The following is a companion piece to the feature on Richmond's Blackwell neighborhood in our September issue.
Built in 1911, the house at 211 E. 18th St. had been vacant for more than a decade and sustained severe water and fire damage. (Photo courtesy Historic Richmond)
For a century, the late Victorian white, two-story wood frame house with green trim at 211 E. 18th St. served as a tangible link to the family of the man for whom Richmond’s Blackwell neighborhood is named, a symbol of continuity as the environment transformed around it.
Dr. James H. Blackwell Jr., as shown in "History of the American Negro, Virginia Edition," Volume V, edited by A.B. Caldwell and published in 1921
The house was where physician James H. Blackwell Jr., son of the renowned educator and civic leader James Heyward Blackwell, raised two children with his wife, Charlotte Virginia Jackson Blackwell. They bought it in 1915, the year they were married, and the property remained under family ownership until 2010, when the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority took possession.
It was also the site of a devastating family loss.
The Blackwells’ grandson, Matthew E. Perkins Jr., never knew his grandfather, who died in 1950, but he recalls spending time at the house with his grandmother, a former schoolteacher known in the neighborhood as “Miss Charlotte.” She liked to visit neighbors in the evenings to watch television, he says.
After one such visit, she returned home and went to the kitchen to wash up the supper dishes before going to bed. As she stood at the sink, a bullet tore through the back of her house and struck her in the temple. It was Sept. 9, 1962, a Sunday night. Two other bullets lodged in an upstairs wall, missing the bed where her sister, Fannie Jackson, was sleeping, Perkins says.
According to a report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch the next day (see the newspaper page below), a police officer chasing a shooting suspect around 9:15 p.m. fired six shots at a man running out of the back of a house near Jefferson Davis Highway and Stockton Street — about a block from the Blackwell house — after the man fired twice at the officer. Patrolman D.L. Nuckols, a member of the K-9 Corps, had been investigating a report that a woman had been shot. After firing at the suspect, Nuckols returned to the first house and found a woman shot in the leg. About 90 minutes later, he and a fellow officer, Lt. O.S. Childress, went back to the Blackwell house. Looking through the kitchen window, they saw Charlotte Blackwell lying on the floor. She died later that night at St. Philip Hospital.
“She lived a few hours, but there was nothing they could do for her,” says Perkins, who was 9 years old at the time.
What happened next is etched in his memory, a bittersweet epilogue to the trauma of his grandmother’s death.
In the days after the fatal shooting, Nuckols contacted Charlotte Blackwell’s grieving family and arranged to meet with Perkins’ mother, Grace Virginia Blackwell Perkins, and his uncle, Heyward Jordan Blackwell, at the house. Perkins’ mother made sure that Matthew and his sister, Gayle, were present.
“That was the first time that I have ever seen a big, burly policeman shedding tears,” Perkins says. “He apologized to my mother and my uncle for having shot my grandmother. He was really broken up about it. My mother and my uncle granted forgiveness … and it really made an impression on me.”
Charlotte Jackson Blackwell is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in South Richmond. (Photo by John Shuck)
An involuntary manslaughter charge against Nuckols was dismissed a month later. The man Nuckols was chasing, John Mack Owens, was convicted of attempted murder and malicious wounding and sentenced to 15 years in prison. (Nuckols died in 2014.)
After Charlotte Blackwell’s death, Matthew Perkins says, his mother decided the house should be rented out to generate income. In the late 1960s, during the development of the 464 scattered-site public housing units built in the neighborhood in 1970, the RRHA sought to acquire the property at 211 E. 18th St. and two vacant lots next to it that were also owned by the family, he says.
The attachment of the Blackwell name to the neighborhood came about with the public housing development, Perkins says. “When I was a kid, the whole area was called South Richmond … when you crossed Hull Street into the black section, on the south side of Hull Street. The north side of Hull Street was white folks.”
Instead of selling the property, he says, Grace Perkins negotiated a deal with the housing authority to obtain a loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to convert the house into two apartments. She and her brother hired a property manager to take care of the house and oversee tenants.
That arrangement ended in 1985, when Matthew Perkins took over the job himself — a decision that he acknowledges was a mistake.
“I had too many irons in the fire,” says Perkins, who was also a restaurant manager and part-owner. “I didn’t manage the property the way I should have.”
There were periods when one or both units were vacant, he says. In 1998, he decided to stop renting it out and move his furniture in. Around that time, he became a caregiver and companion to an older woman who lived across the street. Eventually, he began spending so much time there that he thought he would save money by turning off the utilities at 211 E. 18th St., which came into the possession of Perkins and his sister, Gayle Perkins Atkins, with the deaths of their mother and uncle in 1997 and 1998, respectively.
Perkins says he was in and out of the house for several years, and it remained without utilities for five years, from 2003 to 2008. He says the lack of utilities prompted the city to condemn the structure.
The RRHA acquired the property through eminent domain on March 31, 2010, according to the authority’s general counsel, Cory J. Wolfe. Using Community Development Block Grant funds from the city, the authority paid $42,000 as “just compensation” to Matthew Perkins and Gayle Perkins Atkins, grandchildren of James H. Blackwell Jr. Use of the CDBG funds committed the property to be designated as affordable housing for someone earning no more than 80 percent of the area median income, Wolfe says.
Perkins says he did not want to sell the property to RRHA, but his sister declined to sign over her interest in the property to him, resulting in the court involvement. He says deductions were made from the amount the two heirs received for unpaid real estate taxes and liens against the property. Gayle Atkins, a former broadcast journalist who had served as a board member for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Washington Ballet and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other organizations, died Dec. 15, 2012, in New York City. According to her obituary, she was also involved in Democratic politics as a deputy press secretary for presidential candidate Walter Mondale, an early staff member for Bill Clinton’s primary 1992 campaign in New York and a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The house at 211 E. 18th St., as seen from the front (Photo courtesy Historic Richmond)
After the RRHA acquired the property, a falling tree limb damaged a corner of the house, exposing it to weather, Perkins says, and a hurricane damaged the other side of the house. RRHA officials say the property was "significantly blighted" when the authority acquired it.
Six years later, the RRHA reached an agreement with the nonprofit Southside Community Development and Housing Corp. to transfer the property, but several days before the May 6, 2016, transaction, a fire swept through the already deteriorated building, Wolfe says.
Dianna Bowser, Southside’s president and CEO, says the house had become an eyesore and a public safety concern. After taking possession of the property, SCDHC hired an engineer and architect, but needed permission from the city’s Planning and Preservation Division to proceed, she says.
“The home just sat boarded and vacant,” Bowser says via email. “The original plan was to try to substantially rehabilitate the property, which came with an extreme high cost.”
Kimberly Chen, principal planner in the Richmond Department of Planning and Development Review’s Planning and Preservation Division, notified Blackwell’s civic association leader and representatives of Historic Richmond about the impending demolition of the house in a Dec. 7, 2017, email. She wrote that the city and SCDHC had sought alternatives to demolishing the structure, but “it has been determined that rehabilitation is not feasible.”
Answering a follow-up question via email, Chen adds, “We asked for bids for both rehabilitation and demolition … and the determination was that rehab was more expensive and that by the time everything was repaired and replaced that needed to be repaired and replaced, there would be very little historic fabric left.”
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Construction has begun on the new house that will replace the 1911 structure that was once home to the family of James H. Blackwell Jr. and his wife, Charlotte Jackson Blackwell. (Photo by Tina Eshleman)
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Construction of the new house at 211 E. 18th St., as seen from the rear of the property (Photo by Tina Eshleman)
After consulting with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the city outlined measures be taken to mitigate the loss to the community by building a new house that is similar in size and design, and to incorporate salvaged materials from the original structure, including doors and mantels. A plaque at the site will mark the property’s association with the Blackwell family.
A demolition permit was issued in March, and the house was torn down on April 10.
Bowser says that the general contractor for the project received a building permit in late July, and the house is under contract with a home purchaser who meets the affordable housing income criteria.
For Perkins, the news of the house demolition is disappointing, but not unexpected. Answering questions about his family’s former home brings back feelings of anger, resentment and powerlessness, he says. He’s been living in Bowie, Maryland, with a cousin since late 2013. Though he often thinks about Richmond, he doesn’t have plans to return anytime soon, he says. “There’s no reason to come back.”
Kate Andrews contributed to this report.
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