Left Behind in Rosedale, by Scott Cummings

After reading accounts of neighborhood transition in Tanner Colby's new book Some of My Best Friends are Black, I got curious about the racial history of neighborhoods in my own area.  My suburban neighborhood made a transition from a sand pit to new houses shortly before we moved here, so there's no history here--yet.  But a few years ago I taught school (for a short, miserable time) at a middle school in east Fort Worth.  We actually looked at houses in that neighborhood before we settled on our current home.  So I'm a little bit familiar with neighborhoods in east Fort Worth.

I was delighted to find sociologist's Scott Cummings's insightful study of the changes in Polytechnic Heights and surrounding neighborhoods of east Fort Worth, Left Behind in Rosedale: Race Relations and the Collapse of Community Institutions.  He traces the transition from farmland, to solid mostly white working class to middle class community, to (briefly) black middle class, to black under class.  In the process the economic and social fabric of the community was left in tatters.  Those "left behind," primarily elderly whites, were victimized and lived secluded in their fortress-like homes.

The story of Poly, or Rosedale, as Cummings calls it, has been repeated in communities around the country.  (I don't really get why he uses so many pseudonyms for places.  I guess his goal is for this to be a sociological study and not a history, so names are changed of geographic locations, but he makes it clear that this is east Fort Worth.  I was able to figure out what and where he was talking about, but his name changing only makes things confusing.)  After a generation or so of community building, the racial makeup of Poly began to change.  As soon as some black families moved in, racism and racial fears led many whites, the ones who could afford it, to leave.  School busing made it worse; white families fled to the burgeoning suburbs or enrolled their kids in private schools.  Blockbusting drove property values down further, more and more houses were renter-occupied rather than owner-occupied, businesses closed, churches moved out, community organizations suffered.

By the late 1970s the neighborhood was solidly, overwhelmingly black.  A series of rapes confirmed in people's minds that life in Poly had hit bottom.  The rapists' (there turned out to be several) primary target was the elderly white women who stayed in the neighborhood, either because they could not afford to leave or because of their attachment to their homes, where some had lived for half a century.  Some of the rapists explicitly told their victims that their actions were inspired by the television show Roots; they wanted revenge for the way white people treated slaves.  A few years later, a gang of young men serially terrorized white, elderly Poly residents, robbing them, tearing up their homes, and killing some.

After these attacks which terrorized the neighborhood and left several dead, "it was obvious to everyone that the social conditions producing the violence had not been addressed or mediated by the criminal justice system.  The root causes of hatred and violence in the community remained untouched by the crime prevention efforts of the police.  The high levels of psychological and economic deprivation compelling black teenagers to murder and rape remained embedded within the institutional structure of neighborhood life."  One lawyer, who represented many defendants from the neighborhood, said that "the crimes perpetrated by his clients were caused by a combination of drugs, alcohol, and simple economic deprivation."  [Emphasis added in both quotes.]  I'm not comfortable with the idea the poverty compels kids to ransack elderly neighbors' houses, rape them, and stab them to death.  I don't think the cause of these crimes can be so easily written off.  To be sure, there were and maybe still are difficult circumstances in Poly, but I am confident that we can find kids who did not turn to crime and families who, in spite of their poverty, did not terrorize their neighbors.

If their is a weakness to Cummings's work, I think this is it: relying on accounts from the elderly white Poly residents, and focusing on these two high-profile crime waves (the rapes in the 1970s and the "wilding" in the 1980s), the reader is left with a rather one-sided perspective.  I wish we could have heard more from black community leaders.  If someone with a predisposition toward racism, and a sense that blacks just bring crime when they move in, reads this, their suspicions would be confirmed.

Reading Left Behind in Rosedale stirred up the feelings I had when I was teaching, when, as a white teacher in half-black, half-Hispanic middle school in east Fort Worth, I was subjected to disrespect, taunts, and physical and verbal threats.  I do not need to use much imagination to see some of my former students falling into the patterns of "wilding" and intimidating neighbors that Cummings describes.  While some of my experiences could simply be blamed on typical teenage behavior, much was implicitly and, often, explicitly racist.  And it wasn't just directed toward me as a teacher; in my short time there, at least four white kids were pulled from the school by their parents because of the racist bullying the kids experienced.

Cummings wraps up the book well, pointing out that while certain social changes in Poly would have been inevitable, the overall decline can be attributed in large part to destructive federal policies.  He is no fan of Charles Murray, but he does acknowledge the impact that dependency on government has on the beneficiaries of social programs.  When housing is provided at little or no cost, heavily subsidized by supposedly well-meaning government programs, a sense of ownership never develops.  Further, welfare dependency erodes any sense of private property, to the point of destroying respect for the property of others.

In an even larger sense, federal housing programs exacerbated Poly's problems.  When segregationist housing policies were eliminated, black families could live wherever they could afford to live, so many middle class blacks moved out of declining neighborhoods.  The newer suburban communities resisted public housing and subsidized housing, so that became concentrated in poor, minority neighborhoods.  Thus the black community was dispersed and poor blacks became concentrated in places like Poly, compounding their problems.

I appreciated Cummings's work, yet despair of the future Poly and other ghettoized neighborhoods.  The neighborhood revitalization efforts he describes, and the millions of dollars of government and foundation money that went into those efforts, had very little effect.  Without serious economic development in Poly and an accompanying rebuilding of community institutions, patterns of poverty and crime will continue.