Survival

Though Tulsa, Okla.’s Greenwood district has gotten a lot of attention in pop culture and social media in recent years, it wasn’t the country’s only “Black Wall Street.” Established mostly during the period of Reconstruction and often lasting through Jim Crow, thriving commercial districts in and around Black communities existed throughout the United States. Chicago had Bronzeville; Atlanta had Sweet Auburn; Little Rock, Ark. had West Ninth Street; and Jackson, Miss. had Farish Street. Durham had a neighborhood called Hayti, where the Chicken Hut – then called the Chicken Box – was originally located.

In a 1994 Duke University oral history interview, Peggy recounts fond memories of a thriving stream of Black businesses in her hometown – everything from dry cleaners, restaurants, and barbershops to banks, churches, and even a hotel.

While Tulsa’s Greenwood District was taken out in an exceptionally brutal and chaotic fashion, others often died a slower, somewhat surgical death. In addition to policies like redlining, the government’s urban renewal projects – which started with the Housing Act of 1949 and lasted through the early 70s – and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 carved up these neighborhoods, sending waves of devastation throughout Black communities.

For the urban renewal projects in particular, “The idea was ‘let’s get rid of the blight,’ Joseph DiMento, a law professor who co-wrote Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways, told Vox. But modern historians are challenging what seems to have been the government’s definition of blight. “Places that we’d now see as interesting, multi-ethnic areas were viewed as blight,” DiMento says.

The article continued: “Highways were a tool for justifying the destruction of many of these areas.”

Ultimately, the projects resulted in mass displacement and dispossession in Black communities like Hayti. The location for the original Chicken Hut was one of those casualties, displaced to make space for North Carolina Highway 147 or the Durham Freeway.

“Urban renewal came by and wiped everybody out,” Peggy says.  

But they survived. Peggy and Claiborne regrouped and settled into their permanent location on 3019 Fayetteville St. at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Far from idle observers, they fed the movement by bringing food to freedom fighters who participated in sit-ins and peaceful protestors who were held in jailhouses.

It’s that commitment to community – and adaptability – that has helped the Tapps remain in operation for more than six decades. They also have a stellar set of business practices that were handed down from one generation to the next.