Damario Walker-Brown | Cotton in the Crevices: Remnants of a Black Utopia

Cotton in the Crevices: Remnants of a Black Utopia

by DaMario Walker-Brown 2021 DAAPworks Submission

Abstract + Intro

Mound Bayou, Mississippi is a small community founded by newly freed African-Americans in 1887. Historically known as an agricultural town, it thrived economically, educationally, and spiritually into the first decades of the 20th century while becoming a physical example of the desire of African-Americans to self-determine. By the time of the Great Depression, Mound Bayou began a slow and painful decline with the economic downturn and the introduction and influence of mechanization on agriculture, costing people their livelihoods. Mound Bayou today stands as memory of a proud historic past worthy of revitalization and reinvestment in its people and their community for continued existence in the 21st century. As a contemporary representation of the concept of a “Just City”, the purpose of this thesis shall be to inquire and examine the current conditions of Mound Bayou. In addition, this will be an exploration of how architecture can serve as a catalyst in conceptualizing a future on how this community can take its first steps to revitalization. The main focus of the design will be a new Community Center and Vocational school serving as way to influence the economic and communal reinvestment into this Mississippi Delta town.

The term, “Just City” as described in Toni Griffin’s comments from the Just City Essays-which is a collection of essays from designers, artist, and critical thinkers- she describes her ideal Just City would be a place of equity and choice, with access and spatial networking. A place where people have ownership and diversity, along with participation, inclusion and belonging, beauty, and creative innovation . Mound Bayou is a community that used to be an example of a Just City but now it falls into this category of being unjust and is lacking substantial economic infrastructure to keep the town alive as a continued place of interest, despite its historical significance. Prior to the Great Migration, generally considered around 1916, freed slaves and their descendants established black enclaves and towns in order to create a better life. Over time, these communities declined and disappeared, partly due to a lack of resources and money flowing into their economy. In search for a better lifestyle, residents relocated to northern cities with more opportunity. Mound Bayou is the last chartered city founded and governed by African Americans that is still in existence. Called “the laboratory for black self-sufficiency and self-government” by Booker T. Washington, the worth of Mound Bayou was found in its meaning to the freed slave. It was known as a place that fostered growth, education, and high morals during segregation in the United States while existing within the context of the Jim Crow South. According to Kelsey Davis Betz, a writer who published an article on Mound Bayou for Mississippi Today, stated that 98% of the town’s population is documented as African American. Since residents of the city began leaving in the early 1920s, it has slowly become a place which some have forgotten.

By engaging with the community and talking with residents, I will be able to understand the needs of the town and what they feel would be the most important interventions to implement to improve the community. Through documenting testimonies and stories from residents, utiilizing precedent studies, and generating an analysis of the built environment, I will propose an alternative future to the town of Mound Bayou. This will be done by using a series of collages, diagrams, and architectural drawings, to create a vision plan that may help improve the town while concurrently exposing common discrepancies that are seen in under-resourced communities. As a potential outcome, the town of Mound Bayou will have a series of drawings relating to the town’s existing conditions, a comprehensive set of drawings for the vision plan and a potential path to take in order to conceptualize the possible future of the town and its economy

Residents told countless stories of refuge and the town being a safe haven for African Americans. From people on the run being admitted to a jail to escape an angry mob or the influential community member T.R. M. Howard being shipped out of town in a coffin so he could not be killed by an angry mob. Black Space has always been created out of necessity and led to ingenuous ideas.

Throughout the town there are multiple examples of how architecture has impacted black space. The church has always been a really important figure in a lot of black communities, the home being the ideal place for safety as well. Black space is fabricated out of the desire to have an inclusive, personalized, and private space within the black community, allowing for liberation. Black space has always been around and has always served as an escape from the typical gentrified place society is essentially built from. Dating back to slavery, there are spaces such as bush harbors, which were ad-hoc spaces in the forest for enslaved individuals to have church and worship in secret. The residents of the town used the immediate space around the buildings to gather and hang out even if it was not anything but a grass field in the intermediate space.

The historic district is where a lot of the original building and services were during the towns peak along with the elementary.

Currently the main arterial roads are Edwards road which is indicated by the solid N-S arrow and Martin Luther King which is the E-W arrow. The dotted line represents the former main road through the town where most of the towns 40 businesses were established and still where the founders house and the Bank of Mound Bayou are located.

K

$18 0K

$16 0

$140 K

$120K

$100K

$80K

$60K

$40K

20K

MISSISS IPPI BOLIVAR COUNT Y SOUTH DELTA REGION

MOUND BAYOU

HO 3 M 3.9 EO W N

RTY VALUE PROPE Y .1% T 13 VER

BI-RACIAL

AFRICAN AMERICAN

T BY RA CE

+

IN

POPU LAT ION

DRIVE A LONE

SO DELUTH TA MOUND BAYOU

E OS H

TY ER V PO

NATIVE AMERICAN

PI

BO CO LIV UN AR TY

3

IN 7.4% PO VE RT Y

34.

IN P 8% OVE RTY

44.8%

M BA OUN YO D U

L OO RP A C

H UT TA SO EL ION D G RE

IN POVERT Y

OTHER

S. U.

TY

M IS SI SS IP

IN 21 PO .5% VE R

IN

WALK

PO

U.S.

38.2

PPI ISSI MISS

AR LIV Y BO UNT CO

AN DI ME

37.7

H UT TA SO EL D

E AG

35

M BA OU YO ND U

.8 35

U.S .

MIS SISSI PPI

27 .3

25 .1 M INS .

BOLIVAR COUNTY

SOUTH DELTA

COMMUTE TIME 23.9 MINS.

17.5 MINS.

INS. 17.8 M

D UN MO YOU BA

NS MI 6 .

18

S U.

9%

NE RS

H S % ER .6 N 55 EOW M O

S .9% ER 55EOWN M HO

10% S 68E.OWNER M HO

R VA LI TY BO UN CO U.S.

63.8%

WNERS HOMEO

I SIPP SIS MIS

HO US EH DE OL LT MO AR DI BO UN NCO EG LI D IO B VA ME A N YOU R

$10K

$3 0K

SO UT H

M ED IA N

CO UN TY

$20

IS SI SS IP PI

$4 0K

M

$5 0K

S.

K

Out of the 1,728 people currently living in Mound Bayou, less than 200 of the residents identify as other than African- American and around 850 people are considered to be living in poverty. The average commute time in Mound Bayou is 18 minutes where compared to the national which is 25 minutes. Most residents commute to work with this estimated to be Cleveland as the location where most find employment. Mound Bayou ranks as the lowest when compared to Bolivar County, Mississippi, and the United States. in property value.

The Delta region has an average cheaper property value than Mound Bayou.

The median value of property is $88,000 and only 34% of the residents in this town are homeowners. The average value of property on a national scale is more than double that with the price of property being over $190,000.

$6 0K

Since Mound Bayou is considered an example of what African Americans could do on their own, can a development strategy that revitalizes this historic community be created in order to retain its essence and make a “Just City”?

The Future

Precedents

The main focus of the first phase is community and assembly. This will be approached by putting together a task force to prioritize the needs of the town, after that, the next step is beginning to reach out to artist and create a prompt for them to design library stations that can be dispersed throughout the town to encourage literacy and self-education while also creating outreach. This opportunity may allow artist and community members to come together and establish relationships as well. This site plan is looking at the programmatic being implemented in this phase. Additional changes to be done in the town are the restoration of the cemetery, a community garden with a farmers market, the creative placemaking of the big lawn, a bike shop, bed, and breakfast in one of the historic homes and turning the founders house into a visitors center, this will then activate the big lawn in front of the house as a central point in town for events and activities.

This is looking at identifying a vacant lot on the Edwards road and introducing a community garden to grow vegetation

This diagram is one of three that explore the events that could go on in the big lawn. The first one is a series of things that could happen today or tomorrow such as hosting class outside or bible study, having a community picnic, barbeque or inflatables

Phase two is about the development and the growth of the town. The goal is to transform the idea of the town being a place of refuge to a place welcoming to everyone. This phase looks at proposing a new community center on site as well as creating housing for vocational and creative arts students. With the implementation of this establishment, the community center could host recreational leagues, movies, guest speakers, artist exhibitions, new businesses through a maker space and library. Through the community center and school, the towns history will be shared. During this phase interventions such as housing, and a grocery store will be introduced as well as the beginning of the street development

The current conditions of the main road can be described as no sidewalk, gravel, and no separation from road to the curb

The approach to this was to transform the street into an avenue allowing for water treatment to be apart of the process and the creation of outdoor space for stores to engage with customers and parklets to allow for activity along the road.

The community garden would be relocated to the site where the community center is being proposed and the current site would then begin to prepare for construction to a grocery store.

The big lawn events could extend to semi-permanent activities such a movie night/week on the flat bed of a truck or installations being placed on the site

Phase three is the final idea of what could be the vision for the town. A place that has industry, a hospital, people rushing to visit the town for its resources and reinstilling that feeling of what the town used to be. A utopia for its residents. In this phase the main implementations would be a hospital and an industry, maybe even a Walmart. In addition to this there could also be deployable units that reach out to other areas in the delta to provide healthcare and resources for economic and personal growth.

By this phase, the grocery store will have been built and the town will have access to fresh food with the possibility of getting a lot of their fresh fruits and vegetables from their local garden.

During this last phase, the big lawn could begin to take on permanent manipulations such as bermings and landscape elements as well as a permanent structure to serve as a hub and gathering space in the town.

This structure would attempt to bring back the idea of community and assembly similar to the way bush arbors did back in the day but instead it is an inviting space for everyone.

The site I chose is right outside of the historic district directly east to the elementary school. The site is 19 acres with a relatively flat site with an existing building. The building there used to serve as the facility building that housed an auditorium and pool and is currently 24,000sf

The parti of this new space stems from the idea of cultural black history taught to us by our older generations and the dialogue it has with diluted history that is only an illusion to glorify certain aspects of history-most of which exclude African-Americans. The idea behind this is that the African aspect of being African American is the history that we have to learn through community and the American portion is the history that we are taught to accept in school and how we as African American are placed in a position to try to learn and identify who we are through other symbols, mainly stemming from African cultures. This parti splits a solid mass(the term African American) in half, creating an intermediate space, the space between the community center(cultural history) and the vocational school(American history). This middle area, serving as a form of introspection and reflection, allows for someone to find their identity between what they are taught and what they decide to seek and learn.

The structure of the building is mainly heavy timber, with timber being a locally grown product there. Due to the kink in the building, the structure took on a more diagrid approach with the foundation of the building being a pier foundational system with perimeter beams because the Mississippi soil is more lively. The pier foundation would be responsive to that soil.

This site axon is looking at the site in general, the building is designed to have an extensive green roof to allow for minimal maintenance, the site approach was to figure out a way to begin to explore water flow and how it can be controlled and managed on site. The parking lots are pervious with grass spots, with the islands being bioswales. The terraced spaces connected to the building are rain gardens that could absorb water as it flows from the roof to the ground in an attempt to control runoff. This water flows to the bioswale in an attempt to clean the water as it flows to the detention pond, once the water has been filtered there, some is then transferred to storage tanks while the rest flows back to sewer lines with cleaner water.

The ground floor consists of a café, auditorium, pool, and gym as the main spaces on the recreational side and the vocational school has the agricultural and horticulture workshops adjacent to the field with a greenhouse, this would be an opportunity for the student on the program to be leaders in the community efforts with growing tings in the garden, with tree orchards and planters along with vegetated rows. The lobby in the center of the building is a space for exploration that allows one to learn through association(which is the seating area) memory(the tree garden) and through history(which is the canvases placed in the space which could serve as information hubs).

On the second floor, there is the maker space, exercise room, computer lab, library, and the arts classrooms along with the daycare.