Which is worse: the flagrant injustice committed in a prior century’s ignorance or continued inequity today, softened by the healing language of acknowledgment and repair? How does a city manage to honor its history while repeating its worst past? These questions run through my head as I slog through the four Tropicana Field proposals, under public response and decision by St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch this January.
We know the story. Jim Crow segregation kept the city’s Black population to close quarters after the 1930s. African-Americans resented the official and unofficial redlining, fought back, and forged community within segregated spaces. Pernicious urban planning leveled those spaces. Interstate 175 mowed down Sugar Hill, the homes of leading Black families along what used to be Fifth Avenue South, in the 1970s. Read more.
