Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Katherine Bambrick Ambroziak
Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni closed her essay “400 Mulvaney Street” with the lines, “And all that I knew of love; Would also be buried.” The story recalls a visit to her childhood home months before her grandfather’s death and is reflective of her formative experiences. Describing the place and people of her identity and belonging, her tone is sorrowful and portrays the harshness of another reality, becoming intensely palpable through the use of the word “also.” Her loss grows beyond her family. The word is a premonition to the demolition of her home and neighborhood during the first phase of Knoxville’s urban renewal. Mulvaney Street is emblematic of an erasure of Knoxville’s Black community, a modest street name edit2, a territorial change. It is but one name on a list of streets, on a list of neighborhoods, in a list of cities, in the vast majority of states throughout the nation that were impacted, to the detriment of its minority citizens, by political ambition and economic progress. Through policies of eminent domain, communities experienced forced local migration where families were often consolidated into Black housing enclaves, limited by red-lining real estate practices and facilitating decades of political gerrymandering.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.73
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
