Rebuilding Black Communities, With Love

After nearly twenty years of studying and teaching urban planning and development, this is a love letter and a proposal by Dr. Annalise Fonza. It illuminates what she has learned about the redevelopment of former black ghettos and black urban communities, and in light of her constant engagement with urban and regional planners and black urban residents, in various urban cities across the United States. Dr. Fonza's first signicant experience with the redevelopment of black communities was in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and in the shadow of the late-great John Lee Johnson. Currently, Dr. Fonza lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and in this book she draws upon the example of Ollie Gates, who is the owner of Gates Bar-B-Q, to articulate her position on the redevelopment of former black ghettos and places that were designed to confine, control, and impoverish their residents. She hopes that what she has written here, while brief in pages, will help others to think more deeply about urban plans and proposals to develop former black ghettos and 21st-century urban black communities. She also hopes that this proposal will cause city planners, local officials, social activists, and urban people to reconsider the power of love and what it has done, in theory and in practice, for urban America. Dr. Fonza is also a womanist - as opposed to feminist - and she wants this writing to be known as a womanist planning proposal.