THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501060208
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 210 lines
IT IS SOMETHING that people in this Deep Creek neighborhood will swear to, a memory that runs deep among Camelot's roughly 6,000 residents: A promise of recreation was made to them 28 years ago, and that promise was broken.
No one can quite remember the specifics of what was promised or when: Was it a swimming pool or a golf course? Some residents have found diagrams for tennis courts in city planning records dating back 15 years. And wasn't there something about a man-made canal?
Though there were no signed guarantees, members of the Camelot Civic League banded together around the shared belief of a broken promise to fight against the developer and the city for recreation for their children. Rotting picnic benches and corroding swing sets near the Camelot Elementary School have been the kids' only playground here since the 1,250-home development was built in 1966.
But in the past year of fighting, the neighborhood's united struggle against a developer turned inward.
After the developer, W.W. Reasor, offered a 4.6-acre park in December in exchange for a rezoning to build more homes, residents who had once fought together started fighting amongst themselves. When the civic league voted on the rezoning in its meeting last month, the 38-37 split was about more than acres of land. What started out as Camelot's struggle for a park grew into a struggle over how long the community should keep fighting, what it should fight for and how much responsibility it should take for past failures. That struggle forced residents to ask themselves whether they could lay down the deep-rooted anger and distrust toward a city and a developer that has come from so many years of feeling wronged.
For many residents, including Camelot Civic League president Larry Spruill, the time to put aside past mistrust came when the developer deeded to the city in writing 4.6 acres of land and the city guaranteed funds for equipment and maintenance.
``We aren't exactly satisfied with it,'' said Spruill, who is now working with Claire Askew, director of Parks and Recreation, to get the civic league's input on what should go on the land. ``But it's something we can live with.''
It is a much different tune than the one he and many other residents sang in past years.
When Spruill first joined the community group in 1979, he fought for recreation the only way he knew how: ``raising holy hell.''
``The conservative types in the civic league, they got scared when I came,'' Spruill said. ``They said `Mr. Spruill, what are you doing?' And I would say to them, `What do you expect to get from these people if you don't raise hell?' Because I wasn't going to go begging and pleading for what our children deserved.''
Spruill was not the only one up in arms. Longtime residents and civic leaders Nettie Bailey and C.C. Hawkins were angered by what they saw around them: a predominantly black neighborhood that was more densely packed than other areas of the city, yet had no open space for its roughly 3,500 kids. After years of asking the city for recreation, they saw a community center go up in another Deep Creek neighborhood in 1980. They saw bored kids tearing down mailboxes. They saw a developer whose only offer for recreation was a 2.8-acre lot at the edge of the development, a lot covered with weeds and bordered by a muddy ditch.
And they saw the possibility of real park space disappear as more and more land went to building more homes in Camelot.
``For every 100 homes there should be one acre of recreation space,'' said Hawkins, coordinator of the Camelot-Kingstowne Community Watch. ``How are we ever going to get that if Reasor keeps building?''
As recently as August, Spruill, Bailey, Hawkins and Vernon Johnson, a resident, vowed to continue the fight for adequate land, at least 10 acres. Charging both Reasor and the City Council with racism, Spruill said he was ready to take the city to court if it approved the developer's rezoning request to build 78 new single-family homes.
Spruill still believes the packed council sessions and speeches paid off. ``It wasn't radical for (the sake of being) radical,'' Spruill said, ``but if Camelot never had a radical group to stand up and fight, we wouldn't have gotten as far as we did.''
What they got were several council delays, which forced Reasor to the bargaining table. By November, the developer agreed to change the location of the park from the muddy site originally proposed to a spot directly across from the Camelot Elementary School on King Arthur Drive.
But a recreation proposal submitted to Reasor by the four-member negotiating committee submitted a month earlier had already started Spruill rethinking how much was too much, and whether the direction of the committee matched the neighborhood's intentions. The list of requests asked for all 24 acres the developer planned to build on.
``I'm the president,'' Spruill said. ``That means I have to do what the residents - all of the residents - want me to do. When I started realizing that certain individuals were starting to take the community out of the equation, I knew it was time to go back to my executive board and find out what the community wants.''
What Spruill heard from that 35-member board was not only a rejection of that proposal, but concern about an emerging image of their own community as untrustworthy and unreasonable, an image residents say did not reflect the neighborhood.
``Camelot does not want revolution,'' said Gloria H. Johnson, a board member. ``We are hard-working people, part of the city like other neighborhoods. We've never wanted revolution and we don't support revolutionaries.''
While the fight to increase the amount of acreage was important, Johnson said threats by one civic leader to ``take the land'' would undercut efforts to help those whom the fight is supposed to be about: children.
``I think everyone here has good intentions,'' Johnson said. ``But Hawkins is talking about taking the land if it's not given to us. What does that mean, `take the land?' They want to go back to the time of Angela Davis.''
To Bailey and Hawkins, the time of Angela Davis, a civil rights activist in the 1960s, could be just around the corner if residents give up the battle for the land and the facilities that are owed to them.
On the night Camelot voted by one to fight Reasor's offer of 4.6 acres, Hawkins compared the City Council's decision on the rezoning to a lynching.
``Whenever they get ready to lynch a black,'' Hawkins said, ``people have a way of conveniently leaving town.'' Hawkins was referring to Reasor, who has always sent a representative to Camelot to negotiate on his behalf. ``And that's what they're getting ready to do - lynch Camelot.''
To agree to 4.6 acres when the community deserves 13 and has gone so long without it would be nothing less than an insult to Camelot, Hawkins said later. It is the difference between tokenism and vindication.
Bailey, who heads the Camelot Youth Movement, remembers when Camelot was designed to be a self-contained community - with homes, schools, a shopping area, and open space for children to play.
Instead, it has become a community where parents must drive two miles to the predominantly white area where the Deep Creek Community Center is located.
``When children have something constructive to do, they don't have time to get in trouble,'' Bailey said. And there as been trouble in Camelot: more graffiti, more vandalism, and even incidents of rape and molestation among neighborhood youth.
Bailey acknowledged parents' responsibility for their children, and that respect begins in the home.
``Yes, the community has to get back involved with our children. Parents are willing to do that. We just need a place to do it in.
``All we need to restore trust in the council and the developer is for them to give us what is due to us,'' said Bailey, who has organized a 25-member group with Hawkins to have the rezoning approval reversed and the park site increased. ``We pay $2 million in taxes and we never see it, because it never comes back to the community.''
While Bailey said the new $2.2 million gymnasium to be added to Camelot Elementary School was a step forward for the community, she said it should not be used as an excuse to explain away years of past neglect and lack of recreation in the neighborhood.
``The gym is a temporary solution to the problem,'' Bailey said. ``I support it for what it is - a gym attached to a school - but not as a substitute to open recreation in Camelot.''
Bailey said the new committee was circulating petitions in the community and would submit the signatures to city zoning appeal officials.
``You heard some of the council members,'' Bailey said. ``Even they admitted that they were wrong, that past councils had made mistakes. The city should be responsible for whatever past or present actions it has taken.''
Mayor William E. Ward, who helped buy time for Camelot by persuading the council to put off a vote one last time in November, could not deny the neglect that has been Camelot's history. But whether neglect or racial discrimination played a role in Camelot's past or its present, Ward said it was time for neighborhood parents to reckon with their own obligations toward their children.
``Regardless of what the city does, regardless of how many dollars a city puts into a community, mothers and fathers, churches and schools have a responsibility to monitor their children and instill in them basic values of life, property and respect.''
Ward said that as a black child growing up in the segregated South, his mother and teachers had a much bigger impact on his future than recreation.
``I didn't go to City Hall in Charlotte County to ask for anything because it would have been useless in the first place. So when people blame government entirely on the misdeeds of other, the question arises in my mind: `What have they been doing? Where are the mothers and fathers when kids are vandalizing at midnight?' ''
Having lost the battle for more than 4.6 acres, many residents agree that it is now time to cooperate with the city and the developer.
``My son is 18 years old now,'' said Paul C. Ewing, 70, of Aaron Drive. Ewing, a past president of the civic league, said the longer the community holds out, ``the more kids will grow up here and suffer with no recreation at all.''
After 20 years of fighting against the city, Ewing said there was definitely satisfaction in hearing council members admit that Camelot had been wronged in the past.
``I know it seems small,'' Ewing said, ``but after they said that, I felt a lot better.
Now that that's been done, Ewing said, it was time for the neighborhood to shift scrutiny away from the developer and city hall and toward the neighborhood itself.
To Spruill, that means residents becoming regular participants in civic league affairs, developing consistent programs children can turn to, and even just getting people to pay dues.
``People were talking about hiring a lawyer to sue the city, and I have to knock down doors just to get their dues every year,'' Spruill said.
Building those lasting foundations, Spruill said, will help the community come back together as a united, working whole.
``There's a point where you can't just keep looking back on the past,'' Ewing said. ``It's so easy to say what someone else can do. But now I'm trying to find out, are we really ready to help ourselves? Can we take the torch up to ourselves as well as we took it to Reasor and the council?'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by STEVE EARLEY
Residents of the Camelot neighborhood say their children do not have
enough recreational opportunites. Kevin Smith is shooting basketball
at the only playground in the area.[color cover photo]
Camelot Civic League president Larry Spruill surveys the site for
the proposed recreation park.
Left to right, Kacey Smith, Tremaine Shamlee and Keion Smith play
basketball at Camelot Elementary School.
C.C. Hawkins wants a larger park than the proposed 4.6 acres.
by CNB