When the 'hood looks like . . . David Duke

It's a pop quiz, boys and girls.

In what large-ish American city was this newspaper story published Monday? Remember, no fair Googling:

"It used to be real bad," said Ray Bazer, who has lived in the area for most of his 54 years.

"I've seen blacks get chased out of here. Nobody would sell their house to a black family, and the ones that rented them out wouldn't rent to blacks. Once, they built a duplex over on 14th Street, and a black family came and looked at it, and the next day it was ashes, burned down."

That arson, committed in 1981, leveled a nearly completed (city name deleted) Housing Authority scattered-site duplex under construction. In 1995, a black woman's car was tipped over and set ablaze at the same location.

But Bazer and other neighborhood residents, noting that there have always been a few black people living in the area, said the situation gradually had been improving.

Then came the Feb. 18 attack on Bob's Food Mart.

Police said two white men robbed the store at 5301 N. 16th St. They bound the hands and mouth of the manager - an Ethiopian immigrant - with duct tape, led him to the basement and fled. There was a boom that rattled neighbors' windows up to a block away, and then the store was on fire. The manager, Kassahun Goshime, escaped and survived. The store did not.

When the smoke cleared, what remained of Bob's Food Mart was a roofless shell of charred rubble with a crude message scrawled in crimson on its white back wall: "Go home" and a racial epithet.

Police say the attack may have been a racially motivated hate crime. The case remains under investigation, and no arrest has been made.

SURELY, it was somewhere in the racist South, right?

Naw, too obvious. Somewhere in some dying, nasty, ugly city in the gritty Northeast?

No?

OK, it was Mississippi, then. Definitely Mississippi. Maybe Louisiana . . . just on grounds of general dysfunctionality?

Nope.

TRY OMAHA. Relatively sedate, relatively affluent, relatively progressive and relatively civic-minded Omaha, Nebraska. The newspaper was the Omaha World-Herald. Here's more of the story:

The FBI is monitoring the Omaha police investigation to see whether a hate crime investigation is warranted. And black leaders spoke out against what they called the neighborhood's long-held "off-limits" attitude toward minorities.

Several neighbors said they hope it wasn't a hate crime. They said the spray-painted writing on the wall did not represent neighbors' attitudes overall, but they acknowledged that the graffiti and the arson looked bad.

"It just puts a blight on everything," said Doris Polsley, who has lived in the area for 58 years, since fourth grade. "It's not a reflection of the neighborhood. There are a few bigots, but not the majority."

Polsley and several other women happened to gather last week around homemade ice cream cake and other treats for their monthly ladies' fellowship meeting at Asbury United Methodist Church, across Fort Street from the burned store.

They said they felt bad for Goshime. Echoing many neighbors' opinions, they said he seemed like a nice man who was trying to run a business where one was badly needed.

The store, after decades as a neighborhood grocery, had been vacant for several years before Goshime and his sister, Tsedey, opened their business last year under the old name of Bob's Food Mart.

It was a rare retail business in one of Omaha's older neighborhoods, where homes mix with industry on flat land north of Carter Lake, roughly between 19th Street and Eppley Airfield.

The neighborhood is mostly low-income. Most streets in its eastern stretches are unpaved. Portions of the neighborhood have no sewers.

Cars stolen from around the city often end up in east Omaha, and vacant properties are quickly burglarized for salvageable metal, but there are few police calls to the neighborhood.

Area residents said most problems are settled between neighbors.

"If something goes missing from your garage or yard, you pretty much know where to go to look for it," Bazer said.

Omaha restaurateur and east Omaha resident Tom Foster said that five or six years ago, it was common to hear gunfire at night.

"I had to take bullets out of my roof and patch it, because people had been firing guns in the air," he said.

But gunfire is rare now, Foster said. He said he has been the victim of just one crime in his 15 years of living and commercial gardening in east Omaha. His car was stolen - after he had left the keys in it.

"It's a live-and-let-live kind of neighborhood," Foster said. "If people want to have a bunch of junked cars in their yards, you let 'em. If they want to have loud parties, you let 'em. If they have an unruly dog, you let 'em. There's enough room between our houses that it's not a problem."

He said the neighborhood is friendly - to people who are white.

(snip)

White neighbors said a few black families have moved in, but they are few enough that the white neighbors can point out the houses they occupy. Across the street from one black family's home, KKK graffiti is spray-painted on a metal utility box.

Imogene Gilbert, a longtime resident who owns nearly 30 houses in the neighborhood, said she would have no problem selling or renting to black people. But she said black people don't even come to look at houses on the market in the neighborhood.

That may have to do with the neighborhood's reputation. North Omaha leader LaVon Stennis Williams said she grew up hearing that, "If you're black, you didn't go to east Omaha unless you were going to Carter Lake for the Stone Soul Picnic - and then you went in numbers."

She said white people from the neighborhood literally would chase away black people who came down "horseshoe bend," a steep, winding stretch of street between Florence Boulevard and Carter Lake.

Omahan Michael Robinson said he experienced that himself and knew many others who did.

At age 13 or 14 in the late 1960s, he was riding bikes with friends from their north Omaha homes to goof around on the shore of Carter Lake. A white man with a St. Bernard in the back of his pickup met them at the bottom of the hill.

The man yelled racial slurs at the teenagers. He told them to get out.

"Then he set his dog after us," Robinson said.

Thomas Wells and other black employees at Omaha Paper Stock in the neighborhood said they had heard a lot of stories of that sort through the years. They said east Omaha isn't as bad now. They feel comfortable working there, going into neighborhood businesses and driving through the neighborhood.

"But you're not going to walk down here," Wells said.

BEFORE WE DECRY THE WOES of the black underclass -- and there are numerous woes to decry, and much work to be done (as opposed to merely decrying) -- it is a useful inoculation against Caucasian self-righteousness to contemplate what it looks like when the 'hood is white . . . like me.