substandard housing

Pettigrew Street exposé, part 2.

Within days, Wilson’s board of town commissioners began to explore an ordinance addressing “the repair or elimination of unfit housing and dangerous building conditions.” Stakeholders weighed in — the city’s postmaster, the Colored Ministers Alliance — and the board requested the public at large to weigh in.

(Also on the agenda, a request by East Nash Street businessmen for parking on both sides of the street and a report that a “large number of colored school children are passing under freight car and trains on their way to school.” They were headed, of course, to Sallie Barbour or Vick Elementary or Darden High Schools from Black neighborhoods west of the tracks, like Daniel Hill and New Grabneck.)

Wilson Daily Times, 7 March 1950.

Pettigrew Street exposé, part 1.

In March 1950, the publisher of the Wilson Daily Times, shocked by what he had witnessed on the two short blocks of Wilson’s Pettigrew Street, penned a series of articles exposing living conditions for the city’s poorest. Though Herbert D. Brauff had plenty to say about the standards of the block’s residents, he aimed a surprising salvo straight at the source of the blight — landlords. City manager Talmage Green, who guided Brauff on his tour, viewed public housing as an answer to the problem and this series arguably launched public discourse that would lead to Wilson’s construction in the 1950s and 1960s of housing projects in both African-American neighborhoods.

Wilson Daily Times, 3 March 1950.