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Image 1: Fair housing demonstrators converge on Providence City Hall steps prior to their march on the State House. Their impassioned sit-ins, vigils and chanting forced the General Assembly into premature adjournment. Photograph: June 4, 1963, courtesy the Providence Journal

Image 2: Dannie Ritchie at our May 2024 Critical Oral History event

Image 3: Archival photo of Rites and Reason Theatre’s play The Providence Garden Blues

Lippitt Hill Critical Oral History Project
I facilitate engaged scholarship and help organize an effort led by Dannie Ritchie (MD, MPH) and community members to document stories about—and take action on—displacement, urban renewal, land use, spatial justice and the current housing crisis in Providence, Rhode Island. Our focus is Providence’s East Side, where thriving predominantly Black and multi-racial communities faced city-sanctioned, federally subsidized displacement (also called urban renewal) in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Past work to preserve the stories of the East Side’s Black families has led to murals and events for people to gather, document and tell stories. Actor and historian Sylvia Ann Soares shared a powerful performance at one of these events. Through Community Health Innovations of RI, an organization Dannie founded to work with communities to advance community health, we are creating more vehicles to share the stories of Black Families from the East Side - Mt Hope and Lippitt Hill. 

History:
Approximately 80% of the 57-acre bulldozed parcel were homes to Black residents. The new neighborhood was built to accommodate 13% Black tenants. The City celebrated this statistic by comparing it to Providence’s overall 8% Black population, classifying the area racially integrated. You can read more here and here.

Our Work:
We want to reframe hegemonic stories to activate a more nuanced and evocative perception of history. At our events, we use critical oral histories to look at how urban removal is understood and how it was responded to by people impacted and their descendants.

We use a multi-sensory aproach. We pay special attention to food, music, and arts-based storytelling. At our workshops, we read George Houston Bass’ 1970’s play The Providence Garden Blues. The play is based on interviews with 80 seniors in Providence about their lives against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the urban renewal projects that destroyed the East Side.

Using a desire-centered approach, rather than documenting pain and brokenness to hold power accountable, we contribute to preserving new foundational stories that can reshape how we relate to Lippitt Hill and the broader effects of urban renewal.

In May 2023, after a year of project development, Dannie, Rochelle Lee, April Brown, Virginia Thimas, Justice Ameer, Marijoan Bull, and I co-hosted our first semi-public critical oral history event for 15 invited community members with direct experience of urban renewal. The event was documented by filmmaker Don Mays. 

Our Future:
We are raising funds to create a documentary film and develop popular education workshops that bring older adults and young people together to respond to urban renewal’s legacy.