There have always been Lesbians who claimed feminism and proved to be strong supporters of rights for and equality of women. In Rhode Island in the second half of the twentieth century, Lesbians were critically involved in spearheading feminist activist organizations as well as support centers for women in general. Though not necessarily “out” or promoting Lesbian activities per se, Lesbians were actually, in many cases, the primary activists doing an enormous amount of the work. They participated in the founding and/or developing of important organizations such as the Women’s Liberation Union, the Women’s Center, community publications of resources and information, shelters for battered women, women’s health services, and other related social justice causes. The National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter in Rhode Island was also initiated by Lesbian women.

However, in those early activist days (1970-1980s), feminists did not always embrace Lesbians as allies. As mainstream media dismissed the women’s movement as “bra-burning Lesbians,” the national NOW organization, under the leadership of Betty Friedan, “purged” Lesbians from the organization in 1970. While Lesbians were advocating for women’s rights, the women’s movement did not necessarily acknowledge or accept the sociopolitical rights or needs of Lesbians. Lesbians were perceived by some feminists as threats, or at least, as divisive to the pursuit of women’s rights. Conservatives and anti-feminists also castigated those advocating for women’s rights, especially if Lesbians were involved.

But there came a time when those clever Lesbians and straight-women allies used this divisiveness to a strategic advantage, by using Lesbians as bait! The following story was energetically recalled by Cathy Gorman and M’lyn (Marilyn) Hines, Lesbians who attended these events.

In 1977, the United Nations officially recognized the first International Women’s Day, a movement that was built on the foundations laid by womens and labor movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In that same year, feminists in Rhode Island participated in developing the platform for the National Women’s Conference to be held in Austin, TX.. This organizing process took the form of a state conference held at the Meehan Auditorium at Brown University. Locally, the inclusion of Lesbian issues (as well as issues for elders and women with disabilities) were hotly debated. Several conservative churches opposed various positions but feminist activists wanted to come up with an inclusive platform. So, a strategy was developed to announce and hold a Lesbian-positive workshop. That Lesbian-focused workshop would (and did) attract religious far right opponents to protest there. The wording of resolutions on various controversial topics—pro-choice and Gay Rights, rights for women elders, minority rights, and other feminist position statements—was developed by feminists in various workshops in second-floor classrooms without distraction, while Lesbian women from the organization Gay Women of Providence and their allies captured the attention of an onslaught of conservative protesters. As a result, the feminist proposals emerged without disturbance and were brought to the conference floor where a supportive majority voted in favor of women’s equal rights proposals, including sexual and reproductive freedom. The Lesbian workshop had successfully served as bait for protesters, allowing the passage of these key proposals.

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Recognizing that diversity is our strength, Mary Santos Barros (1923-2018) was a strong and tireless advocate for equal education for all, Cape Verdean advancement, and many other causes in New Bedford. She demonstrated how others can build an inclusive community that treats all people with respect and dignity.

Mary’s concern for her own children and the children of others informed her active advocacy through Parent Teacher Associations (PTA)—coalitions of parents and teachers that advocate for public education and serve as a resource for community families. During the mid-20th century, many women used PTAs to organize on their children’s behalf. Mary often served as president of these PTAs. She also served on the executive committee of the Committee of Concerned Parents for New Bedford schools and was instrumental in the building and dedication of the Alfred J. Gomes Elementary School in 1977, named for a local Cape Verdean attorney and leader.

Using her experiences working in the PTA as a launching pad, Mary became more politically involved. Mary recognized that in order to accomplish certain objectives, one has to be active on many levels. Through a grassroots campaign, going door-to-door, to meet and listen to her constituents, she was elected to the New Bedford City Council in 1989 and served two terms as Ward 4 councilor. Upon her election she remarked that she would be “in the City Council for all the people of Ward 4.” Mary, like Rosalind Poll Brooker before her, brought her knowledge of the community to the Council to fight for changes from within City Hall. Her time in political office was marked by her support for affordable housing, drug rehabilitation programs, anti-poverty efforts, and continued educational advocacy through legislation.

She also brought her advocacy to the state level as a social worker for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services and as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1975-1979. She was recognized “for her distinguished service through the establishment of increased opportunities for the youth and exemplary parent participation.” She was also elected as a city and then a state Committeewoman to the Democratic Party Conventions.

Mary was a strong advocate for all people, particularly people of color, and especially Cape Verdeans. Her own Cape Verdean heritage was important to her and she did much to help Cape Verdeans in New Bedford and the land of her parents. When natural disasters assaulted Cape Verde, Mary, using her organizing skills, worked with others to lobby on state and federal levels to raise funds and send needed supplies to the islands. A believer in political empowerment as well, Mary helped many Cape Verdean immigrants become American citizens and served as a voice for immigrant parents, often taking them to school committee meetings and interpreting for them.

Her legacy is a powerful example that served as a role-model for her own children and all community members, as she spread the knowledge that they can empower themselves and strengthen the community.

Thank you to the family of Mary Santos Barros for their contributions to Mary’s biography and providing photographs. Their stories showcased Mary’s special qualities and tireless efforts on behalf of her family and community.

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Jennie Horne’s (1920-1998) influential career in social services was fueled by her idealism, her love of people, and a desire to contribute to her community in New Bedford. During a time in which information on how people of color could access social programs was not always available, Jennie worked to make sure it was. She advised families on new initiatives that offered educational and job opportunities for everyone, particularly encouraging women of color to join the workforce. Wherever she went people shared their goals and dreams, and Jennie always responded positively with a smile and an offer of help. She is remembered as an “encourager, a connector, and a helper” who always lent a hand to raise others up.

Jennie started as a secretary in the main office of New Bedford’s ONBOARD (Organized New Bedford Opportunity And Resource Development), an anti-poverty community action project agency. Through ONBOARD, she helped acquire grants for city programs that provided education, employment, and recreation opportunities for minorities and poor people. Jennie then went to the West Central Community Center, eventually serving as its director. There she initiated several programs to aid the disadvantaged.

One of Jennie’s greatest gifts was her knowledge of the people who lived in the West End. She kept mental notes on the talents and needs of the people in her neighborhood. Robert Horne remembers his mother as seeming “to know instinctively who to call on in the West End to ask for assistance and also who in the West End might need the assistance that the [West Central Community Center] could provide.” She knew who had the sewing skills to lead a sewing class or the bookkeeping skills to organize and operate a neighborhood credit union.

Jennie also worked for Model Cities, a federal urban assistance program that—along with ONBOARD—was part of the War on Poverty, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s legislative agenda that sought to attack the root causes of poverty and provide opportunity for all. In 1968, New Bedford was one of 151 cities chosen in the Model Cities project, whose mission was to address the effects of prejudice and neglect on urban communities. While at Model Cities, Jennie was involved in improving public school reorganization, public housing development, and relations between police and the community. Model Cities eventually became the Community Development Block Grant Program. Later, as a member of the Mayor’s Citizen Advisory Committee, Jennie helped to channel federal Community Block Grants during several different mayoral administrations.

With boundless energy, Jennie served on several PTAs, nonprofit boards, and women’s organizations, including as president of the Martha Briggs Educational Club. Founded in 1920 by women of color, today the Martha Briggs Educational Club provides scholarships to local minority high school students. In 1939, the Club purchased the Sgt. William H. Carney House at 128 Mill Street where it has been headquartered ever since. For a century, the Club has been led by women of color like Jennie Horne and exists as a forum to self-organize from and advocate for their community. Its members have always been dedicated to education and the role that community service plays in making lives and community richer.

Jennie is remembered as personifying the motto of the Martha Briggs Educational Club: “Lifting as we climb.” Throughout her life, Jennie Horne was a tireless advocate for the disadvantaged. Through her government positions, involvement with community organizations, and everyday encouragement, Jennie worked to bring aid and assistance to those who needed it most. In 2020, residents and friends of New Bedford honored Jennie by selecting her as one of two women represented by large murals at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Jennie exemplified how one woman can light the way for others, who in turn can light the way for those who follow.

Thank you to the family of Jennie Horne for their contributions to Jennie’s biography and providing photographs. Their stories showcased Jennie’s special qualities and tireless efforts on behalf of her family and community.

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Upon entering the nineteenth-century stable that is now 48 Crestwood Road during the Great Depression, a visitor to the old Waterhouse estate ‘on the hill’ which lies between Warwick and East Greenwich would have found a gloomy, cavernous space. They might have seen a young girl playing on a tire swing that hung from a beam on the first floor, or perhaps they would have seen her father watching vigilantly out of one of the building’s few windows. His bargain with the landowner? To keep an eye on the comings and goings of workmen in lieu of paying the rent that he could not afford to pay.

What a surprise that visitor would have had when returning to the same property just over thirty years later… Upstairs: a light-filled and airy modern home replete with fashionable furnishings imported from Copenhagen, geometrical light shades, pale birch woodwork, crisp white walls and an abstract painting, all arranged around a black, cantilevered hearth of reinforced concrete set into white masonry. Downstairs: a barely begun drafting room soon to be fitted out with bespoke cabinets and bookshelves. Outside: a sprawling garden of one and a quarter acres with magnificent views of Greenwich Bay, also in the process of being tamed…

The authors of these changes were Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee and J. Carol Fulkerson. Pattee was an architect and landscape architect by profession and a keen traveller, photographer and conservationist by avocation who purchased the property in 1955. By that point the stable had already been converted into a habitable dwelling by its previous owners, but a lot of work remained to be done in order to bring the house and its grounds up to Pattee’s exacting standards. These emphasised a comprehensive understanding of design which integrated approaches to architecture, landscape architecture, ecology and interior decoration ‘for [the purpose of healthy] living’.

This was a philosophy that Pattee developed over many years as a result of her educational background. She began her career as an architectural draftswoman, having obtained a BS degree in architecture from MIT in 1916, before shifting her focus to landscape architecture, which she studied at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women from 1916 to 1918. Here, she would have learned about botany, planting and surveying. Ecology and conservation issues would have been present in her training too, but it was not until the 1950s that these came to the forefront of her work as an educator and advocate for good design practice.

One topic of concern to Pattee and the nascent conservation movement in Rhode Island in general at this time was the sustainable development of the local shoreline. For Pattee, this necessitated a reconciliation of the functional needs of people and the requirements of the natural environment. In recent times, this has been realised in the planning of the nearby Buttonwoods Beach. Today, these principles are so often taken for granted that it is easy to miss the novelty of the way in which Pattee's home reconfigured the relationship between house, user and landscape in order to reflect the integrity of all three.

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The congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church was born from the first independent African-American church in Providence. In 1819, black congregants withdrew from the First Baptist Church and built the African Union Meeting and Schoolhouse. In 1884, an independent congregation born from this community was organized under the name Ebenezer, worshipping on A Street and later at 135 Dodge Street in the city’s West End. The beautiful and unusual Richardsonian Romanesque church the congregation now occupies at 475 Cranston Street was originally built for the Cranston Street Baptist Church, a white congregation formed by missionary Moses H. Bixby in 1869. New York architect Arthur Bates Jennings designed the church, which was dedicated in 1893. By 1969, the white congregation had dwindled and the church buildings were sold to neighboring Ebenezer, which had grown to be one of the largest and most active African-American congregations in the city. Reverend Carl H. Balark Jr. has led the church since 1992 and continues the tradition of strength and action. He was the first African-American to lead the Rhode Island Council of Churches. Notable speakers at the church include Jesse Jackson and Sallye Davis, who spoke in 1971 to raise funds for the legal defense of her daughter, activist Angela Davis. Mrs. Davis said at Ebenezer’s pulpit, “If Angela gets out [of jail] tomorrow, I would carry on the fight. We can’t be content until all of us are free.”

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Providence’s exquisite jewel box of a French neo-classical temple, the Bell Street Chapel, was built in 1875 for art dealer and engraver James Eddy after a design by storied Providence architect William R. Walker. Eddy dedicated his church “to God, to Truth, and to all that ennobles Humanity.” Eddy was a radical progressive for the time, participating in the causes of temperance, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. He rejected the organized religions of his day, but could find no one to lead a congregation according to his vision. The church remained empty until after his death in 1888. The first service was Eddy’s memorial, featuring reformer and activist Anna Garlin Spencer, who organized an independent church in accord with Eddy’s thoughts and was Rhode Island’s first female ordained minister. Spencer fought against misogyny, racism, and poverty. Among her friends were history’s greatest fighters, including Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. Spencer was a groundbreaker. Today’s Unitarian Universalist congregation continues the fight for social justice with Reverend Margaret Weis at its helm.

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Completed in 1892 to serve the wealthy Episcopalians of Broadway, and home for ten years to the African-American Church of the Savior, this Alpheus C. Morse-designed Romanesque Revival church has been Sts. Vartanantz Armenian Apostolic Church since 1940. Armenians found refuge in the United States after being driven from their homeland by the Ottoman Turkish brutal pogroms in the 1890s and Armenian Genocide of 1915. The immigrant arrivals called their new home in Providence the “Citadel” (mitchnapert) for the community’s strength and activism. The congregation donated their labor to build new altars, a new baptismal font, new pews, and to replace floors. The rich, timber-trussed hammerbeam ceiling over the nave resembles a protective ark. The commitment to faith and service remains as strong today as when they first arrived, representative of their history as the first nation to accept Christianity as its national religion in 301AD. This community gives aid and support to those in need at home, as well as to Armenians across the globe facing conflict and persecution.

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The Federal Hill Riots of 1914, often called the “Macaroni Riots,” epitomize the struggle of immigrant communities in Rhode Island. As World War I was breaking out, food prices spiked. Laborers gathered on street corners to listen to “agitators” blame business owners. A mob formed that attacked wholesale grocer Frank P. Ventrone’s business block here. They smashed windows and hurled macaroni into the street. Police intervention quelled the disturbance, but the next day new confrontations sparked an even bloodier riot in which eighteen were injured, including 15-year-old Quinnio Oddi, shot by police. Over two weeks, there were five violent confrontations between Federal Hill residents and the police. The violence manifested the desperation of Providence’s immigrant working poor. Child labor was the norm; long hours earned little pay; laborers were easily replaced and had no assurance of work; they had no voice in government. In the midst of this poverty and social unrest, radicals like Luigi Nimini agitated for change. Nimini published his Italian-language newspaper Il Ragione Nuova from his shop at 206 Atwells and founded the Karl Marx Club at the corner of Atwells and Dean, the same corner where radical speakers riled up the crowd in August 1914.

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In 1842, this Federal-style house was the headquarters of a political revolution. The owner Burrington Anthony was a supporter of Thomas Wilson Dorr and his effort to expand voting rights. At that time, only white men of property could vote, disenfranchising much of the state, particularly the growing numbers of mill workers in this part of the city. In May 1842, Dorr came to this house a pretender-governor. Brandishing a sword and threatening bloodshed, he gave a fiery speech to the armed men that had gathered there. A pair of raided cannon was positioned in the middle of the avenue, facing down the hill into the city. In the early hours of May 18th, surrounded by dense fog, two hundred men marched from this house through winding streets to a small arsenal on the Dexter Training Grounds. Bells across the city tolled the alarm, but Dorr's cannon fizzled, and so did his revolution. Dorr was tried for treason and imprisoned, but ultimately pardoned. Anthony survived unscathed, living in this house until his death in 1853. A new state constitution expanded the franchise but retained restrictions, particularly targeting foreign-born citizens. Notably, most racial qualifications were removed, making voting rights in Rhode Island more color-blind in 1843 than gender- and class-blind.

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In the spring of 1975, women with sledgehammers marched on what was then called Franklin Park to attack a dilapidated bathhouse. Built in 1911 to serve the crowded Italian immigrant community, the bathhouse had outlived its usefulness. The women threatened to call the site “Mayor Cianci Park” after Providence’s first Italian-American mayor, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci. Federal Hill had been the epicenter of the Italian immigrant experience in Rhode Island. Tens of thousands of new arrivals in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries got their start in America on Federal Hill. Their children and grandchildren wanted their neighborhood revitalized. Buddy turned the PR disaster into a coup. The bathhouse was demolished. The park rehabilitated and renamed Giuseppe Garibaldi Park. “This is the gateway to Federal Hill,” the mayor said at the rededication ceremony the following October. Within a few years, the gateway arch decorated with “La Pigna,” a symbol of hospitality, welcomed visitors into the hometown of the Italian diaspora, a neighborhood dedicated to the celebration of Italian culture and contributions to Rhode Island.

Watch a video featuring Taylor Polites, Curator of the West Side of Providence Rhode Tour, sharing his inspiration and insights on the development of this tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hTkBitQ5sM.

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Rainbow-colored homes spring up from the street grid in New Bedford’s West End like children’s play blocks. However, underneath the colorful patina of the Temple Landing Apartments lays a dramatic history of protest, neglect, and reuse.

To understand the full history of these bright new houses you must travel back half a century to the summers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the Civil Rights era, Black residents of New Bedford increasingly voiced their discontent over high unemployment and discriminatory hiring practices, poor public schools, and inadequate, unsafe housing.

In a series of actions called “the rebellion” by protestors and “the riots” by many others, the summer of 1970 erupted in arson, looting, sniper fire, and street confrontations in an increasingly hostile relationship between New Bedford’s Black residents and the police department. At one point, the National Guard was placed on alert in nearby Fall River.

These conflicts started in a variety of ways. Protests arose over the arrests of young African American men without obvious justification, and again when three white teenagers from surrounding towns drove into the neighborhood and shot indiscriminately into a crowd, killing one bystander and wounding several others. A white resident driving through the area told police he had been shot in the ankle as he passed the protest headquarters. The following day, New Bedford and state police raided the building, targeting the Black Panther-affiliated organizers. Twenty-one people were arrested, including unaffiliated activists, community supporters, and bystanders, and were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, anarchy, and riots.

Following this unrest, a group of community members established the United Front Development Corporation, which supported the construction of more and higher quality housing in the neighborhood on the site of the New Bedford Cordage Company, established in 1842 by ship owners and captains who needed rope for whaling vessels. The company grew and eventually filled a four-acre parcel bounded by Court, Emerson, Ash, and Kempton Streets, before closing in 1964. In 1973, a massive fire destroyed a two-block section of the vacant rope factory, and the remainder was demolished, along with older, blighted housing to make way for the United Front Homes.

The project was progressive and experimental for its time. Closed off from the general street grid, the 200-unit affordable housing development was accompanied by green space, a community center, and a daycare facility.

However, these 200 units did not meet the demands of the housing shortage. Meanwhile, the closed-off nature of the compound prevented police from driving through the development. Crime flourished, much of it committed by the United Front street gang, further damaging the development’s reputation. In 2008, a quarter of all shootings in New Bedford took place in United Front.

The tide began to turn after 2009, when several gang members were arrested. In 2010, the Boston-based group Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) extensively renovated the complex, partnering with United Front Development Corporation to improve 138 units, demolish 62 others, and build 35 new units. The net loss of 27 units was caused by reopening the complex to the street grid, connecting United Front with the rest of the city, and making crime prevention easier.

The new developers, eager to shed the connotations that United Front carried, renamed the development “Temple Landing” after Lewis Temple, the African-American inventor of the toggle harpoon that revolutionized whaling. Crime in the neighborhood has decreased since the opening of the new units, but only time will tell if this project serves the community better than its predecessor.

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Fed up! Perhaps they didn't hear you the first time. Every so often, you have to redeliver the message. That’s exactly what happened in 1975, when a Third World Coalition led by Black students occupied University Hall for 38 hours. Black, Latino, and Asian American students’ snaked through University Hall, equipped with their voices and drums reverberating, a robustly creative ruckus of music, dance, and rhythmically sounded demands.

Equal access, visibility, and services; are these reasonable demands? Brown University’s planned budget cuts would decrease financial aid, student services, ultimately reducing the population of minority students, staff, and faculty. In an attempt to persuade the University to rethink their decision, students formed an alliance demanding to view the budget, and to be part of the conversation.

For two months students of color attempted to have a seat at the administration’s table to address their concerns, but access was denied. They assembled and deliberated, but the administration didn't budge. They organized campus rallies, but the students’ demands were unmet. They put forth a list of demands, most notably an increase in scholarship funding from the administrations’ amount of $3.3 million to $3.5 million. They also demanded that the Black student body proportionately reflect the national percentage of Blacks in the United States—which echoed a demand from 1968. Despite the students’ orderly negotiations and clearly outlined requests, plans remained in place to proceed with the budget cuts.

Nearly 3,000 students went on strike on April 14, 1975, ditching pencils for picket signs to stage a protest. With very little revision, the Advisory and Executive Committee passed a new budget. Had every option been exhausted? University Hall housed the office of the president of Brown and other administrative offices, and was a place for the students to be heard. The students believed that confrontation demonstrated their seriousness and commitment. On April 24, 1975, students occupied University Hall for nearly two days, insisting the university fulfill the promises they made to Black students during a 1968 walkout.

The 1968 walkout, staged by twenty-three Black women of Pembroke College in solidarity with Black male students from Brown University, demanded several changes in the admissions process. The Dean of Admissions refused the first and most important demand: an increase of the black student population to eleven percent enrollment for the class of 1973. On December 5, 1968, the Brown Daily Herald reported, “A substantial majority of black undergraduates at Brown and Pembroke will dissociate themselves from the University at noon today…” The debate around Black presence and representation in education—and by extension in America—was not new. In 1961, Malcolm X spoke at Brown on racial oppression, Black Muslims, and, in his eyes, the need for dis-integration of Blacks in America to move toward liberation.

The irony of Brown University’s complicated relationship with Black America is the role of Black Americans from the institution’s birth. University Hall, the oldest, and until 1832, the only building on Brown University’s campus, was financed with revenue from the slave trade and built in part by Black slave hands. In recent years, Brown has commissioned a slave memorial in an effort to recognize the Brown family’s role in the slave trade.

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Staring at the endless concrete in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, it seems impossible that this was once a vibrant neighborhood. Laughing children ran across neighbors’ yards, caught up in games of hide and seek. The smell of coffee, oranges, and kerosene filled the air. Fruit trees grew everywhere. On a warm day you could hear cicadas sing, and, at night, the frogs chirped. Everybody knew each other.

A close-knit neighborhood, old West Elmwood referred to the community bounded to the east by Mashapaug Pond, to the north by the railroad tracks at Huntington Avenue, and to the west by Niantic Avenue.

Dennis Maynard grew up in West Elmwood in the 1950s: "As a child living in that area it was like Disneyland. It was just a playground. To this day we always talk about West Elmwood as probably the best place you could grow up. It was a combination of residential, country, a lot of gardens. Not farms, but gardens. Lots of fruit trees. You had the access to the water. Everybody knew each other. Regardless of your race, everybody knew each other. As kids you were in everybody's house."

Today, old West Elmwood is gone.

Providence was one of many American cities drastically altered by so-called “urban renewal” projects in the mid-twentieth century. Supposedly “blighted” and deteriorated neighborhoods were demolished to make way for highways, industrial parks, and other modern urban structures. These changes were supposed to improve cities, but in many cases, they destroyed vibrant communities and negatively altered people’s lives. This is what happened in West Elmwood.

The Providence Redevelopment Agency bulldozed West Elmwood to construct the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park. Studies describing unhealthy and unsafe living conditions in this portion of West Elmwood were used to justify the city’s action.

Knocking down this portion of old West Elmwood forced families to leave both their homes and their community. As a result of implicitly racist practices of banks and lenders, people of color often could not get mortgages to purchase new homes in new suburban developments. “Many neighborhoods, [the government] classified as white,” explained Cliff Montiero, a longtime activist and opponent of urban renewal. “People of color could not get mortgages [to live] in those areas.” For the former residents of West Elmwood, who could not afford to buy a home in desirable neighborhoods outright, that meant they were forced to live in sub-prime housing. ”Many people [in West Elmwood] used to be homeowners. After losing their home ownership in the Mashapaug Pond area, [they] became renters,” Montiero said.

Some West Elmwood homeowners fought to save their homes with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Two hundred people signed a petition. People attended city government meetings, speaking out about the injustice of the urban renewal project and the Providence Redevelopment Agency’s misrepresentation of West Elmwood. Arguing that “urban renewal is Negro removal,” they highlighted the implicit racial discrimination in urban renewal projects, which disproportionately negatively affected colored people.

For five years, the people of West Elmwood fought for their neighborhood, but in the end their struggle failed. Most of the houses in old West Elmwood were knocked down. Over five hundred families were forced to leave. "They came in and tore down the houses, bulldozed the hill," recalled neighborhood resident Ed Hooks. Now, West Elmwood survives only in the memories of the people who once lived there.

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