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Show art by Adrian Wood, courtesy of Wading Between Two Titans, recolored by Lissa Deonarain
In this episode, we’ll head to Norfolk, Virginia, where flooding and rising sea levels are disproportionately threatening Black residents, while the city is also also weathering a housing crisis. We’ll hear about how sea-level rise, racism and housing are intertwined in this coastal city in a story from episode one of the podcast Wading Between Two Titans, brought to us by the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab and producer Adrian Wood.
Featuring: Music: Making Contact Team:
Credits Wading Between Two Titans Team
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TRANSCRIPT
Machine-generated transcript
Lucy Kang: You are listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang. Nearly a hundred million people in the United States live in coastal areas, and millions of them will be at risk of flooding from sea level rise and storm surges driven by increasing climate change. Norfolk, Virginia is a city that’s experiencing the highest rate of sea level rise on the East coast.
That’s due to a combination of its geography and the fact that the land is sinking. And one study suggests that the city’s affordable housing is some of the most at risk of flooding, which could exacerbate Norfolk’s existing housing shortage. To learn more about the disproportionately black residents who are caught between the sea level rise and the housing crisis.
We’re going to bring you episode one of the podcast, waiting between two Titans from the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab, where we’ll go on a deep dive of the city’s history. I’ll let producer Adrian Wood take it from here.
Adrian Wood: So, Mrs. Johnson owns this house. She owns this property. Your destination is on the right. Um, it’s like a mix of houses. Some of them are kind of that, like four apartments in one building. And then the other buildings are these like nice little colonial style single family homes, pointy roof. They’re all vinyl.
And here we are. I’ll ring the doorbell.
I was on the way to visit with Ms. Sharon Johnson of Norfolk, Virginia, to ask her about her family home.
Monet Johnson: My grandfather built this house. He said, I’m building it for my daughter got nine kids and I don’t want them to ever not have a place to live. And so that’s what this house means from generation to generation that. The Hicks were always have a place to stay.
Adrian Wood: Sharon Johnson grew up in Norfolk, Virginia. She still lives in the house. Her grandfather built in the 1950s.
Monet Johnson: He was a contractor. He used to tear down houses and build houses. He built this one. Let’s see
the last roof. You can see when I was five years old, I played in the sand that they put down. Wow. To build that house. That was our property. My grandfather property. Leave all the way over to the roof of that house.
Adrian Wood: Ms. Johnson’s home is only blocks away from Booker t Washington High School, a historic African American school and community center. Norfolk is one of half a dozen cities in Virginia’s most populous region, Hampton Roads. It sits on the southern corner of Virginia’s east coast, right down at sea level where the human and the ocean meet.
You have to cross water to get to Norfolk. There is the vast opening of sparkling tributary waters where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay. There’s seagulls people with boats in front of their house. It feels like a beach town somewhere. People’s grandparents retire to sunny and nautical, but without the pretentiousness that seaside cities sometimes have. It’s industrial, not a Palm beach or a Cape Cod. It feels like a hometown on the water.
Monet Johnson: Every time it rained in this neighborhood, it flooded, and I was lucky. And my grandfather, he was smart ’cause he built this own brick. I grew up in this neighborhood. We used to swim home from school several times out of the week we swim home and we thought it was like swim, like, yeah, little kids water. Oh my god. Walking home to water.
Adrian Wood: The ocean is Norfolk’s greatest ally and worst enemy. It bore enslaved Africans to the city shore and hit them as they escaped. Bondage The ocean supports the region’s biggest industry, naval defense, and the ocean creeps into the homes of Norfolk residents, as well as the Naval station, the largest in the world threatening livelihoods, histories, and future.
Two shadows cast by Giants fall over a Miss Johnson’s family home. Though the flooding in her neighborhood has improved due to city interventions in the past decade, she’s now shadowed by the risk of development and resulting gentrification. This is waiting between two Titans from the repair lab. We are an initiative from the University of Virginia focused on racial justice and climate change.
The two titans. Were waiting between our sea level rise and the housing crisis. I am producer Adrian Wood. I’m a white, trans, queer, millennial, sound artist, gardener, and community member. I don’t live in Norfolk. Matter of fact, residents had to teach me to pronounce it. It’s spelled N-O-R-F-O-L-K. But I’ve been instructed to pronounce it nafo though really people from different parts of the city say it different ways.
Even though I don’t live in Norfolk, I’ve seen the kinds of flooding that Ms. Johnson is talking about. The floods that visited her Norfolk neighborhood regularly continue to disproportionately affect Norfolk’s black residents. Due to climate change in Virginia, we’re dealing with more and more flooding, displacement from hurricanes, even rain bombs.
Skip Stiles: Virginia has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East coast,
Andria McLellan: but it’s different in Norfolk. Let’s start off with the fact that Norfolk has 144 miles of coastline, Norfolk, and our region is second only to New Orleans in terms of flood risk.
Monet Johnson: We drowning. We drowning. People are living in. And wall pillars, rust in the bathtub, water that ain’t running right.
Adrian Wood: These are some of the voices
Andria McLellan: that we’ll get to know over the course of this series. Outside of the large, more catastrophic storms, nuisance or sunny day flooding occurs regularly. So when you have that and you have. Precipitation events that we’re seeing these rain bombs, excessive rain, more frequent as a result of climate change. It is literally the perfect storm.
Adrian Wood: The ways that Norfolk deals with the effects of climate change and sea level rise are felt differently among different communities in the city. Proposed solutions threaten to reinforce racism.
Johnny Finn: Norfolk is about 44% white. It’s about 40% black, and it’s about. 20% poverty rate.
Skip Stiles: Not everyone is gonna be able to live with the water. And then you get into some very difficult choices about who gets to live with the water and who doesn’t. So there’s a whole lot of equity issues that are gonna come up really, really quickly.
Andria McLellan: You know, at some point there will be people who protect it and there will be people who won’t.
Kim Sudderth: I just bought a house. I’d hate for the property values to be diminished because, you know, holy crap, we’re not gonna protect this. This property,
Vincent Hodges: water’s taken care of at the speed of redevelopment. Water is taken care of there at the. Rate of convenient displacement. Otherwise, they make it inconvenient for you and they’ll flood you out.
Adrian Wood: People in Norfolk are working to build safe, healthy, and dignified housing in the places where they live and hope to remain. They’re experiencing the same housing crisis as the rest of the country right now. Sky skyhigh, rent evictions, poor quality public housing, and a lack of effective solutions from the government. In the past, Norfolk’s set historic precedents around neighborhood engineering and displacement. Now, other cities in and beyond the US are looking at Norfolk’s response to sea level rise.
Kim Sudderth: If we are to save our city, we’re gonna have to throw everything at it.
Adrian Wood: Through this series, we’ll investigate how sea level rise, racism and housing are intertwined in coastal, Norfolk, Virginia. You’ll hear from scholars, advocates, elected officials, and residents about the past, present, and future of housing in the Mermaid city.
Kim Sudderth: What are the people who currently live here gonna do? Between the water and the housing crisis, just waiting between two Titans.
Adrian Wood: Episode one is a deep history of Norfolk as a port city and what that offered and didn’t offer in terms of employment and housing for black people from the colonial era up until the turn of the 20th century. Norfolk is not an island, but it feels like one water curls around the city like a snail forming a natural harbor, several streams and OTs flow into the city’s center and all of the land is within 12 feet of sea level. That’s a big part of Norfolk’s blood risk. There’s water everywhere and there always has been.
Cassandra Newby-Alexander: The early town of of Norfolk. It was. As most sea towns a nasty place to be rough and ragged, slow to develop because the focus was about the waterways and transporting goods as opposed to developing an infrastructure to support all of that.
Adrian Wood: Cassandra Newbie Alexander is an endowed professor of Virginia Black History and Culture at Norfolk State University. A historically black university founded in the early 19 hundreds.
Cassandra Newby-Alexander: The waterways patterns always result in the area flooding the. Town of Norfolk, that was originally an Indian town of the Ches Peans. So the little town was called Ski, and that was essentially where MacArthur Mall is located today. It’s a piece of land that is high ground by high ground, you know, it’s at least 12 feet above sea level.
Adrian Wood: The Ches were already gone from the area by the time the English arrived. Records show the first free black people in the area only a few years later, including Anthony Johnson, who bought his freedom from indentured servitude in 1621. He started a tobacco farm of his own
Cassandra Newby-Alexander: were their free black communities throughout Hampton Rose. The answer is yes, there were pockets of free blacks everywhere. In fact, there were some people who had never really been enslaved. And then of course, they had children and their children’s, children’s children continued to be free.
Adrian Wood: In the earliest days of Norfolk, many of those free black families lived intermingled with other groups in the town. They lived with the flooding and its byproducts just like Norfolk residents do today.
Tommy Bogger: Many blacks lived in tenement, along the docks, very undesirable, damp, muddy, and damp. It was a very unhealthy area to live in. It was always a marshland. It was a very, very undesirable. Unhealthy place also, and epidemics would prove that, that the death tolls would be high in those areas that for blacks, my name is Tommy l Boer. I’m presently serving as the acting. Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Norfolk State University.
Adrian Wood: According to Dean Boer, the rest of Virginia looked down on Norfolk. In the early days of the United States pre-revolution,
Tommy Bogger: they always detested the Norfolk because local soil was not very conducive to cotton growing. So from the very beginning, Norfolk developed an economy very different from that of the rest of Virginia. And Norfolk had always been somewhat cut off from the rest of the state by water.
Adrian Wood: A different economy in Norfolk meant different paths within the institution of slavery. In the time between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, Norfolk’s trade-based economy was useful for black people living there for several reasons.
Tommy Bogger: Slavery tend to break down in the city. And that was true for just about every city in the South, but especially for those thriving cities that had a a lot of trays in which black could make a good living. Norfolk, thank goodness, had these shipyards enough ’cause one of those cities. In which there are many opportunities for enslaved persons to gain extra work, and over a period of time, they were able to purchase their freedom
Adrian Wood: between the 1780s and 1850s, a scarce. City of Housing in Norfolk actually improved living spaces for some black people. Prominent white families, for instance, didn’t have a lot of room to house enslaved people, though they might have owned land, their lots were limited because Norfolk was just too swampy. So enslaved people went out on their own and found places to live within the black community,
Tommy Bogger: and blacks were very happy to do that. That would give them some sense of privacy away from their owners, away from their watch for eye of their owners. They were able to build up their sense of community and social activities.
Adrian Wood: The city’s relationship to water also supported black people’s lives from pre-revolution. Up until the Civil War, through employment opportunities in the merchant marine industry,
Cassandra Newby-Alexander: you had blackjacks. These were. African American men who were operating as seamen, so what we call Merchant Marines today.
Adrian Wood: This is Professor Newbie Alexander again,
Cassandra Newby-Alexander: and they were coming in and out. Some were part of the British naval vessels coming in and out, or on friendships coming in and out
Adrian Wood: of all the different kinds of maritime labor available to black people in Norfolk. During this time, being a sailor offered the most relative freedom Sailors could buy their own labor, begin to accumulate capital. Many supported families back on shore. This led to many households being run by women while the men were away on the high seas. There was also something of the quote unquote colorblind culture and sailing that valued experience over race.
Sometimes black sailors receive equal pay to their white counterparts. If they were more experienced, sometimes they would even be paid more than white sailors. There were a lot of black sailors. It’s estimated about 20% of seamen between 1700, 18, 20 were free black men. About half of that number were sailors, not fishermen or longshoremen. John Thompson was one of them. In his 1853 memoir, he wrote about how he escaped enslavement by pretending to be a sailor and getting employed on a whaling ship as a steward, a kitchen worker.
Charles Grandy (read by Marcus Anderson): I became very seasick hand. The captain now came into the cabin, very angry and said to me, what is the matter with you? I told him I was sick. Have you ever been at sea before? He asked. I told him I never had, upon which he asked how I came to ship. I answered, I am a fugitive slave. I thought I would go a wailing voyage as being the place where I stood at least chance of being arrested by slave hunters. This narrative seemed to touch his heart for his ce had once assumed a pleasing expression. Thus, God stood between me and him. And worked in my defense
Adrian Wood: through that experience. Later in his life, Thompson became a very accomplished sailor for the same reason traders and merchants valued the area. NAFA and its surrounding region were a key point in the Underground Railroad. It was a nexus for northern and southern states.
Tommy Bogger: Regardless of how bad the situation was for blacks here in Norfolk, this was utopia. For enslaved people in the outlying counties,
Adrian Wood: this is Dean Boer from Norfolk State. Again,
Tommy Bogger: you’ll see runaways and the rural counties were always being suspected of hiding somewhere in Norfolk.
Adrian Wood: Norfolk’s position on the water was in some ways a boon for black people living in the city. Norfolk’s position on the water. Was also a weakness for the plantation system because enslaved people used it to run away the countless creeks, streams, and ettes. That crisscrossed the city, made it possible to steal away on a boat or slip into the water in the night.
Salima Hamirani: I am just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, foc media.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes, and now back to the show.
Adrian Wood: Almost 100 years before John Thompson wrote those memoirs about being a blackjack on the high seas and being caught seasick by the captain in 1778, Ishmael was one of those people, this newspaper advertisement, and the Virginia Gazette speculates that Norfolk may be his destination.
John Quincy Adams: Runaway, a very likely negro man named Ishmael, 27 or 28 years old, very black.And bred to see by Cornelius Calvert. It is very probable he may change his clothes and make for Norfolk as he wants much to get on board some of the ships of war.
Tommy Bogger: Not only did they seek refuge among these slaves and free flags in Norfolk, but for many they saw it as a temporary situation where these same enslaved persons and free blacks would eventually help them book Passage to the North. By sneaking them on board, one of the numerous ships leaving the Nor for carbo. Yes, yes.
Adrian Wood: Black sailors helped runaway slaves and fugitives escape, but it was a serious risk for everyone involved in this 1939 interview. Formerly enslaved Hampton Roads resident, Fannie Nicholson recalls
Fannie Nicholson (read by Barbara Faison): some of the slaves was put in wooden boxes and was sent by the boat to the Yankees. Some of ’em ain’t never got there ’cause. If a monster went on the boat looking for its slaves, the people had to dump ’em in the water to keep the monsters from getting them. Then too, some of ’em died in the boxes before they reached the Yankees.
Adrian Wood: Whether it’s sailors, Draymond, their onshore families, runaways, fishermen, or marine merchants. Black people’s relationship to water in Norfolk, or lingering elements of the importance of water and the ocean in African spirituality. Most new enslaved Africans landing in Virginia between 17 and 1800 were from Angola and the Congo.
There were many Africans and African Americans who trusted the sea so deeply. They chose to commit their bodies to it rather than be enslaved. For example, an enslaved person named Tom attempted to return home two and a half years after landing on American soil. He sailed into the Atlantic on an open boat in 1761, and that’s the last that was heard of him.
For cultural reasons and spiritual reasons, as well as the growing economic and racial dynamics. Norfolk was a unique place for African Americans before the Civil War. It made employment more accessible for free black people living in the area. It made housing more accessible for enslaved black people living in the area.
And at the same time, the area grew in value to the US government as it began to expand its navy. The history of the US Navy and Naval Station, Norfolk in particular, carries some complex intersections with the history of race in the US. Today, Naval Station, Norfolk is the largest in the world, but before the Civil War, the US Navy was very small.
Very small with most statesmen being like, why would we try to compete? With European nas, they are so big and old and we are so small and new. But one loud proponent was Secretary of the Navy, Abel p Upshire, who lived in Virginia’s eastern shore, Norfolk’s, rural neighbor to the north in the mid 18 hundreds, UPS sure wanted to expand the Navy to grab Hawaii, extract resources from South America and police Africa. John Quincy Adams opposed this writing in 1842.
JOhn Quincy Adams: This sudden Virginia overflow of zeal for the patronage of the navy comes wreaking hot from the furnace of slavery. It is a wholesome stream from a polluted fountain.
Adrian Wood: In the next 20 years leading up to the Civil War, the growth of the US Navy went hand in hand with practices that exploited black labor, including slavery and Jim Crow employment that kept black workers in the hardest, most dangerous and lowest paid positions.
Very early into the Civil War, the union took control of Norfolk for its Navy yard, which is now Naval Station Norfolk. This presented a major opportunity for black people in the area, including enslaved folks, fugitives, refugees, and free people. Because enlisting in the Navy doesn’t just mean a job. It is also obliged to feed, clothe, and house you.
And if you’re lucky, you’re family too. Charles Grande escaped slavery during the chaos of the Civil War’s outbreak and was literally picked up on the side of the road by the Union Army where he chose to enlist.
Charles Grandy (read by Marcus Anderson): I was in the army, I warned near no fighting. I was a cook for a white army. Didn’t see but one or two colored soldiers during the whole war. Then I gets tired of the field, always are running and never get no risk. So I listen to Navy one year, they pay you $6 a month in the Navy because you get your clothing and board.
Adrian Wood: Black men have shown up in the Navy since the American Revolution. Black women, not until much later after reconstruction, black men were only allowed to be cooks, stewards, or coal. He’s African American. Representation in the Navy dropped way down until almost a hundred years later. Though Naval Station, Norfolk is a major force in the city today. Residents report that they haven’t been very involved in the housing and flooding conversations. So for now, we’ll move on from the Navy and we’ll look briefly at housing and land for Black people in Norfolk from reconstruction onward when many black people moved to Norfolk as part of the Great Migration. Here’s Charles Grande again.
Charles Grandy (read by Marcus Anderson): After the war, nobody owned, so they all come to Norfolk, looked like to me, hungry, hungry, and without houses. Sleep in was walking round begging. The Army fit a lot of them, but it couldn’t feed all. We used to steal bread and stuff. It in our shirts. When we come off duty, when we get out, we wouldn’t give it to the hungry. Women and babies on, they didn’t have no food at all. Women and children used to die two and three a day from being hungry.
Adrian Wood: In the wreckage of reconstruction, many people were starving because they no longer had access to means through which they could provide basics for themselves, like food and shelter basics that perhaps had used to be provided by their previous owners during enslavement.
White backlash against black Americans during reconstruction ensured that black people would not be able to access the economic growth that they needed. And after Lincoln’s presidency, the federal government started giving land back to former Confederates, and there were a lot of those in Hampton Roads. Matilda Carter, a formerly enslaved woman in Hampton Roads, recounted in a 1939 interview
Fannie Nicholson (read by Barbara Faison): after Lincoln. Johnson went in office, things show change. Then Johnson gave them rebels that land back and gave them all day privilege they had for the war. One day, a committee of three men came around towards Jeff Sinclair, a big old red rebel, Reverend Taylor.
He was the most powerful colored man in town and an officer too. These men went to all the negro houses mine too, and made them people sign a paper saying they property wasn’t theirs. They couldn’t buy it, so they had to pay $10 a year for rent. For living on the land. Reverend Taylor was there to make them folks fine. What he said to a negro was a law.
Adrian Wood: It was only 15 years after this interview with Matilda Carter was recorded and writing by a works progress administration interviewer that Sharon Johnson’s house was built by her grandfather.
Monet Johnson: My grandfather built this house.
Adrian Wood: He built it in 1954, and just like Matilda Carter’s land was seized, Sharon Johnson’s home is also under threat of being taken from her.
It’s as if nothing has changed, but the vessels that carry these threats
Monet Johnson: every day. Somebody wanna buy this house, I get a letter in the mail or a phone call. Everybody wanna be close to town now, but this was always. A middle class black neighborhood
Adrian Wood: in 2021. The city of Norfolk constructed a major stormwater intervention in Ms. Johnson’s neighborhood. It’s really helped prevent the flooding. City improvements like the stormwater project have raised the value of Ms. Johnson’s home. They’ve also made black neighborhoods like hers a target for developers.
Monet Johnson: Okay. The flooding. The flooding, they spent the last year working on the street and they said that our water would be better. They to the street, they to the grass, the neighborhood they, they to, they tore up the Greek since they left. I haven’t seen the flood.
Adrian Wood: Monet Johnson is the other voice in this conversation. She’s Ms. Johnson’s granddaughter and lead organizer for environmental and housing justice with New Virginia Majority.
Monet Johnson: My grandma’s house, she’s like in between the two circles of downtown and midtown. I, I’m sure one day she’s gonna wake up. Her house is gonna be like on a flatbed truck, like, get this outta here. We need this land lady. They’re revitalizing everything. Which means tear down.
Lucy Kang: You just heard episode one of the podcast Waiting Between two Titans from the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab and producer Adrian Wood. We’ll bring you another episode on next week’s show as we continue our look. At the intersection of sea level rise housing and racism in Norfolk, Virginia. To learn more about what you heard, head over to our website at focmedia.org, and that does it for today’s show, I’m Lucy Kang.
Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
