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Raised / Razed – 58:46 Runtime
Directors: Lorenzo Dickerson, Jordy Yager
Raised/Razed is a documentary feature film about the lasting effects of the federally-backed and locally-executed Urban Renewal program, through the lens of Vinegar Hill, a large African American neighborhood in the heart of Charlottesville, Virginia, that for 100 years thrived as the center of business, education, religious, and cultural life, until it — like hundreds of Black communities across America — was destroyed.
Raised/Razed was written and directed by filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson and journalist Jordy Yager who, after two years of extensive research, have woven original audio interviews of former Vinegar Hill residents from the early 1980s with modern-day interviews from their descendants, to bring the neighborhood back to life as it existed at its height and to take viewers into the homes, classrooms, and businesses of community members.
The film closely unpacks exactly how urban renewal operated, and the racist legacies it left behind by highlighting the program’s broad stroke of displacing African Americans in small towns and large cities across America. Raised/Razed draws the connection between Charlottesville’s Vinegar Hill neighborhood and Durham, North Carolina’s Hayti neighborhood, which was also destroyed, to show how Urban Renewal generationally transformed the lives of people across the country.
Raised/Razed leaves us with the question of repair and what can be done to reckon with this painful history.
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