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Dispatches

The Last Homes Standing
By Jill Somers

Driving down Highway 10 on the outskirts of Little Rock, the view from the car window appears like any other suburban American landscape—new strip malls, parking lots, restaurants, coffee shops, and cleaners—all relatively close to upper- and middle-class white neighborhoods. But there is a small plot of housing here that seems out of place. A cluster of around 150 homes belong to the residents of Pankey, a black middle-class community built around 1930. Josephine and Samuel Pankey bought the land, then five miles northwest of the Little Rock city limits, from white farmers. They sold lots to black families for between $12.60 and $24 each (they would also, according to property deeds, accept one quarter of the total price as down payment, plus equivalent payments in potatoes, vegetables, or chickens).

Today, the remaining homes in this onetime suburb of Little Rock—now battling for space against a New Balance store and a Starbucks—stand as a symbol of black self-reliance in the face of rampant city racism and, these days, sprawl. Josephine Pankey moved to Arkansas in 1893 from Cleveland. Samuel Pankey was born into slavery in 1856 in Chester, South Carolina.

They were both schoolteachers and married in September 1904. They lived on West Ninth Street in an historic African- American neighborhood in Little Rock, and started a real estate business out of their home in 1916. Ten years later, a wave of mob violence led to the lynching of a black man named John Carter, whose body was dragged down Ninth Street by white rioters. Businesses closed on West Ninth, and families left. The Pankeys fled for farmland outside the city that Josephine hoped to turn into her own ideal suburb, free from racial discrimination and oppression.

She originally called the area “Josephine Pankey’s Additions to Little Rock.” The unincorporated suburb of Pankey had a strong collective identity and community bond. Buying land from Mrs. Pankey meant becoming a member of the 1916 Real Estate Club, where members paid dues of five cents per week. Josephine donated land for four churches, a school, and a Girl Scout camp. Many African Americans were unable to get home loans until the 1970s, so Pankey residents built the houses themselves by hand. Henrietta Douglas, born in 1908, told the Arkansas Gazette in 1979 that the houses were “put together board by board, people would build as many rooms as they could afford and add on to them later as they needed.”

There is something of a map of the community’s history in the Pankey cemetery, a small plot of 60 graves now in danger of being replaced by commercial development. (A large bank recently moved in, and the building sits approximately ten feet from the headstones.) Daphne Piggee, a 60- year-old lifelong Pankey resident, is fighting to get the cemetery registered as a national historic site. She says the names on the graves—Piggee, Douglas, Norwood, Dyer—reflect the names of families who have been in the area for decades, and still live there. “Everyone knew everybody,” she says of her childhood in Pankey. “I want my children to know the history of Pankey; it’s the history of where they have been.”

As the city limits and white neighbors crept closer to Pankey, the community’s space was questioned, attacked, and increasingly diminished Pankey resisted annexation to Little Rock for years, but that changed in 1979 when the city absorbed the unincorporated community within its legal limits. Most residents protested annexation but were also told the community would be preserved. In 1986, the city’s planning commission approved re-zoning of the land around Highway Ten—which runs through the center of the community—in order to widen the roads from two lanes to five. Two Pankey residents’ homes were demolished to make room for the highway, and other residents’ land was trimmed back because the new highway ran close to their front porches. The re-zoning allowed for office and apartment development rather than single family homes, and not long after that, development in the northwest corner of the city took off.

George Dyer, a retired railroad employee and Pankey resident who built his own home there in 1955, says, “Back when the city annexed Pankey, the leaders here weren’t educated. We didn’t understand the move. We didn’t know that we could start our own place, that we could have had a fire and police department of our own.” In other words, because residents were not informed and aware of their options, the city made decisions for them.

More trouble came in 1988 when a fire damaged the Pankey School. The Little Rock School District had acquired it through a court order, but then permanently closed and demolished the building, instead of repairing it. (Josephine Pankey had been a school teacher before she got into real estate, and longtime residents were crushed.) Hayward Battle, the attorney for a group of Pankey residents, labeled Little Rock School District Administers the “personification of evil.” He told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “They’re like the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor,” speaking about how fast the demolition happened.
“They ripped the heart right out of this community.” The school district gave Pankey residents the option to lease the school building’s land, and eventually, in 2000, the neighborhood association decided to build a community center—one that would serve as a child-care and resource center for all ages, with tutoring facilities, computer labs, and a recreation hall.

But seven years later, the center is still incomplete, something Dyer and others say is Pankey’s last straw in its battle to retain independence as a community. “We ran out of grants,” he says, matter- of-factly. The Pankey Community Improvement Association built the Josephine Pankey Education Center facility and is registered as a non-profit association. Dyer, who is the group’s treasurer, convinced his daughter to write grants for the center, but she resigned after disagreements with newer city councilmen. And controversy over the center continues. Some think that because fewer children live in Pankey, the large building is an unnecessary expense. But Dyer says the community center would be open to surrounding neighborhood adults and children, and would be a place for people of all races, housing situations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to convene.

In the meantime, Pankey residents have new neighbors to deal with—namely, a Starbucks coffee shop, a few gated apartment complexes, strip malls, and big-box retail stores. Though the 150 or so Pankey houses were appraised at values between $5,010 and $37,580 in 1998, many of the homes sit on a hilly, scenic 80-acre area with large hardwood trees—land that is, in many cases, much more valuable to developers than the houses themselves. In August 2001, city inspectors found several code violations in Pankey homes, ranging from scattered auto parts in unkempt yards to boarded windows. But today, according to a Coldwell Banker representative selling real estate in the area, two houses on the north side of the highway are selling as one piece of real estate for $3.5 million dollars. Another home on one lot has an asking price of $1 million.

While a few stubborn residents refuse to sell, Andrew Wiese, a professor of American Urban History at San Diego State University and the author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the 20th Century, says Pankey’s fate—like so many other black suburbs—may be sealed. “This has race written all over it,” Wiese said, referring to an aerial photograph of Pankey on Google Earth. “You see the community and its residential landscape, then there is a ring around the rim of the community where commercial development is, then an outer ring where the upper-middle-class, white planned subdivisions begin.” Owner-built black suburbs built on the edges of cities in the ‘30s and ‘40s that survived urban renewal of the ‘60s are now facing gentrification or, worse, demolition—a kind of “suburban renewal.” In general, he says, whites do not want to build residential development right next to places like Pankey, so the property is seen as a prime target for commercial development.

“They’re going to do what they want to do, that’s the way I see it,” says current resident Willie Douglas. “The most you can do is get what you can while you’re getting out. They’re gonna take it somehow. Let them take it for something.” Other residents vow they’re not going to budge. Dyer, the retired railroad executive, says, “All kinds of big-money men are looking to buy our property for nothing and turn this place into all commercial buildings. But I am not selling. I want my grandson to live in my house once I am gone.” He owns eight lots in Pankey, some of which are vacant and some he’s let family members build houses on. He will not be leaving his ranch-style brick home anytime soon, even if he goes broke. “As long as I have breath in my body,” he says, “I live here.”


According to an 'old enough to know' acquentance of mine - John Carter was lynched because a white woman was riding through town in her horse drawn carraige when the horse became 'spooked' (her words not mine) and John Carter, an African American jumped in to help get the horse back in control.

How far have we come? How far do we have to go?