Gainsboro was founded in 1835, Roanoke's oldest community, and what the people there built under segregation came to be called Roanoke's Black Wall Street. Henry Street was the heart of it — hotels, theaters, restaurants, and professional offices lined the avenue, not by choice but because the law left no alternative. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald performed there. In 1921 a library opened in Gainsboro, the only public library for Black residents during segregation, and it still stands, restored, holding an African American heritage collection. Then Urban Renewal demolished 1,600 homes, 200 businesses, and 24 churches. Desegregation dispersed the rest without replacing what was lost — the pattern repeated across the South after integration. You walk what endured. The library, the surviving buildings on Henry Street, the Harrison Museum in a 1906 warehouse: the proof that a community built something the law tried to limit.
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