How Urban Renewal Harmed Black Communities—And Helped Colleges

The University of Georgia’s first high-rise dormitory, Creswell Hall, opened in 1963. Many people would say that the hall’s history starts with the name Creswell itself, chosen to honor Mary Ethel Creswell, the first woman to graduate with a bachelor’s degree from the university. But Creswell Hall’s history is more deeply rooted than that. The building's significance started before it was ever built, when Linnentown, a predominantly Black neighborhood, was destroyed so Creswell could exist.

Linnentown comprised around 50 working class families and spanned 22 acres and three streets in Athens: South Finley, Lyndon Row, and Peabody Street. Linnentown may not have had sidewalks or fully paved roads or big houses, but Linnentown had life buzzing all around. The community was made up of generations of hard-working families. They were housekeepers, carpenters, cooks, brick masons, and beauticians, and by 1960, two-thirds of Linnentown residents owned their homes.

In 1958, the destruction of Linnentown began when construction machinery rolled into the community after the acquisition of multiple Linnentown properties. By 1966, the last family had moved out, finally succumbing to the intimidation of the university and city’s construction, erasing the last physical traces of the community. Linnentown’s story is not singular. Beginning in the late 1950s, colleges across the nation razed Black neighborhoods to expand their campuses through the federal urban renewal program and eminent domain.

Just before the end of World War II, Congress passed the GI Bill of 1944, which provided education stipends for returning troops. It led to an enrollment explosion at the nation’s colleges. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of U.S. degree holders more than doubled. Colleges quickly realized they needed to expand their footprint to accommodate their new students, and they did so through a program outlined in the Federal Housing Act of 1949. The urban renewal program was designed to revitalize American cities, providing “federal aid to assist with slum-clearance projects.”

Urban renewal projects followed the same structure: First, an interested party—a city, a university, or a hospital—would either rely on existing zone ordinances or collaborate with a developer or the city to identify areas for redevelopment. In other words, the developer or city would outline the neighborhoods that were respectable and the ones that were not. The non-respectable parts of town were typically overpopulated and were made up of Black and immigrant communities. Then, the interested party would apply for money from the federal government. Once awarded funds, the city would condemn the areas zoned for revitalization, exerting eminent domain, the power to take private property in the name of a public good. And finally, the city would begin redevelopment.

While the use of the urban renewal projects spanned across industries, including the creation of government housing and the U.S. highway system, higher education’s use tends to receive less scrutiny. Colleges were not originally included in the Federal Housing Act. However, through a consolidated lobbying effort spearheaded by the University of Chicago, both private and public universities, though mainly private, fought to be included in the urban renewal program. As evidence for urban renewal funds, the University of Chicago, in partnership with the Association of American Universities, surveyed sixteen different universities and identified a nationwide issue with neighborhoods near universities. In 1959, Section 112 of the Federal Housing Act was added into law, allowing colleges to reap the benefits of the federal urban renewal program because they “promote[d] the public welfare and the proper development of the community.”

After the legislation passed, ten out of the sixteen universities surveyed expanded, engulfing predominantly Black neighborhoods in the process. The University of Chicago displaced primarily low-income Black families across the city, and for their Hyde-Park Kenwood project, in particular, the university displaced 4,000 families. Across town, the city proposed a new location for the public University of Illinois Chicago impacting “Little Italy” which was over 50 percent Black. In the city’s suburbs, Northwestern University expanded into Evanston, clearing a majority Black neighborhood to build Engelhart Hall. Four hours away, Indiana University demolished Indiana Avenue, also known as “Black Wall Street” and “Indianapolis Harlem,” to make way for its medical center.

The projects were not limited to the Midwest. On the East Coast, John Hopkins University evicted over 1,100 families in East Baltimore; 90 percent of those families were Black. George Washington University, in Washington D.C., expanded into Foggy Bottom, gentrifying a once thriving Black area. And the University of Pennsylvania razed a Black “dynamic and working class neighborhood” in West Philadelphia known as Black Bottom. Columbia University expanded into Morningside Heights, a New York City neighborhood, to build a new gym, removing thousands of Black and Puerto Rican families. In the South, Vanderbilt University destroyed the Bass Street Neighborhood in the 1950s, a Black community that could trace its history back to the Civil War. And out West, the original University of California, now known as the University of California, Berkeley, expanded into Black neighborhoods in the Southside of Berkeley and forced a predominantly Black high school to relocate in order to build new dormitories.

The other six institutions did not expand explicitly into Black neighborhoods but still benefited from urban renewal projects. Both Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology profited from Cambridge’s business-oriented developments. The University of Minnesota, Tulane University, St. Louis University and Washington University of St. Louis all benefited from the expansions of the U.S. highway system. Though these universities did not bulldoze predominantly Black areas themselves, almost all of these projects did.

These urban renewal projects were just the beginning of years of Black displacement. Racial targeting spanned across projects and can even be detected in the language used in the Federal Housing Act. In the law, the areas that were designated as less respectable were called slums. A slum is “a densely populated urban area marked especially by poverty.” Many of the overcrowded, poor areas were Black neighborhoods, due to systemic segregationist housing policies, which prevented many Black Americans from accessing low-interest mortgages or fair rents like their white counterparts. In many ways, using the word slum was an easy disguise for Black. In addition, the word, blight, a term originating from plant pathology—the study of plant disease—meaning an infection or disease that causes decay and subsequently death was used interchangeably with condemn at this time.

At Georgia, Creswell Hall was built to house students, particularly white students, and it came at the cost of housing for Black families. In its own grant application for urban renewal funding, the University of Georgia acknowledged this racial disparity, admitting its project “will result in a net reduction in the supply of housing available to racial minority families.”

Since many Linnentown residents owned their homes, the creation of Creswell Hall, Russell Hall, Brumby Hall, and the West Campus Parking Deck not only came at the expense of their housing but also the social and financial mobility of these families. Athens and the University of Georgia are not alone in this racially targeted endeavor. Cities across the United States intentionally destroyed their predominantly Black neighborhoods in an attempt to be made new again, an effort funded by the federal government and monopolized by America’s colleges, eroding generations of hard-earned progress toward Black economic mobility and community.