, options.

Whether any of the projects’ proposed options move forward depends on a level of state and federal cooperation that Durham city officials are skeptical of. If any of the options were to progress, Ortiz said that the city’s capacity for destruction and its capacity for repair may not be all that different.

“If we have an imagination for the terrible, we have to have an imagination for the beautiful,” Ortiz said.

Edited by: Mason Eill and Ananya Cox