USC gentrified this Columbia neighborhood. The last Black church wants to buy it back
Nestled on a quiet block off Pickens Street, St. James AME Church serves as a living monument to the thriving Black community that once occupied Columbia’s Wheeler Hill neighborhood. Most of the original residents were forced out a half century ago when the city and the University of South Carolina partnered on a land redevelopment project there.
Now, a plan to build several homes next to the church has ignited calls from critics for USC to right its past wrongs by helping St. James AME acquire some of that land from the developer.
In a statement, university spokesperson Jeff Stensland said that the University of South Carolina Foundation and President Bob Calsen are working with St. James AME to “find a satisfactory solution for all parties, to include the return of property adjacent to the historic church.”
St James AME did not respond to requests for comment.
“The university should step up and buy those lots,” state Sen. Dick Harpootlian said at a Columbia Planning Commission meeting earlier this month. “God knows they committed atrocity after atrocity on Wheeler Hill back in the early ‘70s.”
The Rev. Joseph Darby, a former neighborhood resident whose family had lived in Wheeler Hill and attended St. James since the 1920s, said donating the land could be seen as a form of reparations.
“They are responsible for destroying what was a solid and stable community,” he said. “If they do anything to threaten the well being of St James, that would be part of a rolling abuse.”
Driven by a stated desire to increase student housing, USC began purchasing property in Wheeler Hill in the 1960s, said Conor Harrison, an associate professor of geography at USC who co-authored a research paper on USC’s gentrification of the Wheeler Hill neighborhood.
“However, if you read the rhetoric of the university administration at the time, there was concern about the character and racial demographics of the Wheeler Hill neighborhood and the ‘negative’ impact that was having on students and faculty,” Harrison wrote in an email.
In the 1970s, USC and the City of Columbia partnered to redevelop the land into low-income and market rate housing, Harrison said. That meant razing most of the original structures in the neighborhood and forcibly displacing longtime residents and business owners.
Before the urban renewal program, there were 42 businesses and 210 families in Wheeler Hill, mostly Black. Darby said the community that was rebuilt there looked nothing like the place where he grew up.
“They made the costs of the lots prohibitive for almost anybody who lived there before to come back,” he said. “There was very little affordable housing.”
A little over a year ago, the University of South Carolina Foundation sold some of its last remaining plots in the neighborhood to local developer David Tuttle. Pending approval from the city’s Planning Commission, Tuttle said he will divide up the land and sell it to local builders. There is enough space for 35 single family homes on the 5-acre property, he said.
The university foundation first tried to sell the property fifteen years ago. At that time, church officials hoped to get a piece of the land to build additional parking, but the foundation said it would not donate any plots.
Tuttle said before he purchased the land, church officials made it clear they were interested in possibly expanding. He agreed to temporarily reserve the plots adjacent to St James to give the church time to raise money for the land.
“If they can formulate a solution with the university, we will certainly try and cooperate any way we can,” he said. “But we’ve sat idle now for 8 months and we’re at a point where we really need to move forward.”
Lucas Daprile contributed reporting.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 12:02 PM.
