Emmett McLoughlin Archives - Rogue Columnist

Bringing forth fruit

I first met Kit Danley in 2001 when she asked me to visit Neighborhood Ministries at its new home, hard against the railroad yards on Fillmore Street west of 19th Avenue.

It was a place that held fond memories for me. As a child, I had spent many hours train watching at the nearby Mobest Yard of the Santa Fe Railway. In those days, Fillmore ran through to 19th Avenue, and this end of the yard featured a cleaning facility for passenger cars (when Phoenix had passenger trains) and the locomotive turntable. South was the busy and (to my young eyes) imposing Valley Feed and Seed, where railcars were switched against the warehouse for loading and unloading.

Valley Feed and Seed looked very different in 2001: abandoned, decomposing, the grounds full of debris, silos that once provided seeds for this great agricultural valley now empty, eight acres of sadness. It was a graveyard that extended to Van Buren Street. Fillmore had been closed to a cul-de-sac when the yard was moved south (to lessen the train delays on McDowell). The surrounding area was known for crime now, not commerce.

But this was the site that Neighborhood Ministries had purchased in 1998 for an ambitious campus that would increase its outreach to the poor. By the time of my first visit, the organization had raised $2.2 million to begin renovations.

I liked Danley immediately. She was a near-native, went to Scottsdale High (I went to Coronado), and had chosen to make a stand in the wounded heart of Phoenix, founding Neighborhood Ministries in 1982. She was the polar opposite of the city of the short hustle, the state where hate was peddled for political profit.

And she would be frustrated that I appear to be making this column about her (it's not; read on). Like her spiritual forebear in Phoenix, Father Emmett McLoughlin, she felt called by Christ to minister here to the least and the lost, to the stranger and the wanderer, and find Christ in them.

Jon Talton April 1, 201594

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

People of color in old Phoenix

The 1948 graduating class from George Washington Carver High School (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

From its founding until the late 20th century, Phoenix was an overwhelmingly Anglo city. But Phoenicians of color were always here. This column tells a bit of their stories.

Phoenix was settled by many Southerners and ex-Confederates, and it kept that Southern sensibility well into the 1960s. The white Chicagoans who started coming in the 1930s brought their own racial biases that for decades tore that city apart.

Into the early 1950s many places in Phoenix were legally segregated, including schools. Phoenix Union Colored High School, later George Washington Carver High, opened in 1926. Booker T. Washington and Paul Lawrence Dunbar elementary schools were built for younger "colored" children. (Washington is now home of New Times).

Deed covenants restricted many neighborhoods to "whites only." Minorities couldn't buy houses north of Van Buren Street well into the 1940s (and, as the 1913 advertisement shows, often couldn't buy south, either). Many stores and restaurants would not serve blacks, Mexicans, Japanese and American Indians. Swimming pools were segregated, too. Arizona had an anti-miscegenation law on the books from 1865 to 1962.

To be fair, there was no "colored waiting room" at Union Station and Encanto Park golf course accepted minority players in the 1940s. No lynching based on race is on record. Chinese-American children went to white public schools. Early minority businessmen such as Jose M. Iberri prospered. Mexicans who could "pass" for Anglos, such as the Van Harens, could move more freely. But the race and class lines were not hard to find. Phoenix always saw itself as an Anglo city (and the demographics back this up, especially after 1920), unlike old Tucson with its proud Spanish and Mexican traditions.

And consider: For decades the distance between the mansions of "Millionaires Row," Chinatown, and "the slums" were often only a few blocks.

The Salt River Valley, of course, had once been part of Mexico. Prior to Columbus, it was the site of the most advanced irrigation-based civilization in the Americas before being abandoned by the Hohokam. By the time the cavalry forced peace on the Apaches and white families such as mine began arriving in the latter part of the 19th century, Hispanics and Pimas were living in the Valley, too.

The nature of the town was embodied in one of its founders, Jack Swilling. He had a Mexican wife, Trinidad Escalante, as well as an adopted Apache son, Guillermo.

In other words, Phoenix was never Des Moines in the desert.

Jon Talton November 5, 200912