Angelia Davis

davisal@greenvilleonline.com

The Nicholtown Community is determined not to let the shooting death of a Greenville police officer slow its drive to become a better place to live.

Community leaders will meet next week with Police Chief Ken Miller to develop a strategy to improve the community.

Police officer Allen Jacobs, 28, was fatally shot by Deontea Mackey, 17, on March 18 during a chase in Nicholtown. Mackey, described by authorities as a known gang member, then shot and killed himself police said.

Delores Durham, president of the Nicholtown Neighborhood Association, described those events as a tragedy and said her heart goes out to both families.

But, the relationship that has been established with police, “I want to keep that going,” she said.

“The police department is very much a part of our community,” Durham said. “They come to our activities and our community meetings. They stop, speak, and play basketball with kids in the community. And we recognize the diligence they put forth daily to keep us safe.”

Miller said he too is committed to helping improve life in Nicholtown.

“They’re supportive of us and we’re supportive of them and we do whatever we can to help keep them safe,” Miller said. “Most of our problems that show up in Nicholtown are youth or gang related, but 98 percent of the population in Nicholtown is stable. They’re great people.”

Decline

In its best days, Nicholtown, Greenville’s first black community, did not have the problems that now make some people there feel unsafe.

The community is in “heart” of Greenville, about 1.5 miles from the downtown Central Business District, is bordered by Pleasantburg Drive, Laurens Road, Cleveland Park and the Reedy River.

Ruth-Ann Butler, who grew up in Nicholtown and now runs the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center, has said the community became known as Nicholtown because in those days you could buy almost anything for a nickel. Its history dates back to 1849, when Elisha Green willed a portion of his plantation to his daughter, according to city records.

Over time, the land was divided and sold to individuals outside the Green family. During the 1870s, nine black families settled into the community and purchased large parcels of land. As other black families moved in, the community grew.

Out of that growth came prominent local, regional, state and national leaders and professionals.

“This neighborhood, back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, was a very good neighborhood, with a very diverse socioeconomic level of African Americans,” said resident Sylvia Palmer.

“We had the poorest of the poor, the middle class, and common laborers. We had a lot of prominent school teachers, principals, preachers, and professional people as well as,” she said. “It was a very peaceful neighborhood. We all got along.”

That was before the influx of drugs and crime moved in, and helped bring the neighborhood down, she said.

As the community continued to grow, Roosevelt Heights apartments were built in 1949. In 1952, another public housing development called Fieldcrest Village was built.

The city renamed Fieldcrest Village Jesse Jackson Townhomes in 1989. Over time, both housing developments sank into despair.

By the late 1970s, after years of owner-occupied homes turning into rentals, a change in values and lifestyles took place at the foundation of the community.

The infiltration of drugs also had a tremendous impact on Nicholtown and the Jesse Jackson Townhomes began to change, residents said.

In May 2005, the Greenville Housing Authority received a $20 million HOPE VI Revitalization grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The grant allowed the authority to demolish the Jesse Jackson apartments and replace them with single-family homes, townhouses and new apartments.

Palmer believes the biggest problems now still come from the public housing complexes and the transient populations in them.

“A lot of times, they don’t have the living standards and morals that we would like for people to have,” she said.

“If we could get parents to become more involved in their children’s upbringing and take on the role of a parent and not a buddy or a friend, that I think would help a lot,” she said.

She said there are programs in the community at the Sterling School and the Phillis Wheatley Community Center, other places that work with children to raise their level of respect, manners and values.

“But we’re having trouble getting our parents to get these kids involved in these type of programs,” Palmer said. “There are people who still value respect and education and those things but until we get everybody on the same page, we’re going to have problems.”

She said some of the problems with crime in Nicholtown come from people who don’t live there.

“I don’t know if there’s ever a way to stop anything like that, but I would like to see people have a general respect for life, a love for people and just do the right thing,” she said.

Overall, the climate in Nicholtown is better today than it was in the late 80s and 90s as far as crime is concerned, Palmer said.

That’s because some residents have taken an active role in trying to remove elements that put the neighborhood in decline.

“In about 12 years’ time, we have really made tremendous progress,” she said. “That’s one of the things I’m involved in and one of the things I really like about our community. We have people who are actively working to make a difference, but we need everybody.”

Turnaround

Darian Blue, pastor of Nicholtown Missionary Baptist Church and executive director of the Phillis Wheatley Association, said in the four years he’s been in Nicholtown, he’s seen a tremendous turnaround.

He’s seen everything from community gardens to prayer walks involving different races of people, “robust” programming for children and revitalization.

Additionally, he said, great local and state leaders still live in the community.

His hope is that no one takes the incident resulting in Jacob’s death and casts a dark cloud over the entire Nicholtown community.

“It is not in any way, shape, form or fashion the type of community that many people would try to portray it to be,” he said.

“I think the city is doing a great job of fulfilling its role in the master plan for Nicholtown,” he said. “I think the culture here today is one of change, vibrancy, and one that cares for its neighbors. We seek to pull each other up.

“When something happens in our community, nobody sits down and points fingers. We all come together and seek solutions. We seek to be part of the solution and not part of the problem,” he said.

Nicholtown is filled with children and young people, Blue said. A challenge is having resources to offer them.

“In order to have another successful generation, we need more resources to offer our children. It’s hard for us as a community to compete with social media, and the music our children hear on the radios.” Blue said. “You’ve almost got to beat the world to the punch in order to save them and with a lack of resources we can’t. It’s like we’re reacting as opposed, to if we had the resources, we could be the ones leading.”

Since Jacob’s death, racial tension has started to brew, Blue said.

“I want everybody to stay encouraged and to understand that while we may have had a tragedy, it can be viewed as a perfect storm in the sense that this is the perfect opportunity to show love,” he said. “This isn’t an opportunity to spew hate.”

It’s also not a setback in the progress that has been made to uplift Nicholtown, he said.

“If we view it as a setback, then we’re scrambling,” Blue said. “We’ve got a clear agenda. We know what we’re trying to accomplish with our youth, with housing, jobs, and education. We’ve just got to stay the course and don’t lose hope, faith and love.”

Biggest challenge

Like Blue, Durham said the tragedy involving Jacobs has neither been a negative setback in efforts to improve the community nor has it strained the neighborhood’s relationship with police.

“They have called me and we’ve talked and cried together,” she said. “I’m determined to not let this discourage us.”

Next week, she’ll meet with Miller and hopes to work with his department to develop a plan to empower young people in Nicholtown.

“As a community, we strive for all of our children to work toward empowerment to uplift the community because any time a child has fallen short of that, we all lose.” she said.

“That’s what I want to come out of the meeting, a way to where we can reach the young people, to see what we can do to help them become more empowered. I think it is our biggest challenge.”

One thing that needs to change, she said, is communication with the young people.

That involves finding out what their needs are and working to provide those needs to keep them positive, she said.

In the process, “we’ll continue to work and try to come up with ways to prevent a tragedy like that from happening again.”

Moment of silence observed for officer during Mackey funeral

Chief: Honor Jacobs sacrifice by building community