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By Root 196 0

city put up a couple of different neighborhoods just for black people to live in. There were places like Castalia Heights, which at the time was called the "South's No. 1 Private Negro Apartment Development." It provided low-cost homes for more than four hundred families. There were also places like LeMoyne Gardens and Klondyke Arms, which were built during the 1940 and 1950s. The goal was to keep black families away from the white ones, so the poor white housing projects were completely separate. There were a lot of those, too, but at the time there were still laws that restricted where in the city black people could live. For most of the 1960s, there was a halt on all public housing, so no new projects were built then. But the population kept growing, and many discrimination laws were still in place, which meant a lot of black families literally had nowhere to go.

Racial tension was a big problem in the city, and the housing situation was a major part of it. Groups like the Black Panthers eventually got involved when other protests didn't bring about any change. They staged "live-ins" where they would occupy housing units to bring attention to the shortage of available places and the bad conditions of the existing ones.

Hurt Village started out as one of those housings projects that was originally built for poor white people in the 1950s. But that changed as Memphis did. The unfair housing laws finally were defeated as the schools were integrated, and by the 1970s, there wasn't a white person to be seen in Hurt Village. They'd all moved out as the new laws allowed black families to move in. I guess when you're that poor, you hold on tightly to your identity because it's all you've got, so the neighborhood went from one kind of segregated to another.

Some of the other projects stayed just as they had been built. LeMoyne Gardens has always been a black neighborhood, first by law and then just because that was who continued to live there. But it changed, too. At first, it had been designed to be a place where lessons on hygiene and job skills and parenting were offered as part of a community outreach effort. But as time went by, many of the hardworking families were able to get out and buy their own homes. They were usually replaced by people who weren't as motivated to make good life choices. By the 1980s, LeMoyne had to be put under a curfew and "foot patrols" by police officers who would walk around all night because of the drug deals and high crime. It was that way in a lot of places, black neighborhoods and white ones. The people who really cared and worked for success almost all eventually left for better neighborhoods as opportunities opened up for them, and the people who replaced them in the old neighborhoods didn't have the same sense of pride or vision.

The crime problem kept growing and finally, in the late 1990s, someone decided that in order to fight the crime problem in Memphis's housing projects, they'd knock most of them down and spread the residents all over the city to new areas. The idea, I guess, was to break up the "problem people." Many condemned homes were fixed up. Others were taken down completely. By the end of 2001, more than 3,500 apartments in eleven of the biggest projects had been closed. Robert Lipscomb, the executive director of the Memphis Housing Authority, said in an interview that the goal was to "deconcentrate" the population of poor people and help move them to better neighborhoods. He explained, "I think if we eliminate some of these problem structures, we will also reduce crime."

It was a nice thought, but all it managed to do was to spread crime to new areas.

The first HOPE IV neighborhood, which is what the city called the new effort, opened where LeMoyne Gardens used to be. It got knocked down to build a mixed-income neighborhood with some middle-class homes and condos and some public housing apartments. That started a trend that you can see all over the city now. Hurt Village ended up as part of that movement. It got bulldozed not long after LeMoyne did. In fact, a lot of