Fulton Plan Sparks 'Roots' Fight

By Bill Miller

A warm fall wind blew across the predominantly vacant acres of the Fulton community. The wind blew against a row of early 20th century town houses, causing a whistling in the living room of the only occupied house.

Spencer Armstead sat in the room and began telling his story, which began with his birth in an upstairs room of the house, a story that included graduating from a predominantly white New England preparatory school, spending four months in a Virginia prison camp and fighting desperately to save the row of houses.

Of the 4,100 people who lived in Fulton's more than 800 structures when the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority began to work on redeveloping the area in 1967, there now are only a handful.

Of that handful, the only ones who have not sold their property to the housing authority are Armstead and his mother, Marian F. Armstead.

"THEY'LL NEVER get my house," Armstead, 27, vowed last week. "I'll shoot them if they try to throw me out. Man, I was born in this house. My mother was born in this house. Whenever I want to find my roots, I just walk up those steps to the room where I was born. My grandmother and grandfather worked too hard to build this house for me to let someone come in and take it.

Armstead, who is a leader of eight other black men who call themselves Together, Inc., also argues for saving the 109-year-old Rising Mount Zion Church up the street from his house at 702 Denny St., for saving the Carter-Venable building at 4021 Williamsburg Ave. and for saving the old Webster Davis School about two blocks from his house.

He and Garland W. Jones, president of the men's group, argued in his living room that there is too much tradition, too much history in Fulton for all of it to be torn down and replaced with modern buildings. They made the same arguments as they walked around the few buildings left in the heart of Fulton.

"WHEN I STARTED this, I knew it would get down to this," Armstead said. "I knew no one would listen and everyone would leave. I tried to talk people into staying, but they said, 'No, we're going to take this money and get out of here.' "

But the community elders who are on the Fulton Project Area Committee (and because of that are the local authority in the community) argued that they already have their roots, that they sacrificed them so that Fulton could be given a new life.

"My roots were up in the 800 block of Denny," said James A. Braxton, committee chairman, as he sat in the project office on old Williamsburg Avenue. "Everyone who was here originally had his roots here.

"I wish you could have been here 10 or 15 years ago," Braxton continued. "It was warmer on the outside than the inside of our houses. There were privies all around. People improved their living conditions when they moved. Now they can turn up a thermostat to get heat, when before you couldn't heat but one room..."

Braxton shifted in his chair. "I don't know the working of the man upstairs, but a lot of elderly people died after they moved from here.

"I DON"T KNOW. This is that we got into. What do you or anyone want? This, the rebuilding, is what we said we'd do. It didn't all work out as we thought, but this is what we got into," he said.

Reworking the Fulton plans to accommodate the desires of Armstead and Together Inc. would "mess things up," Braxton said.

Work on the Fulton plan began with a 1966 survey that recommended renewal of the East End residential community as the city's No. 1 priority, said John Baker, redevelopment chief for the housing authority. A survey of the Fulton buildings showed that more than 660 of the 861 were dilapidated or had significant deficiencies, he said.

In late 1967, the housing authority's white officials took the study and renewal proposal to the once-integrated but then totally black Fulton community. Tensions followed, caused by the emotional response to the renewal proposal and the generally tense race relations of the period. The two parties had to fight to an agreement, parties on both sides said last week.

The residents' decision, Baker said, was to take a wipe-the-slate-clean approach, to have the housing authority buy the Fulton community, raze almost all of the buildings and market the land for redevelopment. The residents, embodied in the committee, made the decision, and if it is to be changed, it is the committee that must tell the housing authority to change it, Baker said.

"THE PEOPLE THOUGHT in '68 that the community was in such a state that it'd be better to replace the whole thing," Braxton said. "Now, this group, Together, comes in after everybody's been moved and say they want to stop it. What about everybody else? We asked Together to come in and look at our plans and, if they can help, we want them."

But Armstead said that his group cannot work with the committee. "There is a real generation gap," he said as he and Jones led a tour of the buildings they want preserved. "No one on the PAC is under 50 and they have watched us grow up and are used to having the say-so."

"The housing authority says this is a power struggle," Jones said.

"That's right," Armstead said. "We want the power. Those on the PAC are too old and don't know what's going on."

Armstead said that when the original plans for Fulton were being made, he was attending a preparatory school in New England. He was able to go there, he said, because he scored well on a test. He received a scholarship. From the preparatory school, he went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

"I GOT AN EXPOSURE to a lot of things I'd never have seen in this ghetto," he said. But all was not well. "When you come out of a prep school, they expect you to be a 9-to-5 type and wear a suit and tie. I wasn't the type."

During part of the conversation, Armstead sat in a living room cluttered with a variety of furniture. He was wearing jeans and a light blue shirt that was unbuttoned, disclosing a darker blue tank top. A black wide-brimmed felt hat had been perched on his head when he answered a knock on his door.

Armstead said he left college in his fourth year and traveled across the country. He returned to his mother's Fulton house in the winter of 1974. In December, 1975, he was convicted in Henrico County of shoplifting and was sentenced to four months in Road Camp 16 in Barhamsville. "And I got an education there, too," he said.

Armstead returned home to find his neighborhood being torn down. He remembered that the renewal plan originally called for simultaneous razing and rebuilding. He questioned why nothing was being rebuilt.

ARMSTEAD WASN'T AROUND, Braxton said when the committee changed its plans and asked the housing authority to first buy vacant buildings and then to buy houses owned by the elderly and infirm who needed to be moved first. The change prevented the assembling of large parcels that could be res[???] for new building.

Not satisfied with the answers he got, Armstead pushed for the formation of the corporation of young black men. Delegates from the group began attending committee and housing authority meetings.

"We organized for the promotion of social welfare in the Fulton community." Armstead said. "We want restoration of the community, the education of its residents and the protection of its history."

The old buildings still standing in Fulton are part of that history, he said. He is spending most of his time protecting them. He sits frequently at the old church protecting stained-glass windows from being broken. He patrols the area, stopping looting.

"I feel responsible for every tree, grain of dirt, bird, rabbit -- everything around," he said. "You don't have justice when you come in and rape a community like this."

ALL HE WANTS, Armstead said, is justice in Fulton. But the committee, Braxton argued, already had decided what is just for the community. Without a switch in signals from the committee, the housing authority will continue with the plans already made," Baker said.

In carrying out the plans, the housing authority has filed a condemnation suit to take title to the Armstead house. While Armstead's mother holds title, the presence of the as yet undocketed suit sets a dark cloud over her ability to hold onto it.