This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
The city of Newport News, Virginia, and Christopher Newport University are creating a joint task force to reexamine the destruction of a Black neighborhood to make way for the school’s campus starting in the 1960s, and recommend possible redress for uprooted families.
The new commission, announced Monday, will scrutinize four decades of the school’s property acquisitions, probing the decisions that led to locating and expanding its campus in the midst of a once-thriving Black community. It will also contact families displaced by Christopher Newport’s steady growth to ask what “restorative justice” would mean for them, and seek state assistance with potential relief for victims, according to a draft action plan.
The formation of the task force follows publication of a series by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and ProPublica , which revealed that Christopher Newport and other Virginia state universities grew by decimating thriving Black communities. It also documented race-based decision-making by the City Council by locating the school in a Black neighborhood despite having cheaper options and by seizing properties by eminent domain. CNU’s expansion has whittled down the Shoe Lane neighborhood in Newport News to just five houses.