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Title
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I, Too, Am The Eastside
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Creator
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Dannie Ritchie
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Description
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"Critical Oral History Project
In collaboration, Dr. Ritchie, initially Dr Lisa Biggs, and community members – Professor MJ Bull, Virginia Tech PhD candidate Merenda Surmenak and others, Rochelle Lee, April Brown, Virginia Thimas, and Justice Ameer, developed, co-hosted and piloted an oral history storytelling gathering for invited community members with a focus on the Lippitt Hill Urban Renewal Project. This was the largest Urban Renewal Project in Providence. It targeted the largest African American community in the city in the 1950s and 60s."
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Format
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mp4
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Contributor
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Elliot Clement, Kia Cameron, Malcolm Reis, Manny Rose, Mike Araujo, Sylvia Ann Soares, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Don Mays
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transcript of
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Speaker 1 [00:05,807 - 00:39,696]: And I had 12, well, 11 aunts and uncles, and we'd all gather at Flora's house on Ford Street, and there would be fights about the land that was lost on Governor Street, and all up and down around Governor and Ives, Governor and John, about my uncles who had given up their land, and that they didn't fight hard enough. There was always a fight every year, Around my grandmother's birthday, there was always a, how come we gave it up, or how come it was lost?
Speaker 0 [00:42,338 - 02:12,144]: Redlining, infrastructure, neighborhood redistricting, housing projects, urban renewal, all tell the story of Black communities in America. Federal and local governments in concert with private industry through housing policies have continuously targeted black communities stripping them of their wealth and stability. Lippitt Hill on Providence's east side one and a half miles from Brown University's Ivy league campus tells one such story. Within that community is what is described by the city and planners as the Mount Hope neighborhood, which includes a significant multi-generational black community, a distinction that separates it from the rest of the East Side. Hi, I'm Dr. Dannie Ritchie, head of a small nonprofit, Community Health Innovations of Rhode Island, whose mission is to interrupt conditions that create racial health disparities. A large part of our work remains in Mount Hope. We are working to preserve the stories of Black families of Providence's East Side. In this film, you will hear, in their own words, the residents of Lippitt Hill or Mount Hope proclaim I too am the East Side.
I, Too, Am the Eastside