What does it take to resurrect
a neighborhood cornbread?
Mac and cheese there.
You got your collard greens.
Everybody loved for Michael Brown.
It takes faith.
And I showed that to you.
Persistence.
This place set coal for 40
years and a sense of history 40 years.
Five years ago, Michael bought an
abandoned building in the heart of
a neighborhood in perpetual decline.
This is my passion, an attempt to rebuild
something his community lost years ago.
63 years here
in the same neighborhood.
If I messed up over here, that.
Family had the right to get ahold of me.
Like I said, it takes a village to
raise a child and this was a village.
East Central is that village, a village
whose history is largely forgotten.
Freya, Thor. Every house from
there, all the way down to
Liberty Park, was black-owned.
We all knew each other.
Kids all grew up together.
We all go together,
know each other for years. We go back years.
Michael will tell you we
grew up in church together.
It's a troublemaker,
and I was the good one.
You can ask him that.
A couple of kids living in Spokane's
lone Black neighborhood, blacks couldn't
afford to live nowhere else.
This was our black bubble.
It was vibrant. It was the place
to be back in the day. Along
the street here in central, you will
see nothing but blacks.
We all know due to a lot of red lining
and just socioeconomic issues back then.
But this was home to us,
a home that was split in
half with Interstate 90. Who
really wants to live by a freeway?
It was a step forward for Spokane,
but a step backward for the
neighborhood. Do you think most
of Spokane knows the history
of African Americans?
Of course not. No, no, not at all.
See. And if I feel if they did.
They might have a little
bit more compassion now.
In this neighborhood, there's
no more black people. 5th
Ave is the last of the black community
fighting to hold on to that history.
A lot of people still don't know where.
Here you got Larry Barber
and styling the longest,
oldest operating Barber in Spokane
Black on the beauty shop there.
Then you got R2 places here.
Then you got the maxi center all
in one block, all with one thing in common.
We're the forgotten neighborhood.
But Michael and Betsy remember E
central, with its many churches,
was the only place they could gather.
Where black churches are located is where
black people will live. The church was it,
which is why Betsy's mom moved
her family to East Central
1963, a black woman with four children
coming across the country on a train.
Betsy, just seven years old at the time,
my mom was the first black woman
to pastor. Their own church.
Now Betsy is sitting on those church steps,
following in her mom's footsteps.
Councilmember Wilkerson, president.
As the only sitting Black Council
member representing E Central
Betsy's legacy legislation is
the E 5th Ave initiative. People
have labeled E central
crime ridden low income.
We've carried that label for so long.
We all see the potential,
and we just want E central
to live out its dream,
especially Michael, whose job
training program is giving
neighborhood teens a place to start.
So we're both on the same track,
trying to achieve the same goals.
We just have different paths of
how we're trying to get there.
So what will it take to resurrect E central?
Michael can answer that himself,
if we can all just come together.
It's the beginning and if we can all
just stay together then we got progress,
but if we can work together, we got success.
With photographer Nathan Brand.
I'm Nicole Hernandez. Crime 2 news.