Just some interesting article i found about my hometown...
Being Black in the Valley
The African-American community is drawn apart by the appeal of the suburbs, leaving many looking to fill a cultural void
Yvonne Wingett and Ryan Konig
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 18, 2007 12:00 AM
Bari-Ellen Ross moved to a gated neighborhood in Litchfield Park from the East Coast four years ago. Newly married and adventurous, she and her husband, Charles, left their corporate jobs to start a new life.
But once the moving boxes were unpacked, culture shock set in for the African-American couple. It was rare to run into people who looked like them. And where were the jazz clubs, the soul-food restaurants and Black beauty salons?
"I've settled into the mentality that that part of my life, that intimacy with my culture, is gone," Bari-Ellen, 54, said. advertisement
The Rosses' experience is beginning to define what it's like to be Black in metropolitan Phoenix as the Valley's growing Black population evolves from a tight-knit community concentrated mostly in south Phoenix into a patchwork scattered throughout the area.
The Valley's African-American population doubled from 1990 to 2005 and numbers close to 150,000, accounting for nearly 4 percent of the county's 3.5 million residents. The move to the suburbs is a sign of success for Valley African-Americans, who are better educated and more affluent than those in most other U.S. counties, according to census data. But suburbanization also has diluted the sense of cultural identity, some say.
African-Americans who have lived in the Valley for a long time are deeply rooted in the community's storied past. Many newcomers, used to the feel of ethnic neighborhoods of major East Coast cities, are disconnected from old, tight-knit Black neighborhoods and religious and civic leaders. That has left many African-Americans looking for the area's few Black places to meet friends and socialize.
For Bari-Ellen and Charles, adjusting to life in the Valley was tough. They flew back to New York six times during the first six months.
"We were trying to keep that (cultural) connection because we didn't have it out here," said Bari-Ellen, sitting at a table in the soul-food restaurant she opened 18 months ago in south Phoenix. "I love it here. But in coming into a new territory, a new land, a new opportunity, it (culture) is gone. That was my sacrifice."
Phoenix Black history
Man Sanders was 12 years old when his parents moved to the Valley from Texas in 1938. They came for year-round work picking cotton and settled in southwest Phoenix.
One recent afternoon, Sanders, dressed in worn Roebucks overalls, a green plaid shirt and a pink corduroy hat, spoke of those days.
"Everybody got acquainted with each other at church, at the cafes," said the 80-year-old, bifocals perched on his nose. "Everybody knew each other real well. Some moved in, some moved out, but you never lost touch."
Throughout the early 20th century, most African-Americans in the Valley worked low-wage jobs and were forced to live south of Van Buren Street in Phoenix. Blacks were separated from Whites in swimming pools, theaters, parks, grocery stores and cemeteries.
Woolworth's department store refused to serve Blacks at its lunch counter. The old Westward Ho hotel would not allow Blacks to stay. Goldwater's department store would not hire African-Americans.
African-Americans looked within their own communities for services. They formed churches, such as the Wesley Methodist Church. Madge Copeland operated a beauty shop out of her home near 13th and Jefferson streets, according to a Phoenix survey of African-American historical properties. Along a stretch of Buckeye Road, from 11th to 15th avenues, African-Americans opened small businesses, including a restaurant, drug store and pool hall.
Social lives revolved around these businesses, and they became neighborhood institutions, said Matthew Whitaker, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University in Tempe and author of Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West.
A series of local, state and federal laws were enacted in the 1950s and 1960s to help ban segregation and discrimination, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But change came slowly for Blacks in the Valley.
By 1970, African-Americans remained heavily concentrated in south Phoenix. Nearly 41 percent of the total 32,872 lived in neighborhoods between the Salt River and South Mountain. Back then, the community was still tight and most families knew each other, longtime residents remember.
Over the next three decades, the African-American population grew and spread, along with the Valley. The number of Blacks living in south Phoenix remained about the same, but its role faded as the center of the larger Black community.
"I knew everybody in my neighborhood," said Frances Hickman, 66, while shopping at a south Phoenix discount store. "We could walk in the streets at 10 at night. Everybody took care of everybody. You knew of everything that was going on. Now, if you don't get the Arizona Informant (newspaper), there is no connection. It's not as close-knitted as it used to be."
Moving in and growing
Bari-Ellen Ross missed shopping at Afro-centric clothing stores for head wraps and fabric. It was impossible to find some of her favorite things: the right brand of filé for gumbo dishes, **** seasoning for Jamaican food, Carol's Daughter hair products.
After a while, she was so desperate to meet other African-Americans, she would stop them at banks, post offices and gas stations.
"You just start talking to them," she said, always asking them four standard questions: Where are you from? How did you get here? Where do you go to church? Where do you get your hair done?
Only 15 percent, or 17,059, of the Valley's 114,551 Black residents lived between the Salt River and South Mountain in Phoenix in 2000. That year, the median income for Black households reached $35,530, according to census figures, lower than the median Anglo household but a dramatic increase from the 1990 median of $21,135. The community remains, but newly arriving Blacks are not a part of it.
"As we've integrated and grown, it's been both a blessing and, to some degree, a curse," said Art Hamilton, a former Arizona legislator. "We are now a community of people who are almost from someplace else. It changes the nature of the community. It's also diluted people's sense of this place."
Like many newcomers to the Valley, African-Americans are moving here for fresh starts, jobs, warmer weather and affordable homes. They are coming from all over the U.S., often from cities with large Black populations, such as Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles.
They are moving into homes in Ahwatukee, north-central Phoenix, west Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler. Some said they looked for homes in south and central Phoenix, but they moved elsewhere for larger homes, better schools and shopping, and the feel of the neighborhoods.
Finding a community
Jeff Barton longs for the Black America vibe he left in Atlanta.
He graduated from Morehouse College, a historically Black school. He was used to open-mike poetry and late-night stage musicals by Black playwright Tyler Perry, popular for his urban plays and movies. And he was used to crushes of people turning out for community events celebrating Black people and achievements.
"I don't see any of that here," said Barton, who lives in Chandler and is a deputy budget and research director for the city of Phoenix. "Those are things that will make the community."
Many Blacks often travel to Los Angeles, Chicago and other major cities to go to concerts and festivals and to buy clothes and hair and skin products they can't find here.
Church is still the most important cultural connector. Many drive in from Valley suburbs to worship and socialize at the large Black churches in downtown Phoenix, where pastors say newcomers from other states are filling pews.
Many African-Americans join professional networking groups, such as the local chapter of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators. Others hook up with local chapters of Black fraternities or sororities.
Barton has made friends through work and his family but will miss living in a thriving Black culture.
"I do feel that a part of me I kind of left someplace else," he said. "I will never probably get over it. To me, it's important to maintain that culture. It makes you appreciate yourself, your family, their struggles, your ancestors' struggles."
Reach the reporter at yvonne .wingett@arizonarepublic.com.
