Henry Street and the Gainsboro Neighborhood

A few blocks north of the Hotel Roanoke, where the slope of Gainsboro Hill begins to rise toward the older residential streets, there was once a neighborhood that functioned as the complete civic world of Black Roanoke. Henry Street was its commercial spine, and for the first seven decades of the twentieth century it offered nearly everything that legal segregation denied African Americans in the white downtown below: restaurants, insurance offices, a hospital, a movie house, doctors, lawyers, barbers, tailors, and the Hotel Dumas, which served the Black travelers who could not stay at the hotel that bore the city's name. The Gainsboro neighborhood developed alongside Roanoke itself, as African American workers who had come to build the railroad and staff the shops laid claim to land on the northern ridge.

By the nineteen twenties and thirties, the community had developed a density and an institutional richness that gave it real staying power. Churches anchored the social calendar. The Burrell Memorial Hospital, founded in nineteen fifteen, provided medical care to Black patients at a time when the main hospital in Roanoke was fully segregated.

The Hunton YMCA served as a community gathering place. The Gainsboro Branch of the public library was among the first library branches in Virginia open to Black patrons. Oliver Hill grew up in this neighborhood.

Hill went on to study law at Howard University, where he trained under Charles Hamilton Houston, the man who designed the legal strategy that would eventually produce Brown versus Board of Education. Hill spent decades dismantling the legal architecture of segregation across Virginia, filing school equalization cases, transportation cases, housing cases, one after another through the nineteen forties and fifties. He was one of the lead attorneys on Davis versus County School Board of Prince Edward County, one of the five cases consolidated into Brown versus Board of Education in nineteen fifty-four.

In nineteen ninety-nine, at the age of ninety-two, Hill received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. The Henry Street corridor that shaped Hill and thousands of others was largely destroyed in the nineteen sixties and seventies through urban renewal and highway construction. The neighborhood lost blocks of housing and commercial buildings.

The Hotel Dumas was demolished. What remains today is a fraction of what stood, and Roanoke's preservation and history communities have spent decades documenting what was lost and debating how to honor it. The Gainsboro neighborhood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and local organizations continue working to interpret and revitalize the area.