Chris Churchill: A pioneering family was at home on a vanishing Albany street
Chris Churchill Published 7:59 pm, Saturday, December 12, 2015
Jesse and Teresa Sandidge decided to buy a home. They wanted a single-family house in a neighborhood of lawns and trees.
The problem? They were black.
When the Sandidges visited a neighborhood in Guilderland, teenagers gathered and chanted, "Not for sale ... Not for sale." When they looked at a house in McKownville, also in Guilderland, the home next door immediately went up for sale, and they were told that "the whole street is in an uproar" over their potential purchase.
That was the world in 1961, which, of course, really wasn't all that long ago.
Eventually, the Sandidges landed on little Loughlin Street in Albany, then an unpaved road lined by newish ranch houses just inside the city border. The couple and their children were the first black family there, and they weren't exactly welcomed with open arms.
Within months of their purchase, five of the nine houses on the dead-end street were for sale. Teresa Sandidge noticed that many of the prospective buyers being shown those houses were also black.
"I knew what was happening," she said a few years later. "They were bunching us up again."
We know what the Sandidges endured because it was chronicled for the Times Union by William Kennedy, the Albany writer who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Without that multi-part series in 1965 on the changing demographics of city neighborhoods, the family's experience might be lost to history.
"It wasn't something that my parents made me aware of," said Maureen Obie, who was a newborn when the family bought the house. "I don't remember hearing about any difficulties with us moving to the street until much later, and I didn't hear about it from them."
Something remarkable happened on Loughlin. After black families bought four of the street's houses, the remaining white families stayed. It became an integrated neighborhood, a real rarity in the 1960s.
"We just happened to be blessed with our neighbors," Teresa Sandidge told Kennedy. "You couldn't ask for better."
Loughlin was more isolated then, which might explain why it evaded the "blockbusting" that usually turned white neighborhoods black. Then, as now, the street off Fuller Road near UAlbany was disconnected from other city neighborhoods.
Obie remembers Loughlin as full of children who made the nearby woods a playground. She doesn't remember the kids ever talking about race. It just wasn't an issue, even as the civil rights movement roiled the wider world.
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Meanwhile, Teresa Sandidge continued to be a pioneer, becoming the first black president of the Albany PTA. When she died in 1968 at 42, a Times Union editorial mourned the "grievous loss to the community" but celebrated her work to free the city "from the mire of prejudice."
Four years after Teresa's death, the Sandidges lost the home at 7 Loughlin to foreclosure and moved to North Albany. It was a jarring change. "The new neighborhood wasn't the same for us," Obie told me. "We had lost our childhood home, and we had just recently lost a mother." (Jesse Sandidge, a self-employed trucker, died in the early 1980s.)
Loughlin, though, continued as a truly integrated neighborhood right up until its homes were emptied last year. The street will be redeveloped, potentially as housing for the rapidly expanding SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
The neighborhood's change has been much discussed, and I won't get into it again here. I'll just note that Obie — who works for Albany Law School — is saddened by it. A fondly remembered piece of her family's history is being erased.
But perhaps not forgotten. Councilman Mike O'Brien is proposing that Loughlin Street be renamed for Jesse and Teresa Sandidge, and perhaps another honor might follow if redevelopment ultimately removes the road. The point, O'Brien said, is to recognize the Sandiges' courage and the unique neighborhood they helped create.
"It was a great model of what a community is supposed to be," he said.
In his 1965 story, Kennedy noted that Albanians often clucked over civil rights abuses in Alabama even as they committed similar, if less violent, offenses against black house hunters. It was hypocrisy, he wrote.
We shouldn't cluck at the way the world was then. I say that because a few years ago, Obie considered renting a home in McKownville that was not far from Loughlin Street. When she arrived, the woman who met her made it obvious that a black tenant wasn't preferred.
Fifty years had passed since her parents' home search, but not enough had changed. |
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