Toledo’s Dorr Street is emblematic of what happened in cities across the country. Community leaders are charting a path for rebirth.
When Dorris Greer, 83, was growing up, Dorr Street was where the action was, where life was, where kids like her could walk past the street’s dozens of shops and storefronts, all pressed up tight against the sidewalk, and feel like they were experiencing all that life had to offer. Today, the vibrant business district that Greer would walk to as a young woman backs up to Interstate 75’s six lanes. All of those amenities she and her neighbors could find just down the street — the barber shops and grocery stores, the haberdashers and the nightclubs — are long gone.
The story of Dorr Street’s destruction mirrors those of Black-owned small business districts across the U.S. Decades of racist policies left Dorr Street physically unrecognizable from its mid-century heyday as Black Toledo’s home for community and commerce. The same disinvestment and discrimination — from redlining to highway projects to so-called urban renewal — hollowed out scores of Black neighborhoods in cities from coast to coast. Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rondo in St. Paul, Minnesota; Overtown in Miami; Albina in Portland, Oregon; Jackson Ward in Richmond, Virginia; and many other Black business districts around the country were wiped out. Urban redevelopment and renewal displaced more than 40,000 predominantly Black-owned businesses nationwide, with many more lost to urban highway construction. While they all have their own histories, these communities, where Black business, culture, and politics converged, suffered similar fates from the same racist policies.
But the current state of Black neighborhoods and communities is also connected to another story: how U.S. policymakers abandoned the idea that small businesses provide service and value to communities, that community self-determination should be protected, and that, in a democracy, economic power is decentralized — tenets that the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has promoted for 50 years. Government policymakers compounded the systemic racism of Black and Brown neighborhoods by allowing big corporations to dominate.
In this multimedia essay, Ron Knox and Susan Holmberg tell the story of Dorr Street as a way to shine a light on how these two intertwined forces — discrimination against and disinvestment of Black communities and economic policies that favor corporate dominance — combined to erase the economic, political, and cultural vitality of Black business districts around the country.
They also point to signs of hope and possibility emerging. Communities are fighting corporate power and taking advantage of new pools of federal funding to spur crucial repair and reinvestment. Change is beginning to happen in Toledo as it is in Tulsa, Chicago, and beyond. We believe that the more these stories are told, the more other communities will harness their own power and the more policymakers will act to tackle outsized corporate power and rebuild generations of lost wealth and independence.
The Fall and Potential Rise of a Black Business District is part of ILSR’s 50th Anniversary StoryMap collection showcasing communities of color and Native Nations tackling outsized corporate power and rebuilding generations of lost wealth and independence at the local level.
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