Church Hill Meeting an Open Door to Dialogue

The childhood home of Maurice Sydnor still stands in Church Hill. He longs for his children or grandchildren to live in that house someday.

“I’m a little older than most of you,” said Sydnor, who graduated from Armstrong High School in 1965.

“Gentrification is a new word. I did not grow up with that word. I struggle to understand that word. ... But when you think of losing what you had—I don’t care what name you put on it—it’s a loss, a hurt. And most of the time when I think of gentrification, I think of someone being hurt.”

During the time she worked at WPA Bakery at 27th and Marshall streets, Shola Walker, its only black employee, noticed black residents keeping a wary distance. “But when they saw me, they would stand at the door, they would make eye contact with me, and then they would come in and talk to me.”

“Now, I appreciate being the bridge,” said Walker, 33. “But I also feel like I have a responsibility to speak on the fact that we're operating out of two different cultures.”

Those two different cultures—one black, one white, not always coexisting comfortably—played out at Armstrong during Tuesday’s performance of Church Hill: A Changing Neighborhood. The documentary drama was written, performed and produced by students from the University of Richmond in collaboration with students from the Armstrong Leadership Program.