Alison O’Brien wasn’t even alive when Roanoke began dismantling its once-thriving African American neighborhoods.
She didn’t refuse mortgages to Black customers simply because they lived in areas deemed to be a poor financial risk, a practice known as “redlining.” Or steer homebuyers to particular addresses based on the color of their skin.
But as an agent with MKB Realtors, she recently joined her colleagues at the Taubman Museum of Art to view the colorful, tragically captivating exhibit “David Ramey: Gainsboro Road and Beyond” that portrays a bygone African American community that once bustled with art, commerce and life.
“I feel like I have an obligation to learn,” she said. “Unfortunately my profession has a terrible history of telling people, ‘Oh, you should live over here, and you would be better off over there.’ Rising above it is acknowledging it, learning about it, and explaining to people why you can’t do that.”
Not only is MKB a sponsor of the exhibit, but the Roanoke-based agency recently hosted a lunch-and-learn for 40 of its agents who visited both the Taubman and the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, which hosts about half of the exhibit.
“We are passionate about shining a light on the events of the past, such as redlining and urban renewal, to provide a context for today’s challenges,” said MKB co-owner Mary Dykstra. “Wealth inequity is burgeoning at an incredible speed in this appreciating housing market. Many of the problems that urban cities face today have their genesis in the unfair and racist policies of the past.”
MKB celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023 and hails itself as “the region’s largest locally owned brokerage,” but the Taubman excursion was as much about learning about, and atoning for, past sins of its predecessors.
“Yes, we peddle real estate, sticks and bricks,” said Dykstra’s business partner, Kit Hale. “But we are also part of this community. And so it’s important for us to educate our agents on the history of our community, on what’s important to us, so that we can be better ambassadors. We sell real estate, but we are ambassadors to the city.”
* * *
The Ramey exhibit — comprising 200 drawings with 75 accompanying stories of the Gainsboro and Northeast neighborhoods from the mid-1940s through the 1960s — depicts the kind of community that urban planners would envy today.
Men in lime-green suits and rose-colored sport coats with matching fedoras stroll down Henry Street from the pool hall to the barbershop and across to the Palace Hotel. Women in red heels and saloned hair gossip on the sidewalks under the bemused gaze of boys wearing sweaters emblazoned in the all-Black Lucy Addison High School colors.
[Read more about David Ramey and this exhibit.]
David Ramey was just a boy at the time, having moved from Martinsville to Roanoke in 1949.
“Imagine a kid living in a place where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face if the moon wasn’t out, and then moving to right off Henry Street in 1949 with all that was going on … just imagine,” said his son, David Ramey Jr. “And he just fell so deeply in love with it, it captivated him.”
Ramey joined the MKB group at the Taubman to share stories about his father, who used a photographic memory to create his artwork starting in the 1980s. He died in 2017.
“When he moved here he lived on Patton Avenue and he could come on his back porch and could see all of Henry Street, and on his front porch he could see the Gainsboro Library, which was one of his favorite places to play as a kid and one of his favorite images to draw,” Ramey said.
Urban renewal, eminent domain, redlining and other discriminatory real estate practices destroyed so much more than the neighborhoods’ buildings, Ramey said. It killed communities where neighbors cared for each other, disciplined each other’s children and demanded their academic success, celebrated communal achievements and mourned collective sufferings.
It also killed the already fragile American dream for Black residents and their descendants, said Karl Willers, who curated the exhibit for the Taubman. “Family wealth was destroyed rather than passed on to the next generation. Family wealth is mostly in real estate, that’s where people had their life savings.”
This point resonated in the lunch-and-learn with the 40 white real estate agents whose fair housing education has been mostly confined to lectures and books. MKB has some racial diversity, Hale says, but more needs to be done.
“We as Realtors have an obligation to follow a strict code of ethics, and we’re good at following those things, but a lot of people don’t get an opportunity to find out why we follow those things and why it’s so important,” said Meg Smith, MKB’s chief operating officer. “Getting a peek into such an incredible project as this is exactly what we need. This is so far beyond what I thought it would be.”
Dykstra nodded: “We will now always have in our minds those images when we’re talking about Gainsboro, Northeast, what’s there and the history,” she said. “That’s so much different than sitting in a class and just hearing ‘urban renewal,’ two words, blah blah blah.”
For his part, Ramey hoped the agents would dwell “not necessarily on what went on back then but what’s what’s going on right now … that they will take their professionality to another level and do the best they can.”
He told the group: “Yes, there were negative and bad things. But you can’t concentrate on just a negative. You’ve got to concentrate on the positive things as well. So just try to learn everything that was negative, learn from that so it doesn’t get repeated again.”
