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This weekend, Grand Center hosts a string of local and national acts.

Six initiative petitions filed last week seeking to add rape and incest exceptions to Missouri’s abortion ban are facing pushback from both sides of the issue, pilloried as either an anti-abortion wolf in sheep’s clothing or a clandestine push to allow abortion on demand. Filed by Republican political operative Jamie Corley with assistance from Democratic […]

The post New initiative petitions draw criticism from both sides of Missouri abortion debate appeared first on Missouri Independent.

As a 5th generation Missouri farmer, I know what the stakes are. As independent family farmers, we are responsible for our animals and the land 365 days a year, through every type of weather, year in and year out. We carry the majority of the risk, and then we watch corporate meatpackers take the majority […]

The post History of the hog industry shows how to save the cattle industry appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The United Steelworkers is backing Cleveland-Cliffs’ bid for U.S. Steel because of CEO Lourenco Goncalves’ commitment to blast furnaces.

by Vianna Davila and Jessica Priest

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton held a news conference in May decrying state lawmakers’ anticipated vote to impeach him, he framed the decision as not only a threat to his political career but as one that endangered the slew of lawsuits he’d filed against the Biden administration.

Paxton, who has since been suspended from office, faces an impeachment trial that starts today. He has long positioned himself as one of the country’s strongest conservative attorneys general, relentlessly pursuing nearly 50 lawsuits against the federal government on issues that include immigration, health care and the environment. Such messaging raised Paxton’s national profile, appealed to his base of conservative supporters and helped him tamp down political pushback stemming from allegations of wrongdoing that have dogged his eight-year tenure.

But as Paxton has aggressively pursued such lawsuits, he has repeatedly declined to do a critical but less glamorous part of his job: represent state agencies in court.

Despite his role as Texas’ lead attorney, Paxton has denied representation to state agencies at least 75 times in the past two years, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The denials forced some of those agencies to assume additional, unanticipated costs as they scrambled to secure legal assistance.

“Every time he backs out of one of these cases – and an agency, a university has to get outside counsel, if they get the funding approved – that's costing the taxpayers a lot of extra money, because that's one of the principal reasons the AG’s office exists, is to provide these basic legal services, basic legal defense,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General.

Over the years, some of Paxton’s representation denials have become public. Among those is his longtime refusal to defend the state Ethics Commission against lawsuits filed by the now-disbanded Empower Texans, a political action committee, and the PAC’s then-head Michael Quinn Sullivan. Empower Texans contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign and loaned him $1 million, according to campaign finance reports. Another has been his choice not to represent the State Commission on Judicial Conduct after it issued a public warning to a justice of the peace who refused to perform same-sex marriages despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized the unions.

But the scope of the denials has not been fully known. Neither have details of other times he has said no to state agencies seeking representation.

In one such instance, Paxton declined to represent the University of Houston–Clear Lake after students filed a lawsuit alleging the university wouldn’t recognize their organization because of the group’s requirement that its officers be Christian. Until then, the attorney general’s office had never before declined to represent the university in a case, said university spokesperson Chris Stipes.

In another instance, Paxton’s office not only held off on a decision to represent the University of Texas System in an affirmative action case, but also withheld a determination on whether the university could hire outside legal counsel, forcing multiple delays. That choice stands in contrast to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to represent the University of Texas at Austin in a similar case 15 years earlier when he was the state’s attorney general.

Texas lawmakers in 2021 required the attorney general’s office to begin reporting each time it declined to represent a state agency. It’s unclear what prompted the mandate.

ProPublica and the Tribune obtained records documenting dozens of denials through a Public Information Act request, but the vast majority do not include a clear reason for the decisions. The attorney general’s office declined to provide specifics about its communications with state agencies, including those that occurred before the reporting requirement went into effect, citing attorney-client privilege. The office also did not respond to a question about whether the agency tracked these denials prior to 2021.

Lawmakers took additional action this year, requiring the attorney general to start giving reasons for the denials beginning Sept. 1.

Paxton’s office has claimed that the bulk of those denials were because agencies preferred to hire their own attorneys or because the office was statutorily prevented from representing them. Other requests, Paxton has said, were turned down because they would have required his office to take a position opposite of what it had previously argued or because he believed they would run contrary to the state’s constitution.

An office spokesperson said the attorney general approves the vast majority of solicitations for help, but neither the office nor Paxton responded to requests for interviews or to detailed questions about specific denials.

Such transparency is necessary, according to former attorneys general and legal experts, who say that Paxton’s denials reflect a broader polarization among attorneys general across the country, threatening the claim that they represent the rule of law.

“He certainly was one of those people that was leading the way of this idea that they don't have to enforce or defend anything they don't like,” Toth said. “And that's not what AGs are elected to do. And it's not the courageous thing to do either because AGs have to do the right thing by the law, even when it's not popular.”

In 2014, Colorado’s then-Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post that warned against such politicization of the office. In the piece, Suthers criticized three Democratic attorneys general at the time, including California’s Kamala Harris, now U.S. vice president, for refusing to defend their state’s ban on gay marriage ahead of the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing the unions. “I fear that refusing to defend unpopular or politically distasteful laws will ultimately weaken the legal and moral authority that attorneys general have earned and depend on,” he wrote.

Suthers reiterated the same concern about Paxton’s refusal to defend state agencies in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune.

“If you decide for yourself what laws ought to be defended, what agencies ought to be defended on other than dictates of the courts, then you come across as nothing but a wholly political entity,” Suthers said. “That's not the role that you're supposed to play in the system. Let the legislature and the governor be political. You're supposed to be adhering to the rule of law."

Growing Costs

During a legislative committee hearing in February, Mary González, a state representative from the El Paso area, grilled Paxton about his decisions to not represent state agencies. She and other lawmakers had just finished asking Paxton about his office’s agreement more than a week earlier to pay $3.3 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit with former employees who had accused him of bribery and retaliation.

González, a Democrat, asked Paxton if he had made an active decision to have the attorney general’s office take on the lawsuit filed against him. She noted that Paxton’s office could have declined to represent him in court the same way it had denied representation to state agencies.

“Ultimately, the attorney general isn't doing his job,” González said in an interview with the news organizations. “We should care if any elected official is not doing their job.”

Paxton and his staff did not directly answer González’s question but raised the various reasons the office would not take on a case, including instances when it thinks an agency’s argument violates the constitution.

“If we’re given a case that appears to us clearly to be unconstitutional, they want us to take a position against the constitution. That’s a real problem for me given my oath,” Paxton said.

Two days later, Jacqueline Habersham, executive director of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, appeared before the same legislators to request $150,000 to help cover legal fees over the next two years. Paxton has refused to defend the commission in two ongoing lawsuits.

In late 2019, a justice of the peace in Waco, Texas, less than two hours south of Dallas, sued the judicial commission in district court after it issued her a public warning because of statements she made to the media about disagreeing with and refusing to perform same-sex marriages after they’d been legalized, casting “doubt on her capacity to act impartially.” The lawsuit argued that the commission’s public punishment of the justice of the peace constituted “a substantial burden” on her “free exercise of religion,” according to court records.

A few months later, the county judge of Jack County, northwest of Fort Worth, sued the judicial commission in federal court, arguing that he also was at risk of being sanctioned because he did not perform same-sex marriages. An attorney for the county judge declined to comment.

The cases, and the costs, are ongoing.

Even before Habersham went to lawmakers for help, the judicial commission had already spent $120,000 for outside counsel because Paxton had declined to provide representation. She said the small agency had previously not budgeted for such expenses. With the commission having no way to know if the attorney general will deny legal help again, “we’re just hoping that no other lawsuits are filed against us, where the AG will also decline (to represent us) again,” Habersham said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune.

In 2015, after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, Paxton issued an opinion that said judges should not have to perform these ceremonies if they have religious objections. Asked in 2020 about not representing the commission, an attorney general spokesman told the Houston Chronicle, “We believe judges retain their right to religious liberty when they take the bench.”

The statement and Paxton’s decision against defending the judicial commission “certainly has the appearance that he's refusing to do it because he disagrees with the Supreme Court decision, and therefore he's making a political decision and not a legal decision,” said Suthers, the former Colorado attorney general.

The plaintiffs in both lawsuits filed against the commission have at some point been represented by First Liberty Institute, a Plano-based conservative Christian law firm. The firm’s president and chief executive, Kelly Shackelford, is a longtime friend of Paxton and has contributed $1,000 to a legal defense fund Paxton has used to fight an ongoing criminal indictment for securities fraud. First Liberty board member Tim Dunn is among Paxton’s biggest individual donors, having given him $820,000 since he first ran for attorney general. Political action committees associated with Dunn have also donated more than $950,000 combined to Paxton. Neither Shackelford nor Dunn responded to a request for comment.

First Liberty’s executive general counsel, Hiram Sasser, who briefly worked for the attorney general’s office under Paxton, said he doesn’t know how donations would have affected the attorney general’s decision.

But Sasser said he would have been disappointed had the attorney general chosen to represent the commission. He alleges that the commission is violating the Waco justice of the peace’s rights under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which limits government actions that substantially burden someone’s ability to freely exercise their religion, and the Texas Constitution because it violates her freedom of speech and religion.

The judicial commission’s private attorneys said that the justice of the peace argued those points before the commission in 2019 but lost the case. They maintain that she did not appeal that case, so she has no right to pursue a new lawsuit that claims the warning was invalid.

State law says the attorney general’s office shall represent the judicial commission in court at its request, which indicates Paxton has minimal wiggle room to refuse to defend them, said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University, who researches attorneys general.

“This seems more like the AG choosing to adopt a certain constitutional interpretation and then saying, 'Well, I believe it's unconstitutional, therefore, I'm not going to defend it.' But it's still ambiguous. It's not like an open and shut case.”

Contrasting Legal Approaches

While about 15 years apart, two cases against the University of Texas at Austin lay bare the different approaches taken by Paxton and Abbott, Paxton’s predecessor and now the state’s Republican governor.

Under Abbott’s leadership, the attorney general’s office defended UT-Austin in federal district court against a lawsuit filed by Abigail Fisher and another student. In the 2008 lawsuit, the students, who were white, alleged that the school’s consideration of race in admissions prevented them from being accepted. The attorney general’s office argued that the university’s admission policy was legal because Fisher had not proven it was adopted in bad faith. The office also argued the policy was narrowly tailored to achieve needed diversity there.

Fisher appealed the district court’s decision in favor of the university in 2009. Although Abbott did not represent the university throughout the entire appeals process, he submitted a nearly 50-page brief in December 2011 when the case first went before the Supreme Court, urging the high court to reject the case. The attorney general office’s leading argument was that Fisher, by then scheduled to graduate from another university in 2012, could no longer assert that she intended to apply to UT-Austin as a freshman or transfer student.

Abbott did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld UT’s affirmative action policies in a 4-3 decision. (Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the decision and one seat was vacant at the time.)

In contrast, Paxton not only withheld a decision on representing the UT System in another affirmative action case earlier this year, but also kept the agency in limbo by holding off on allowing it to hire outside legal counsel.

On Jan. 12, a lawyer with the UT System sent a letter to the attorney general requesting representation after a man named George Stewart filed a federal lawsuit against six medical schools that had rejected his applications for admission. All but one of the schools were in the UT System. Stewart, who is white, argued that the schools were “unlawfully discriminating against whites, Asians, and men.” Stewart and his attorneys declined to comment.

Over the next several weeks, UT System attorneys contacted a deputy chief in Paxton’s office numerous times. They called. They emailed. The deputy chief told UT lawyers that “decisionmakers” at the attorney general’s office were aware that filing deadlines were approaching but were still considering the request, court documents show.

UT System lawyers eventually were forced to ask the plaintiff’s lawyer for an extension, delaying the case.

More than a month passed before the attorney general formally responded.

The attorney general’s office wrote in a letter that it agreed with the plaintiff’s argument that considering race and gender in student admissions was illegal and that it was awaiting the outcome of other affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court. The attorney general’s office also wrote in the letter that it had filed briefs urging the court to do away with affirmative action because it was “abhorrent to the Constitution.”

“For these reasons, we are choosing at this time to withhold a decision on your request for representation and for outside counsel,” the letter said.

UT could represent itself, the letter continued, but only for the purpose of requesting extensions in the case. Although state agencies like UT often have their own in-house general counsel, the attorney general is officially their lawyer. The state agency lawyers aren’t necessarily litigators, or litigation may only be a small part of their job. Often, their time is spent giving internal legal advice, reviewing contracts or consulting on employment issues. State agencies smaller than UT may not even have attorneys on staff.

Catherine Frazier, a UT System spokesperson, would not comment on the lawsuit or answer questions but said that the school, like every state agency, is required to ask the attorney general for representation or outside counsel. Every case is different, she said, and the UT System has ultimately been able to secure counsel.

Months later, the Supreme Court would rule in a 6-3 decision that consideration of race in college admissions violates the U.S. Constitution. But neither the attorney general nor UT lawyers knew how the high court would vote when Stewart filed his lawsuit.

“The law was clear that affirmative action was allowed (at the time),” said Terry Goddard, a Democrat who was Arizona’s attorney general from 2003 to 2011. “I don't think you get to wait for the next round of Supreme Court decisions to make up your mind.”

Goddard’s approach to the attorney general role, he said, was that if he could make any constitutional argument in support of a law, whether or not he agreed with it, “it was your job to take that argument and do the best job you could.”

"Now, that's not what we're hearing today from people like Paxton,” Goddard said. “He's basically saying, 'Look, I'm not gonna make the argument at all.' He didn't even take what I think is the appropriate fallback, which is, ‘I won't support it. And the record will show that I'm not supporting your position, but I'm going to get you counsel.'"

About a month after Paxton was impeached by the Texas House and suspended from his position, the attorney general’s office, while under the leadership of interim Attorney General John Scott, finally allowed the UT System to hire outside lawyers in the affirmative action case.

“Playing Favoritism”

Just as Paxton has declined cases where he has an opposing view, he has chosen to get involved with others with whom he is aligned ideologically.

In 2020, Lucas Babin, a district attorney in East Texas, obtained an indictment against the streaming service Netflix for distributing the French film “Cuties,” a documentary about a Senegalese immigrant who joins a children’s dance troupe. The director has said the film critiques the sexualization of young girls, but critics focused on some of the film’s advertising depicting the girls dressed in tight, midriff-baring clothing or scenes showing them dancing. Babin alleged the film violated a state law that bans the “lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child,” which Netflix has disputed.

Less than two weeks before Babin announced the indictment, Paxton was one of four attorneys general who signed a letter to Netflix “vehemently” opposing the continued streaming of the film.

After an appellate court ruled in an unrelated case in 2021 that the lewd exhibition charge was unconstitutional, Netflix requested that Babin dismiss his indictment. Babin dropped that charge in March 2022 after he brought four new indictments that alleged the film violated state child pornography statutes.

On March 3, 2022, Netflix filed a request for injunction in federal court, arguing Babin was “abusing his office” by bringing the new indictments in response to Netflix’s effort to get the first indictment dismissed. The film had won awards, Netflix argued, and Babin was infringing on the company’s “constitutional rights.” (The Texas Tribune is among a group that has filed an amicus brief in support of Netflix in its case against Babin.)

The following day, Babin arrived in court, this time as a defendant, with a lawyer of his own: an assistant attorney general from Paxton’s office.

Under Texas state law, the attorney general is obligated to represent state district attorneys under limited circumstances, specifically when the case is in federal court and when the person filing the lawsuit is in prison.

It’s not unusual for a district attorney to ask the attorney general’s office for help, said Nolette. What’s surprising, he said, is that the state said yes.

“This isn't a case where the DA said, ‘Please help me in this case to prosecute Netflix,’” Nolette said. “It's that they're being sued by Netflix for essentially prosecutorial misconduct. And yet, the AG is getting involved in a local issue where this is not a state agency.”

“It just gives the perception, and obviously some of this is specific to Paxton, that he's playing favoritism,” Nolette said.

Neither Babin nor Netflix responded to a request for comment.

In November 2022, a federal judge granted Netflix’s request for a preliminary injunction, essentially preventing Babin and his office from pursuing new indictments against the tech company until the initial case is resolved. Babin has appealed that decision.

The attorney general’s office, along with a private attorney, continue to represent him.

Carla Astudillo of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

Songwriter Desmond Child had a hand in co-writing some of the biggest stadium anthems and sing-alongs of our time, including Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” and Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like A Lady." But some…

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Hot temperatures are predicted today. Temperatures are projected to be a quite steamy high of 91. Today has the makings of a perfect day to hit the pool or find a nice air-conditioned room. We'll see a low temperature of…

A passel of program authorizations and funding expire in September. There isn’t really a path yet to deal with them all.

Biden may be a drag on the Democratic ticket, but there are plenty of other sources of energy and mobilization.

by Brandi Kellam, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

As a high school sprinter in Virginia’s Tidewater region, I often participated in meets at Christopher Newport University’s Freeman Center, which had one of the few indoor tracks in the area. I won 500-meter races against top runners, and my high school was team champion.

Track and field was a huge part of my identity. I looked forward to crossing the Monitor-Merrimac bridge over the James River to Newport News, and I saw the opportunity to display my skill at Christopher Newport as a way to impress colleges and earn an athletic scholarship. It wouldn’t be until 20 years later that I understood the underlying irony. The construction of Christopher Newport, where Black athletes like me competed alongside our white counterparts, had displaced Black homeowners whose hopes and aspirations were dashed by racism.

That personal connection helps explain why I have spent more than two years exploring a largely forgotten tragedy: how Newport News officials and educational leaders eradicated the Black middle-class area of Shoe Lane to establish and expand Christopher Newport’s campus.

Month after month, first under a Columbia University grant, and then under a ProPublica/Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism fellowship, I pored over archival records in Newport News libraries and city offices, reconstructing Shoe Lane’s history. Often going back a century or more, I examined land deeds, voter rolls, newspaper clippings, City Council minutes, marriage licenses and obituaries. I also interviewed remaining residents, descendants of former property owners, eminent domain and civil rights attorneys, local historians, academic experts and Virginia legislators.

My investigation cast my home region in a different light. I thought about how racism had constrained where my parents and grandparents could live. My father managed a grocery store in Newport News, but I hadn’t known much about the city’s past. Now I recognized that housing patterns, such as the concentration of Black people in the impoverished downtown at the southern tip, didn’t simply reflect market conditions such as prices and availability. They also resulted from government actions, like redlining or eminent domain seizures, that have contributed to a widening racial gap in homeownership nationwide. About 73% of white households own their homes, compared with 44% of Black households, according to the National Association of Realtors.

I also realized that colleges and universities have at times exacerbated those inequalities. All too often, educational institutions also control the narrative about their role in society, including their expansion into diverse communities, and it’s the journalist’s responsibility to find victims and make their voices heard. “The University publicly acknowledges that residents of a valuable and well-established neighborhood were displaced by decisions made about the location of the University,” spokesperson Jim Hanchett said in a statement. “University faculty have spearheaded efforts to raise awareness of this history and its impact. At the same time, the University’s growth has fueled the economic revival of Newport News’ mid-city area.”

I first learned about the neighborhood that was destroyed to make way for Christopher Newport from an alumnus. I was looking for a reporting project near my hometown of Chesapeake, Virginia. After a decade of reporting nationally, I wanted to make an impact in my home community. My source told me about the demolition of the Shoe Lane area, adding that a Christopher Newport professor, Phillip Hamilton, had written a paper about it.

Initially, I juggled my Shoe Lane reporting with my day job as a CBS producer in Washington, D.C. I spent nights and weekends researching the history of Black communities in Virginia and throughout the South. I found that a neighborhood of Black property owners was unusual but hardly unprecedented. In the late 19th century, freed slaves and other African Americans who were shut out of white areas formed communities where they could seek refuge from racism. Sometimes Black Civil War veterans pooled money to buy land, or Black people acquired property from white former slave owners with whom they had kinship ties. Joseph Clarke, a former slave, bought 100 acres from a white landowner and divided them among Black families to establish the town of Eatonville in central Florida in 1887.

In Virginia, rates of landownership among freed slaves and their descendants were consistently high. In one Virginia county, 76% of Black heads of household owned land in 1890. In 1915, about 60% of Virginia’s landowners were African American, according to Adrienne Petty, a professor of history at William & Mary.

When I spoke with Hamilton, I asked if he felt there was anything missing from his research. He said he wished that he could have talked with the families exiled by eminent domain, but that they were long gone.

I wasn’t so sure. The alumnus had mentioned that a few families remained in the area. I decided to look for them. Crossing the bridge again to Newport News, I drove around the campus. I noticed one house surrounded by Christopher Newport buildings and only accessible through a university parking lot. I knocked on the door but no one answered, so I left my business card in the mailbox.

I had better luck at a house on Shoe Lane, where an elderly Black resident, Barbara Johnson, opened her door. I introduced myself and told her that I had learned about the community that used to exist where the college is now and that I wanted to tell its story.

Standing on the front porch while keeping the door ajar, Barbara told me that I should speak with her husband, James, who grew up in the community. I told her that my experience covering national stories had ignited a passion to return to my roots and report on barriers facing the local Black community.

After a brief conversation about her memories of the neighborhood and race relations in Newport News, she gave me their phone number, which I called a few days later. James answered.

"I don’t know if I can be beneficial to you or not," he told me. “I don't get involved with politics, because I like a quiet life. But if I can do anything to connect dots you already have, perhaps I can try.” He said he had some photos and documents that he might be willing to show me.

I told him I would appreciate anything he could share and asked if I could meet him and Barbara at their home. He agreed, and we scheduled a time.

Barbara and James Johnson in their living room (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

When I sat down at the Johnsons’ dining room table two days later, I discovered James had more to offer than I ever imagined. He and Barbara told me about growing up on a farm there, and about how the seizure of the neighborhood’s core by eminent domain had thwarted their family’s plan to build a subdivision for Black families. He showed me albums and notebooks filled with his photos of the demolished houses and with newspaper clippings he had collected. He described how preserving these records had been cathartic for him. It became clear that this quiet, seemingly stoic man had organized and collected over 60 years’ worth of records out of a deep attachment to the only place he knew as home.

James Johnson looking through one of his scrapbooks (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

I realized that, despite our differences in age and occupation, he and I weren’t that different. We both were dedicated to preserving the history of the community. James inspired me to work harder, and I often told him that he would have been a terrific journalist.

The Johnsons were well aware that the same forces that uprooted their community had devastated other Black neighborhoods across the country. As I continued reporting, I realized just how fiercely the Johnsons and other Black families had fought against redlining and other outgrowths of systemic racism, how doggedly they had pursued their piece of the American dream, and how much they had sacrificed.

As a Black journalist, I’m grateful for the unique access the Johnsons granted me. They and others from the Shoe Lane community gave me the rare opportunity to witness its history and shift the narrative.

Reach Brandi Kellam at brandi@brandikellam.com or brandi.kellam@vcij.org.

by Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Katie Luck was sitting in her yard under a magnolia tree one afternoon in April when a school bus passed by. A white elementary school student shouted at her from a window, “You don’t belong here.”

The 81-year-old grandmother and retired teacher, who is Black, was so distressed that she called James and Barbara Johnson, who live down the road from her on Shoe Lane in Newport News, Virginia. The Johnsons, perhaps better than anyone, knew just how wrong the elementary schooler was. The stacks of files and photo albums on their dining room table are a shrine to what the Shoe Lane area used to be — and what it might have become.

Around 1960, in the last gasp of the Jim Crow era, the Shoe Lane community consisted of a church and about 20 Black families, including teachers, dentists, a high school principal and a NASA engineer. They owned ranch-style houses along Shoe Lane and three other streets, which formed a trapezoid enclosing woods and farmland. The Johnsons were planning to sell some of the farmland to Black people who aspired to the American dream of homeownership but were shut out of white neighborhoods by racist banking and zoning policies. The enclave’s population was about to grow.

But geography — and racism — were against them. The 110-acre Shoe Lane area lay beside one of the city’s most affluent white sections, where Newport News’ power brokers played golf at a segregated country club. Aware that more Black families would be moving to the area, the Newport News City Council wielded its most powerful weapon: eminent domain, the government’s right to forcibly purchase private property for public use. In 1961, it seized the core of the Shoe Lane area, including the Johnsons’ farmland, for a new public two-year college — a branch of the Colleges of William and Mary system. The council overrode protests from homeowners and civil rights advocates that there were more suitable, and less expensive, sites elsewhere for the college, which today is Christopher Newport University. The city worsened the blow by paying 20% less for the properties than the value set by an independent appraiser, council records show.

The campus location “was almost entirely a racial issue,” said Christopher Newport professor Phillip Hamilton, author of a history of the institution, who examined records including minutes of the City Council’s deliberations. “I believe they wanted to remove the Black community from here. They certainly wanted to halt the arrival of middle-class Blacks.”

The Shoe Lane seizure was an “egregious wrong,” said Anthony Santoro, Christopher Newport’s president from 1987 to 1996. “Historically, the city has to own up to the fact that this was a deliberate attempt to get rid of a Black community, because there were many places that the school could have been built.”

Christopher Newport University (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

All white at its inception, the college enrolled its first Black student in 1965. It became independent from William and Mary in 1977. As it expanded into a university under Santoro’s leadership, it was eyeing the parts of Shoe Lane that weren’t affected by the initial taking. While it ruled out using eminent domain, it sought to acquire the remaining homes and businesses through traditional sales. Feeling blindsided, homeowners sued the school in 1989. They contended that, because Christopher Newport had extended its boundaries to encompass their houses, they couldn’t sell to anyone else. The case was dismissed.

Santoro’s successor, longtime president Paul Trible, said publicly he wouldn’t need to invoke eminent domain. But his administration used it as leverage to force at least one homeowner to sell in 2005, records show. That same year, the school’s governing board approved its use for three other properties that Christopher Newport said it ultimately acquired without resorting to eminent domain.

Christopher Newport “publicly acknowledges that residents of a valuable and well-established neighborhood were displaced by decisions made about the location of the University,” spokesperson Jim Hanchett said in a statement. “University faculty have spearheaded efforts to raise awareness of this history and its impact. At the same time, the University’s growth has fueled the economic revival of Newport News’ mid-city area.” Trible, who is retired, could not be reached for comment.

Today, only five Black households, including the Johnsons and Katie Luck, are left in the Shoe Lane area. One sits between sorority and fraternity houses and a residence hall; the only street access is through a university parking lot. A dorm and a student center occupy land that the Johnsons hoped to develop.

Barbara and James Johnson sit in their living room in July. They helped build the home on family property almost 60 years ago. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

One spring afternoon, the Johnsons sat and reminisced in the home they helped build with their own hands. They’ve lived there since they were married, in their 20s, except when James was in the Army. Now in their 80s, the couple lamented the absence of family and former neighbors, now scattered far and wide.

Their scrapbooks trace the dismantling of a vibrant Black community. Six-decade-old civil engineering maps detail the family’s plans to develop the farmland that was taken by eminent domain. Faded news clippings, carefully snipped and placed in chronological order inside sheet protectors, recount the City Council’s selection of Shoe Lane for the college campus. Rusted metal staples fasten protest letters homeowners sent to college officials and papers from their unsuccessful federal lawsuit.

Thumbing through the albums, James Johnson paused suddenly, as if struck by a distant memory. He disappeared into the back of his house and returned with yet two more scrapbooks: pages of original land deeds more than a century old and images of one- and two-story homes photographed hastily before they were demolished in the 1990s and 2000s.

Scrapbooks on the Johnsons’ dining room table chronicle the demise of the Shoe Lane community. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

An auto mechanic by trade, Johnson became the self-appointed historian of his vanishing neighborhood. “When things started moving fast, I woke up one morning and told my wife, ‘I got to document this community,’” James said. “This helped me get through.” He peered through his bifocals at a photo of dump trucks carrying debris from houses leveled to make way for the college. Affixed to the photo was a yellow sticky note: “The trucks that haul our homes away after they have been trashed.”

“This was truly a village,” Barbara said. “Young folks don’t know anything about what used to be here.”

James Johnson became the self-appointed historian of his vanishing neighborhood. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photographs taken by James Johnson.)

James Johnson’s lips curled into a resolute half-smile partially covered by his salt-and-pepper mustache. “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” he said. “All the guys I grew up with moved away. It was hard.

“We’ve known, all over the country, this is what they’ve done to neighborhoods where Blacks are. We all felt it was taken because it was a Black neighborhood.”

The Johnsons raised three children in their Shoe Lane home. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photographs taken by James Johnson.)

As debate rages over the reality of historical and present-day racial discrimination, the Shoe Lane saga illuminates a long-standing aspect of the African American experience: the confiscation and destruction of Black neighborhoods for higher-education facilities in the post-World War II period. A federal program that provided financial incentives for university expansions was responsible for displacing nearly 20,000 families in the U.S. between 1959 and 1966, according to University of Richmond professor Robert Nelson, who has compiled an online database on the topic. While working-class white residents were also dislodged, roughly 40% were Black families, about four times the Black proportion of the U.S. population at the time. Local and state programs expelled thousands more Black families, like the Shoe Lane homeowners, for higher-education projects.

Eminent domain seizures by universities exacerbated the racial gap in homeownership and the widespread loss of Black-owned properties, resulting in “the loss of wealth by African American communities and individual African Americans,” Nelson said. Even those residents who found better housing “still lament the fact that their community and their neighborhood was destroyed.”

University seizures were part of a broader policy of urban renewal, famously dubbed “Negro removal” by author James Baldwin. Touted for improving ramshackle neighborhoods, urban renewal also ravaged thriving communities. Eminent domain was, and remains, its favored tool.

The government has long had broad powers to take property for roads, bridges and infrastructure projects. But in 1954, the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated public schools in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the court broadened government authority to acquire land by eminent domain for other public purposes, such as urban renewal. The condemning agency only had to show that some part of the area was poorly maintained.

Four children carry flyers for a community demonstration against the expansion of Temple University in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. (Harold M. Lambert/Getty Images)

“If you wanted to, you could find pretty much any neighborhood blighted,” said James Burling, vice president of legal affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that specializes in lawsuits against what it considers government overreach. “There was very little thought about what was going to happen to the people that lived there.”

Across the country, government agencies acquired Black neighborhoods through the use or threat of eminent domain, often for less than market-rate prices. A study by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, shows that two-thirds of the 1 million people displaced by eminent domain and urban renewal projects between 1949 and 1973 were Black.

Communities near colleges were especially vulnerable. As the Cold War created a clamor for more scientific training, universities rushed to build classrooms and dorms for the first wave of baby boomers and lobbied Congress for funding and authority to take over surrounding areas. “Without the right of eminent domain,” a vice president of NYU told Congress in 1959, “our institutional planning and development could be totally blocked for the future.” Local officials supported these demands, since universities served as economic-development engines for cities struggling with white flight to suburbia. That same year, an amendment to the Federal Housing Act gave colleges wider latitude — and generous subsidies — to ally with cities to expand into stable neighborhoods.

In the 1960s, some of the nation’s most prominent universities swept into Black neighborhoods. The University of Pennsylvania forced almost 600 families out of a predominantly African American neighborhood known as Black Bottom to make room for a science center, touching off protests and student sit-ins. The University of Georgia leveled Linnentown, a Black community of 50 families, for dorms and parking. The University of Oklahoma took an area of more than 650 Black families in Oklahoma City for a medical center. In Virginia, cities seized Black properties to expand public campuses in Norfolk and Charlottesville, as well as Newport News.

“Small colleges, large colleges, small cities, large cities — it was widespread just in the same way that urban renewal, more broadly, is widespread,” said Virginia Tech professor LaDale Winling, author of “Building the Ivory Tower.”

How Christopher Newport University Uprooted a Black Neighborhood Maps were created using land deeds and parcel geodata from the Newport News, Virginia, assessor’s office. Campus boundaries are based on analysis of aerial imagery that was obtained from the Newport News city planning department. Some buildings or locations may be omitted from historical maps because city records only reflect current parcels. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

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A statue of jaunty, bearded Christopher Newport, wearing a cavalier hat and leaning on a sword, looms at the entrance to his namesake university. Behind the mariner who transported settlers to the Virginia Colony in the early 17th century lies a campus of brick Colonial and Georgian-style buildings named after public officials, university administrators and wealthy donors.

A statue of Christopher Newport, the ship captain for whom the university is named, stands at the entrance to campus. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

The land where the 4,500-student university now stands had been a Black community at least as far back as the turn of the 20th century. Black people, likely including freed slaves and their descendants, settled the area, working on farms or at the shipyards, scraping together money for their piece of America. Back then it was a mix of forests, farmland and dirt paths that led to a couple of dozen homes bordered by four streets: Shoe Lane, Moores Lane, Prince Drew Road and Warwick Boulevard.

James Johnson’s grandfather Edward Johnson came from Chesterfield, Virginia, about 90 miles north of Newport News. In 1907, he purchased slightly more than 30 acres of land in the Shoe Lane area. Since he could barely read or write, his wife, Nannie, helped him arrange it. Edward raised pigs and grew peas, beans and corn. During World War II, he received a certificate of appreciation from President Franklin Roosevelt for his work with the draft board.

James Johnson’s grandfather and grandmother. Edward Johnson bought 30 acres in the Shoe Lane area in 1907. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

James was born in 1938 and grew up on Shoe Lane, then a dirt road. Across from its entrance, close to where the Christopher Newport statue stands today, one of James’ uncles erected a statue of a horse. It served as a signpost for customers of a horse training school across the street from the Johnsons. As a boy, James made money by charging the school’s patrons to park on his grandfather’s land during riding shows.

“At the end of a day of parking cars, 25 cents a car, I had a pocketful of quarters,” James said. “I thought I was rich.”

A Daily Press article from 1954 featured the statue that was a signpost for customers of a horse training school across from the Johnsons’ house. (Daily Press/TCA)

The community was remarkably self-sufficient. Neighbors helped build and refurbish each other’s houses and loaned each other money for funeral expenses. Many families were connected by blood or marriage. James’ aunt Alice lived on Shoe Lane and taught Sunday school at nearby First Baptist Church Morrison. She baked and sold brownies to take her class on field trips.

Barbara, James’ future wife, grew up nearby. They met in middle school and began dating in high school. An avid photographer from his early teens, he chronicled their blossoming relationship. He still keeps a selfie, which he took by holding a camera in his outstretched hand, of their first kiss. Barbara played alto sax in the band in high school and at Virginia State University, a historically Black college, graduating with a degree in home economics. James was drafted into the U.S. Army.

James Johnson kept this selfie of his and Barbara’s first kiss. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photograph by James Johnson.)

In the mid-1950s, many white developers across the country were building suburban subdivisions. Hidenwood, then a whites-only housing development, sprang up around the James River Country Club, adjacent to Shoe Lane. At the time, the Johnsons’ extended family owned several houses and 20 acres of farmland. They had the idea to convert the farmland into lots for middle-class Black families who were excluded from Newport News’ desirable white neighborhoods.

In 1956, the Johnsons started dividing 5 acres on the corner of Shoe Lane and Moores Lane into six lots. With the city’s approval, they sold them to several middle-class Black buyers, including William Walker, a real estate developer. They dubbed the new subdivision Johnson Terrace.

In 1959, the Johnsons began planning to divide their other 15 acres into at least 35 lots. They hired a civil engineer, who drew up plans that included curbs, gutters, a new road and sewers, at a cost of at least $75,000.

The Johnsons sold lots to middle-class Black families for a new subdivision they called Johnson Terrace. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

The Johnson Terrace project typified the emerging economic and political activism in the Black community nationwide. The Civil Rights Movement was growing, and the Brown v. Board decision was opening opportunities for Black children to learn side by side with white students. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. regularly traveled to the Tidewater area to address church congregations, urging Black parishioners to protest for economic and social equality.

State leaders resisted change. U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., boss of Democratic politics in Virginia for nearly four decades, led a campaign known as Massive Resistance to shutter public schools rather than integrate. Private whites-only schools sprang up.

“As you know, we face a grave crisis in Virginia,” Gov. J. Lindsay Almond wrote to a Norfolk schoolteacher in October 1958. “Mixing of the races will destroy public schools in many areas and seriously militate against their efficient operation in other areas.”

In 1960, only four of Virginia’s 13 predominantly white public colleges enrolled African Americans. Of the 31,000 students in those 13 schools, just 50 were Black. The all-male Virginia Military Institute did not have a single Black cadet until 1968.

One of the Johnsons’ children played on the foundation of their house when it was under construction. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photograph by James Johnson.)

The Johnsons’ plans for a Black development soon collided with the ambitions of Newport News’ City Council. As the Cold War boosted production at the shipyards, the local economy was booming, and civic leaders wanted a college to educate and train the workforce. In 1960, the city of Newport News established a William and Mary branch, but it needed a permanent location.

Black residents would have little say in a decision that would drive some of them from their homes. While Black people made up 43% of Newport News’ population in 1950, poll taxes and literacy tests prevented many of them from voting. The city’s 1958 merger with the whiter surrounding county further diluted Black political power. As a result, the mayor and all the city councilors were white. They winnowed at least five potential sites for Christopher Newport College down to two only a three-minute drive apart: a racially integrated area north of Roys Lane, and the Shoe Lane area.

Newport News officials offered race-neutral reasons for considering Shoe Lane and Roys Lane, such as easy commutes for students and proximity to medical facilities. But they had repeatedly targeted neighborhoods where Black people lived for eminent domain takings. Between 1955 and 1960, they seized 30 acres farther east on Shoe Lane and 70 acres on Roys Lane for all-white public schools. Ivy Francis, James Johnson’s great-uncle, lost his Shoe Lane home in that taking and moved up the street, closer to James’ family.

This house, owned by Ivy Francis, was taken by eminent domain in the 1950s. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photographer unknown.)

“Does it not seem more than coincidental that, with the hundreds of undeveloped acres in the city, the sites recently chosen by the city for condemnation are sites owned by Negroes?” local civil rights leader C. Waldo Scott, a Black surgeon, wrote in Newport News’ Daily Press newspaper.

Although it’s not clear if the Johnsons submitted their plans for a 35-lot Black development to the city, there’s evidence that Mayor Oscar Brittingham Jr., who chaired the City Council, was aware of them. While the council was considering the Shoe Lane site, Brittingham corresponded with a real estate agent, who told him about discussions he’d had with the Johnsons regarding a residential development.

The Johnson Family’s Land Was Near a Sprawling Whites-Only Golf Course and Country Club An aerial image of the Shoe Lane area and the country club’s golf course in 1959. Boundaries were created using parcel geodata and historical maps from the Newport News, Virginia, assessor’s office. Aerial imagery was obtained from the Newport News city planning department. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Hamilton, the Christopher Newport historian, said that city leaders likely focused on Shoe Lane because it was close to the all-white James River Country Club. The club’s manager declined to provide member rosters for this article, but indicated that at least one city councilor belonged in the early 1960s. So did the city’s business elite. Even a quarter-century later, when Christopher Newport hired Santoro as president, the club didn’t admit Black or Jewish people. (He said he joined anyway because college board members told him he had to: It was where “all the money people” — prospective donors — were.)

In a series of tense City Council hearings across 1960 and into 1961, Shoe Lane residents fought for their homes. They enlisted two civil rights attorneys, W. Hale Thompson and Philip Walker (William’s brother). Along with helping to integrate the Newport News library, Thompson had represented the Johnson family on business transactions, while Walker had argued desegregation cases alongside famed civil rights lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Many homeowners in the Shoe Lane area, including the Johnsons, wrote letters urging political and educational leaders to select a different site for the campus. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Thompson and Walker contended that cheaper and better vacant sites were available and would not harm the Black community. “It is an indisputable fact that the desirable residential sites for non-white use are extremely limited,” Thompson and Walker said in a public statement. “We implore you to abandon the thought of acquiring the land in this area for public use.”

The homeowners’ white allies included Anne W. Fullman. A devout Methodist and president of Church Women United, Fullman advocated for Black people, women and migrant workers. At a City Council hearing on May 8, 1961, she deplored the “racial overtones” of the proposed purchase. “There are some very fine Negro homes in the Shoe Lane area. There should be fair play and justice for all.” Black families “too like nice homes in nice areas,” she added. “It is harder for them to buy such desirable sites.”

At one point, city councilors said they would rely on guidance from William and Mary’s governing board. The Johnsons pleaded with the all-white board. “Because of the number of Negro families which will be displaced, [we] strongly advise that the Board of Visitors not choose this site for the college,” they wrote. “This has greatly disturbed every homeowner in the area.”

But the college didn’t take a stand, deciding on May 20 that either location would be “entirely suitable,” according to meeting minutes. The board left the choice to the City Council.

There was intense local interest over whether Shoe Lane or Roys Lane would be chosen for the new college. (Daily Press/TCA)

Nine days later, residents packed every seat and lined the wood-paneled council chambers for a special hearing to select the college site. Thompson made a blunt final appeal. The city’s goal, he said, “was to eliminate the possibility of Negroes building homes in that area.” The council surveyed attendees of both races, and a majority favored the integrated Roys Lane as the college site, though most of the white residents preferred Shoe Lane. By a 5-2 vote, the all-white council picked Shoe Lane.

Santoro believes that city leaders at the time wanted to destroy the entire Shoe Lane community. “I had heard that the goal was to wipe it out completely, you know, no houses or anything,” he said. “I was told that that was the plan: It was to erase the Black spot — they called it a ‘Black spot.’ And I didn’t like hearing that at all.”

But “there was such an uproar” that the city narrowed its sights, he said. Enclosed by Shoe Lane and the other three streets, the 60-acre zone designated for the new campus by the City Council was a mix of houses, woods and farmland. James’ home, and his parents’, lay outside its boundary, as did the finished 5-acre subdivision. The zone did include the 15 acres that the Johnsons planned to develop, as well as the house where James’ uncle Ivy had moved after the prior Shoe Lane seizure. He was twice dispossessed.

At this standing-room-only hearing, the Newport News City Council picked Shoe Lane as the site for Christopher Newport Junior College. (Daily Press/TCA)

With the council’s approval, Newport News moved to buy the Shoe Lane properties. Undaunted by the political setback, most of the families refused to sell. The city invoked eminent domain to acquire 18 properties. Laws at the time allowed cities to choose favorable assessed values. Unhappy with an independent appraiser’s assessment of $363,000 combined for the properties, the city ordered another valuation. The council accepted a lower appraisal of $290,000. One couple received $500 — about $5,000 in today’s dollars — for a quarter-acre parcel.

The Johnsons held out so long that the city boosted its original offer for the 15 acres — $35,250 — to almost $53,000. Still, they had to surrender the land that they wanted to develop. Their hopes of creating a refuge for Black people from housing discrimination had been crushed.

Anthony Santoro was an outsider: an Illinois native and president of a college in Maine. When he became Christopher Newport’s fourth president, in 1987, he inherited what he called an “impossible situation.”

Former Christopher Newport president Anthony Santoro, shown here in his office, said that the taking of the core of the Shoe Lane area by eminent domain was an "egregious wrong.'' (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

The city, Santoro said, had “made a mess of” acquiring property for the campus. “They tried to build a school by eradicating a community, but they were only able to eradicate part of it. And that exacerbated the problem.”

While Christopher Newport occupied the geographic center of the Shoe Lane area, more Black families had moved there in the quarter-century since the 1961 taking. They built homes around the campus perimeter, joining longtime residents like the Johnsons. After serving six years in the Army, James Johnson worked at automotive plants, while Barbara taught home economics in a school for the deaf and blind. They raised three children, two boys and one girl.

The school’s master site plan called for extending the campus boundary and swallowing 90 more properties, including the rest of the Shoe Lane homes. Santoro dismissed using eminent domain: “It would have just started a new war.” The school had also promised not to “initiate, nor actively seek” to buy property in the Shoe Lane area. Nevertheless, Santoro said, Christopher Newport contacted each homeowner. Some simply refused to sell. But if the issue was money, the school met their price. “We paid a premium, as we should have,” Santoro said.

An aerial view of Christopher Newport University in 2015 (Daily Press/TCA)

Many homeowners felt differently. They learned about the site plan not from Christopher Newport but from the newspaper, heightening their fears of a 1960s rerun, according to court documents. They felt that the plan would decimate their community. Additionally, despite Christopher Newport’s disavowals, they worried that the school might eventually take their properties by eminent domain, and that this prospect would scare off other buyers. They formed an association, which hired Richmond civil rights lawyer Gerald Zerkin. “It just seemed like they were getting screwed by Christopher Newport,” Zerkin said in an interview.

In 1989, the association sued Christopher Newport’s board and president and the governor of Virginia in federal court, seeking to block the expansion. Lawrence Brown, a resident who worked on the Apollo project for NASA, served as lead plaintiff. Katie Luck, who had moved to Shoe Lane in 1985 to care for an elderly friend, was among the homeowners who, through a public records request, gained access to Christopher Newport’s expansion plans. School officials contended that the site plan was merely “advisory” and an “internal working document.”

This news article alerted homeowners that Christopher Newport was planning more expansion in their neighborhood. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

Judge Robert Doumar ordered the plaintiffs to include all affected Shoe Lane homeowners in the lawsuit. Otherwise, if some of them wanted to sell to the school, a ruling for the plaintiffs would interfere with legitimate transactions, he said. Saying it would be costly and time-consuming to track down all the homeowners and gain their permission, the association refused to comply with the order. Shortly before the trial was supposed to start, Doumar dismissed the lawsuit.

James Johnson was disappointed but not surprised. “We didn’t expect it to be in our favor,” he said. “We were against the whole city and the state.”

The defeat spurred James to photograph houses within the school’s site plan, knowing they might soon be razed. “I realized that people will never know this community, how it was,” he said. “I became very depressed.”

Christopher Newport kept expanding. From 1987 to 2019, it acquired at least 70 properties in the Shoe Lane area, far more than the city had taken by eminent domain in the 1960s, according to an analysis of real estate records. In 2003, the university, state and city partnered to acquire the Baptist church where many of the families worshipped; it was demolished to widen Warwick Boulevard.

During that period, the Johnsons sold one property to the university. Shoe Lane was being rerouted, creating a new entrance to the campus, and Aunt Alice’s old house, which James and Barbara had inherited, lay squarely in the road’s path. Having no other choice, they visited President Trible to talk terms. It was a cordial conversation, but the Johnsons were dismayed to see a map of the Shoe Lane area on Trible’s office wall, and a list of residents. Their name was on it.

Trible, a former U.S. senator from Virginia who was president of Christopher Newport from 1996 to 2022, said in 2001 that the university would not need to acquire properties by eminent domain. “Time favors Christopher Newport University,” he told the Daily Press. “This university is going to be around for hundreds of years. We’re going to get that land eventually.”

In practice, the university wasn’t so patient. In 2005, its board of visitors authorized Trible to take three properties by eminent domain for a parking lot, after negotiations reached an impasse. Black people appeared to own two of the lots. The university sought court approval to take at least one parcel, records show. A university spokesperson said that Christopher Newport’s real estate foundation purchased the properties without resorting to eminent domain.

Doug Hornsby, chief executive of the real estate foundation, left his business card in a Black resident’s mailbox in 2010. He followed up with a letter asking the homeowner to have the house appraised at his expense.

James’ aunt’s house at 40 Shoe Lane was later demolished. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Photograph on the right taken by James Johnson.)

“I need you to know that I am not interested in selling my home,” the resident responded. Hornsby declined comment.

The next year, Trible advised the homeowner in a letter to expect to be “enveloped by bulldozers, cars and students in the days ahead.” He added, “If you decide you wish to sell your property, my colleagues and I would be happy to discuss this with you.”

Between the homes of Luck and the Johnsons lies a three-quarter-acre patch of grass and trees owned by the university. It’s marked by a 2019 plaque that infuriates the Johnsons.

The plaque on the site of “Walker’s Green” honors their late neighbor William Walker. Walker was a real estate developer and president of the NAACP’s Newport News chapter. But he also served on Christopher Newport’s board while the school was expanding and the homeowners sued.

The university’s plaque honoring William Walker infuriates the Johnsons. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

The plaque notes that Walker “initially opposed” locating the college on Shoe Lane in the 1960s “because it required the taking of lands from African-American families.” But what it omits is that during his time on the board, other homeowners were upset that Walker didn’t update them about the school’s intentions, and encouraged them to compromise. “He told us we should be happy we were in the master plan because we would always be assured” of a buyer for the homes, Luck recalled. The homeowners’ association terminated his membership. Rather than reflect this conflict, the plaque praises Walker for emerging “as a staunch supporter of the school.”

Hanchett, the Christopher Newport spokesperson, said that the park and the marker are “a tangible reflection of the University’s concern and respect for its neighbors past and present” and “honor the neighborhood’s residents who led the opposition.”

Former Christopher Newport president James C. Windsor, whom Hamilton interviewed for his book on the school’s history, advised him to leave out the debate over its location because it was too controversial, the historian said. Hamilton had been unfamiliar with the issue, but the ex-president’s comment piqued his interest, and he dug into the taking of Shoe Lane. Windsor died in 2016.

Like Christopher Newport, William & Mary hasn’t fully grappled with its role in Shoe Lane’s demise. Its official history states that the city donated the land, without mentioning how, and from whom, it was obtained. In 2009, William & Mary’s board did acknowledge that the college had failed to take a stand against segregation during the Jim Crow era. Nine years later, it apologized for perpetuating “the legacies of racial discrimination.”

Nationally, and in Virginia, the higher-education playbook has hardly changed. In the past two decades, universities in Miami, Phoenix, Philadelphia and more than a dozen other cities have developed research parks in former Black and Latino communities, often through eminent domain, said Davarian Baldwin, an American-studies professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

“We want to hold on to the belief in the idea that universities are a positive influence on communities around them,” Baldwin said. “But there's a whole area of consequences that we have rarely looked at until very recently.”

Some Black community leaders have called for reparations. Baldwin has worked with residents and elected officials in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and California to push for compensation and support for displaced communities. In 2021, the mayor of Athens, Georgia, apologized to the Linnentown families whose homes were demolished for the University of Georgia’s expansion.

James Johnson indicates the campus boundaries on the university’s master site plan. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

In Newport News today, the mayor and all but one city councilor are Black. The James River Country Club admitted its first Black member in 1990. “I worked very hard to get the club to change its policies,” Santoro said. It “has everybody in it now.” Although Newport News is more than 40% Black, just 7% of Christopher Newport’s students are Black.

Save for the plaque to Walker and another on the former site of the Baptist church, the once-prosperous Black community on Shoe Lane has almost vanished. In a cemetery just down the road from the university, the headstones marking where residents and church parishioners are buried are worn with time, some barely legible.

Despite the schoolboy’s taunt, Luck is staying put. “I’m not selling to the college,” she said. “I don’t know what my children might do. But I’m not selling.”

The Johnsons say they aren’t bitter toward Christopher Newport. Two of their children graduated from the university. But they say they feel like strangers on land where they should belong. They don’t know how much longer they will stay in their home, or if the decision will be up to them — or their children, who would inherit under their will. The university’s updated site plan calls for acquiring the last houses in the neighborhood by 2030.

Barbara Johnson is often asked why she and her husband chose to live in the middle of a college campus. “They didn’t know we were here before the college,” she said.

“This is where we have our roots. We built this ourselves. When you put your sweat and blood into something, you don’t give it up.”

Gabriel Sandoval, of ProPublica, contributed research.

Some reporting for this story was supported by a fellowship from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights.

Reach Brandi Kellam at brandi@brandikellam.com or brandi.kellam@vcij.org and Louis Hansen at Louis.hansen@vcij.org.

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