How many of us have spent years driving and walking through familiar local neighborhoods without pausing to think about the rich and complex history that preceded their current configuration? Behind the historic street names, noteworthy architecture, lost structures, and painful dislocations are so many stories – some inspiring and some shameful. Brent Runyon is here to remind us how important it is for us to stop, reflect, and appreciate.
Since 2013, Brent Runyon has been executive director of the Providence Preservation Society.
Growing up in a small southern town, it seemed completely normal to me that the poor black families lived in neighborhoods with unpaved streets and ramshackle houses, places I was never permitted to go except when my grandmother was running for office. Fortunately, because our town was so small and there were no private schools or clubs, I had as many Black friends as white ones. During college at the Georgia Institute of Technology, I became friends with people from India, Brazil, Germany, Vietnam and other countries. Having friends of different races and religions expanded my worldview and instilled an empathy in me that too many others seem to lack.
Beyond simple ignorance, I believe that it is the erasure of communities that leads to a lack of familiarity, intolerance, hatred, and further erasure. This has played itself out in America’s cities time and time again. Here in Providence, erasure has come through massacres, often called riots, but also through highway projects, redlining, blockbusting, urban renewal, and historic preservation.
People and places have completely or nearly been erased, with only stories, ephemera, scars on the landscape, and sometimes a bronze marker to remind us. You may have heard of Providence’s lost neighborhoods of Snowtown and Hard Scrabble or know of the displacement of people from Lippitt Hill, Benefit Street, or Fox Point. But I believe that many have not heard about what happened to the Chinese population of Providence.
The recent murder of six Asian-American women in Georgia is an unspeakable tragedy. I believe that this horrific act was borne out of inflammatory rhetoric that associated COVID-19 to a city in China, and which spurred anti-Asian violence across our country.
But this demonization goes back to 1880s America, when “the yellow peril” prompted enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, iterations of which were finally completely abolished with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The eradication of Chinatown in Providence, not once, but twice, was rooted in the expendability of a long-marginalized community.
While less well known, this history of Providence’s Chinatown is within living memory. It is documented in a walking tour and exhibit where one can learn how city planning has been used to disenfranchise poor- and non-white people, people thought of as “other.” I invite everyone to take the walking tour, to honor those whose homes and businesses were erased.
If we bring more people into the processes that shape our cities, I believe these past atrocities will not be repeated. If we all continue to work toward greater embrace of our fellow humans, we can win the fight against racism. I believe we can do this here in Providence.
