Portsmouth is considering returning land to residents of a historic Black neighborhood. Is it a blessing or a burden?

PORTSMOUTH — A century ago, nestled alongside Scott’s Creek was a turn-of-the-century, tight-knit community started by Black families who moved to the area for the railroad industry.

The neighborhood is known as Sugar Hill, part of the Pinners Point community in Portsmouth. It once boasted a handful of stores, churches and a school along with duplexes, or “shotgun houses,” for dozens of families. The nearby creek served as a natural barrier for peace away from city life, a central gathering place and, for some, the best place to get baptized.

Now, highway and interstate markers perched above the small community signal the neighborhood’s decadeslong undoing. Only a few modest homes sit atop the six-block neighborhood marked by mostly empty lots in an area the city has deemed historically vulnerable to flooding.

The city played a significant role in the neighborhood’s dismantling, often obtaining property in the area for major transit and port developments through aggressive tax sales. But Portsmouth is now looking to right the wrongs of the past. The city is considering ways to return land to the families it was taken from — a form of reparations that has started to catch on nationwide as a way to acknowledge past harm to Black homeowners.

But given Sugar Hill’s industrial surroundings, encroaching sea level rise and potential inherited tax burden, some wonder if returning such land would be helpful at all.

To understand the benefits and challenges of such an endeavor, The Virginian-Pilot consulted historians and land reparation experts and archived coverage about Sugar Hill to better understand the neighborhood’s past, present and potential future.

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What was Sugar Hill?

A freed family named Ellet once owned land in Sugar Hill that was developed into a thriving Black community in the late 1890s and early 1900s. While the exact population of the Sugar Hill and Pinners Point neighborhoods is not known, past school enrollment figures from the 1940s show more than 500 Black students attended two nearby segregated schools and 1950 census data showed 23 to 30 families occupied the Sugar Hill area, according to the city assessor’s office.

The community was so tight knit that even after much of it was torn down to make way for port and transit developments, hundreds of former residents continued to return for reunions throughout the following decades to munch on crab legs and reminisce.

“This was a community like you wouldn’t believe,” said Beryl Hodges Roberts, whose grandparents ran one of the grocery stores in the neighborhood, according to a Virginian-Pilot article from 2000 about a Pinners Point reunion. “Everybody shared. There was a closeness with each other that made us all strive to achieve.”

In the same article, Rita Mosley recalled the tradition of catching crabs.

“My grandmother’s house was there on the creek, and all the kids used to catch crabs and fight with each other all day,” Mosley said. “Then we’d go home, get a bath, and my grandmother would boil up the crabs in a big black pot over a fire, and we’d make up. We all spent a lot of happy days here.”

Population began dwindling over the decades due to the desire for railroad expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. The construction of the Norfolk-Portsmouth Tunnel and Martin Luther King Freeway can be seen as two major catalysts for the neighborhood’s decline. Pinners Point Colored School, a central landmark in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, was abandoned and closed in the 1950s and then used as storage before the city razed it in the 1980s.

According to a 1982 article about the razing, the school had been deemed by the city “too isolated from most people for it to become useful as a community center.”

Sugar Hill was just one example of a nationwide trend of divesting and displacing African American communities in the name of industrial and economic development, often justified with building codes and laws that undermined residents to push them out. Such targeting also came in the forms of predatory developers, aggressive tax liens, eminent domain and private tax sales that might have minimized the purchase price. Oftentimes, such communities lacked the resources to fight encroachment through the legal system.

While early acquisition in Portsmouth was marked by railroad and maritime development, over the decades, the city also considered low-income housing, a regional pleasure boat hub, waterfront condos and a city park as it acquired parcels in the area. But the land seizure didn’t come without pushback from residents ― some of whom said they’d stay until the city forced them out.

“Indeed, were it up to the city, the 21 houses (in Sugar Hill) would be bulldozed away to make room for the expansion of the Pinners Point Marine Terminal,” according to a 1978 Pilot article. “But because of the tenacious fight put up by Sugar Hill’s residents, and several other major obstacles ― notably the resistance of the nearby middle-class neighborhood of Shea Terrace to expansion of the terminal ― Sugar Hill has been granted a stay of execution. For how long? Only until its denizens throw in the towel and sell to the city, according to City Planning Director Brewer Moore.”

“We do fine down here,” said then-resident Yvonne Stanley in a 1988 article. “Nobody bothers us and we don’t bother them. This is home, and we might be robbed of our heritage.”

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The present day neighborhood

Today, the Sugar Hill area comprises about six blocks intersected by Marion Avenue and Roberta and Quebec streets, with the Martin Luther King Freeway to the west and Scott’s Creek to the east. Its decadeslong undoing is clear with a quick drive through the neighborhood today. Old tires and broken appliances litter the curbs of the mostly empty lots and swathes of undeveloped land. “No Trespassing” signs on doors and windows signal a wariness that the community has become a dumping ground for others’ trash.

A report from the city assessor’s office has shown that aggressive tax sales were used to seize the land from those behind on taxes. Today, the city owns 74 of the total 87 parcels in the neighborhood and the rest are privately owned.

[ Decades ago, Portsmouth ravaged a historic Black neighborhood by seizing land. The city wants to give it back. ]

But would returning the city-owned land to previous owners be a blessing or a burden? It’s something the city attorney’s office is still figuring out.

As recently as last summer, when the city acquired a plot of land on Quebec Street, city documents referred to the Sugar Hill area as “too low-lying and too flood prone to be suitable for development.” A home on the property was slated for demolition as it’s been the city’s practice to acquire land in the area to prevent development — something seen as a benefit to the city’s stormwater and flood mitigation programs.

Even when the Pinners Point Colored School was demolished in the 1980s, it was on a lot considered to be “half marsh.”

City Attorney Lavonda Graham-Williams said the city would first need authority from the state to transfer the land. The other hurdle is tracing down the known heirs with the help of a private law firm or title company. The city would then need to declare which properties would be eligible to transfer.

The federal designation that much of the area is within a flood plain is another challenge, she said.

Cassandra Newby-Alexander, history professor and dean at Norfolk State University, applauds Portsmouth leaders for the efforts. But she said returning land isn’t the same as restoring it ― or making up for the decades of lost potential revenue, for example.

“The land that was designed to be a community, a residential area, became a pawn in an industrial movement,” she said. “You’re not restoring the land per se, because the land included a lot of other elements that no longer exist.”

But here in Portsmouth, some residents who lived and worked near Sugar Hill say they hope to see the city find a way to make it work. Mae Breckenridge-Haywood, vice president of the African American Historical Society of Portsmouth, said it’s the right thing to do.

“Do not let ‘Jim Crowism’ continue to win the race,” she told The Pilot. “A small close-knit community was destroyed.”

Portsmouth resident Alveria Griffin, who lived in the nearby Mount Hermon area, said she was young at the time the city was buying land in the area, but it was something she considered “usual.” She said many residents didn’t have a choice in moving away and the city robbed families of their ability to build generational wealth.

“We don’t have much to pass on to our children, some of us,” she said.

Griffin said the city’s efforts to help “right a wrong” is tremendous.

“Those homes are worth something to those people and they had something they could pass on to their children when it comes to have been passed down,” she said. “They had to get out and start all over again to try to build up something.”

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What would it take?

While the concept of paying reparations to African Americans has gained traction in recent years, touched off by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” the practice of giving back land reparations is still relatively uncharted territory.

A land transfer of beachfront property in California is perhaps the only example for other municipal governments to rely on. Last year, Los Angeles County gave beachfront property worth tens of millions of dollars back to the Bruce family. Before it was seized in the 1920s, it had been a buzzing Black resort spot. After the family heirs obtained the land, they sold it back to the city for nearly $20 million.

Kavon Ward led the grassroots efforts to make the Bruce’s Beach land transfer happen with a group called Justice for Bruce’s Beach. That success grew into the national advocacy group Where is My Land, which now works to help Black Americans research and discover connections to stolen land, reclaim it, and educate the broader public about such history.

Ward said land transfers, for example, should be seen as a first step toward proper restitution. Leaders also have a responsibility to grant such communities the tools necessary to keep the land, she said, by ensuring the property owners won’t be burdened with high tax bills, for example.

“The most important piece of advice I would provide to the city is that they not make the decision around what repair is on their own and that they actually ask the Black people living in that community,” Ward said.

Other states are moving in a similar direction. Illinois has launched a reparations commission to study African American communities disproportionately impacted by long-standing divestment because of slavery.

There’s some traction on a national scale as well. This year, U.S. Sen Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, introduced companion bills that would establish a commission to study the impacts of slavery and continuing discrimination against Black Americans and how such harm can be rectified.

Federal lawmakers visited Norfolk last week to deliver a $1.6 million grant intended to reconnect the majority Black neighborhood of St. Paul’s with the core downtown area, which was divided by the construction of Interstate 264 in the 1960s. The Biden administration’s recent infrastructure bill allotted $185 million to 39 similar projects nationwide.

Newby-Alexander said the idea of reparations and reparative justice hasn’t been discussed enough publicly, so Portsmouth has the opportunity to lead the way — and maybe attract further investment.

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“Portsmouth can become a leader, but they have to think big,” Newby-Alexander said. “And that could really be a driving force to shift the trajectory of Portsmouth. Portsmouth has more resources than they realize, but their most important resource is their citizenry.”

She said true unity throughout the community can’t happen until what’s been broken has been fixed.

“If you’re not having a broad conversation and engaging the larger community, it may not be a successful effort,” she said. “Once you finally decide to start looking at one situation and thinking about reparative justice there, then it opens the doors for other things as well.”

But it’s not clear how city leaders will move forward on the issue. Following a presentation to City Council last week from an expert who spoke about heirs’ rights and the decline of Black-owned land throughout the decades, Councilman Mark Whitaker, criticized members for remaining silent on the issue. Whitaker, who’s championed the land transfer, suggested a resolution from City Council acknowledging the wrongs done to the Sugar Hill community.

Whitaker also noted that as the city was obtaining those properties, there was no Black involvement in such policymaking until 1968, when the first two Black residents were elected to City Council.

“What happened on Sugar Hill was not a mistake. It was intentional,” Whitaker said. “So when we take into account the context, the challenge is on council to do the right thing.”

Natalie Anderson, 757-732-1133, natalie.anderson@virginiamedia.com