Driving a Bulldozer, Wearing a Suit
Chapter 1, Part 3
Upcoming Charlotte Talks appearance: Charlotte-area readers likely know the local radio program “Charlotte Talks.” I’ll be the guest on the program this Thursday, February 15, from 9-10AM, talking about Our Trespasses. You can hear the program anywhere—locally on 90.7FM, online at the WFAE Facebook page, by telling your smart speaker to play WFAE, or on the NPR app on your device.
Excerpt, part 3: In advance of the February 20 release of Our Trespasses, we are serializing the first chapter of the book. Find part one here. Find part two here.
This excerpt is from Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods by Greg Jarrell, ©2024 Fortress Press. You are welcome to share this post, but it should not be reprinted, excerpted, or reproduced without the written consent of Fortress Press.
The public program that displaced Rey and more than one thousand families from Brooklyn was called Urban Renewal. Beginning in 1949, cities around the country could apply for federal funding to pay two-thirds of the cost of clearing land deemed to be “slums.” The powerful people in US cities who wielded the force of government had learned to see territory occupied by nonwhite people, and to some extent by poor white people, as hopelessly decrepit. The result of Urban Renewal projects was the displacement of families, businesses, and institutions without regard for the displaced, without consideration of the political and economic conditions that had created areas of neglect, and without plans to prevent those conditions from recurring.1
There is a photograph, well known in Charlotte, that crystallizes Urban Renewal at one key moment (see figure 1.1).2 In it, a man sits on a bulldozer. He is wearing a suit. He is ceremonially driving the bucket of the dozer into a house. The post supporting the corner of the house buckles under the weight of the machine. A dozen compound fractures form where the house’s frame bursts through the siding that had protected its family from storms.
The picture only captures the man’s profile. The viewer must reconstruct the look on his face. There may be a hint of a smile, the feeling that comes from having immense power under your fingertips. Perhaps it is not a smile but a grimace of worry as the building begins to give and the dust cloud behind him begins to widen. Maybe there is nothing, just a man doing his job.
A photograph is an artifact that raises the possibility of a haunting through the way it remains recognizable and yet distant. The house in the photo had an address, but the viewer knows that to locate the address and walk to it in the present day—were that even possible—could never reconstitute the same scene. The landscape is different now. At the same time, the machinery is familiar, as is the shape of the house, and the man in the suit, and the cloud of dust. From their own places, nearly everyone has known the reality of this photo—some in the operator’s chair, others just outside the frame observing.3 “When photographs appear in contexts of hauntings, they become part of the contest between familiarity and strangeness, between hurting and healing, that the ghost is registering,” Avery Gordon says.4 A photograph alters the boundaries of linear time. It is not only evidence of what happened; it also creates a collision of what is past and what is present, what is personal and what is systemic. The photograph describes the future that is always arriving until we resolve the hauntings.
The picture of the man on the bulldozer implies all kinds of sounds, but the photograph itself is silent.5 Often its public presentation is as well, a display of immense power without the words that might destabilize that power. One set of words that might provoke: the story of the man in the suit.
His name is Raymond E. King Jr., chairman of the Charlotte Redevelopment Commission. He was the county’s most important Democratic operative, a man of enough national importance to be invited to the White House for talks on civil rights by the Kennedy administration and the Democratic National Committee.6 A good liberal, plowing down houses. King was a deacon at Charlotte’s Trinity Presbyterian Church and a popular Sunday School teacher there. The photograph was taken on a Tuesday, two days after King’s last Sunday School lesson, five days prior to his next one. A faithful Christian, working in silence.
Many people are excluded from the photo. Perhaps they are just beyond the border of the shot. Maybe the family who belonged to that house is looking on. The photo is an invitation to watch, but it has cropped out those who cannot bear to look. Many of them had questions, surely, about what was happening and why and why then. The photograph leaves those questions open in perpetuity. The house does not look empty or at least not like it had to be emptied. The disrepair seems to have arrived at the same time as the bulldozer, seems to have been imagined by some officials, seems to have been determined unresolvable just before the photographer opened the aperture.
The boundaries of the photograph are arbitrary. The picture leaves space to wonder what happened in the moments before this most unwanted visitor arrived. Reynard Wright remembers that the officials and work crews would come “like a thief in the night.” The weighty trauma and the heavy machinery showed up quickly, at once. Perhaps the official plans were documented on a form in a municipal office, but the knowledge of them did not make it to the block. The night prior, one imagines, a family sat on that porch with a pitcher of tea. The children petted the dog and swatted mosquitoes. Mom and Dad’s faces were wet with tears, their bodies weak with resignation. A social worker may have come by to give them a new address. The constraints of an empire that had never been concerned with their flourishing surrounded them. The picture captures none of that. It tells the story as though all of the real action were inside the frame, as though the solitary bulldozer operator was the only character to know.
There is the ceremony, and the picture, and the flattening, and that evening Ray King in his suit probably sat on his back porch, a pitcher of tea nearby. “How was your day, honey?” his wife would have asked as she patted the dust off the back of his tailored jacket.
Did he know? Could he imagine the babies who had been weaned on that porch or the family that fried fish in that kitchen? Could he hear in his mind the lonesome chants of hymn choirs echoing out the doors of the church on the corner, or did the rumble of progress drown it all out? Did he, lying in his bed later, hesitate to sleep?
Did he imagine the wound he had made or only the thrill of sitting at the controls to make it?
Who taught him to feel nothing, to imagine nothing, to say nothing, and when he felt, to ignore it, to keep running the big bucket into one cornerstone after another? Who taught him? What were their names? What might break their silences?
Our Trespasses in the Wild: My friend Joe Hamby sent the first report of the book showing up out in the world. Joe is an extraordinary man who does important work with A Roof Above, an agency that serves the unhoused. He is kind and compassionate. He listens closely, in a way that makes you know he is paying attention.
I saw Joe last night at the Charlotte City Council meeting. Our city council adopted some new policies last night that will likely have the effect of further criminalizing homelessness. Two dozen advocates spoke up, and dozens more showed up, to implore our elected officials to make life easier for the poorest, rather than harder. I offered the council a couplet: “It’s hard to be free/ without a place to pee.” The new policies make public urination and defecation arrestable offenses, along with sleeping in certain public spaces. Such acts may offend genteel Charlotteans, but far worse than seeing someone pee is living in a city that rewards the wealthy for their greed while despising the poor for their poverty.
If you visit Joe at A Roof Above, or one of our other service agencies for the unhoused, it is easy to see the racial disparities in homelessness. A significant majority of neighbors there are Black. That’s the result of policy. Like Jim Crow or Urban Renewal, homelessness in Charlotte is one of “slavery’s afterlives.”7 So is locking folks up for being poor, or for daring to have digestive systems but not money.
One Last Note: It’s Fat Tuesday, y’all.
I will provide extensive detail about the federal Urban Renewal program, its local implementation in Charlotte, and its long-term results in the rest of the work below. For overviews of the program, see chapters 4 and 5. (Note for excerpt readers: buy the book! You’ll love chapter 4 AND chapter 5!)
The photo comes from the Urban Renewal project in Charlotte’s Greenville neighborhood, some ten years following the beginnings of the razing of Brooklyn. Nevertheless, the power of the photo has made it a regular representation of the Renewal projects across Charlotte.
Despite the commonplace display of the photo above in public discourse about Urban Renewal within Charlotte, few people know the accompanying photos that put together a fuller picture of this demolition. Among the crowd were Black neighbors standing on the porch of the house next door and white officials and onlookers watching the ceremony from the yard of the house being destroyed. For some of those photographs, see “Renewal Bash Begins,” Charlotte Observer, July 22, 1970. Readers should note that although the local association usually connects the photo to the Brooklyn Urban Renewal project, this photo comes from the later Greenville neighborhood Urban Renewal projects.
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 102–3.
The picture and accompanying photos are in both Charlotte Observer and Charlotte News, July 22, 1970.
See “Party Chief King Sees JFK Easing Up on Civil Rights,” Charlotte Observer, July 9, 1963.
This phrase comes from Christina Sharpe’s powerful book Ordinary Notes (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023) 28.