About 100 people attended Wednesday afternoon’s special free screening at the Perry Grand Theater of the documentary film, “The Center Street Story: An Urban Renewal Retrospective,” produced by regional historians and researchers Madison Deshay-Duncan and Richard Duncan of Des Moines and hosted by the Hometown Heritage at the Carnegie Library Museum.
Combining oral history and archival research, the sobering story follows the fortunes of the Center Street neighborhood in Des Moines, a vibrant center of African-American culture and community demolished in the 1960s to make way for U.S. Interstate 235 and to accomplish urban-renewal goals of the city of Des Moines.
The destruction of the Center Street community — whether an intended or unintended consequence of “progress” and “development” — while not as violent as the 1921 razing by a white mob of the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the “Black Wall Street” — but the outcome was just as fatal to the prosperity and social solidarity of the black business district in Des Moines…