OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — A deep love for the community and specifically its people runs through North Omaha, along with its culture and roots.
“It’s an African American phenomenon. It's a wonderful culture that includes our churches, our religions, our food, our dress, our hair, our arts, and all of those things, and our intellect and professionalism,” said Preston Love, Jr., a North Omaha resident and activist.
But residents say a lot of the good gets overshadowed by misrepresentations by outside communities who think of the bad.
“We've had years, I'm talking about decades, of neglect that took us from the glory days to the days of economic devastation and all the residuals of poverty. The residuals are not good and include crime and a lot of things which is a false image of this community,” said Love.
North Omaha was historically discriminated against through redlining, according to Jeannette Gabriel, Ph.D., a professor at UNO and an investigator in the Omaha Spatial Justice Project.
“In Omaha, there was significant racial discrimination impacting communities not considered nonwhite. Those communities largely resided in North and South Omaha,” said Gabriel.
She adds that worse than redlining was racially restrictive housing covenants.
“Which said only certain types of people could live in those homes and what this did is placed a geographic barrier over where people could move,” said Gabriel.
But it's not just about where your home is located.
“Where your home is, is connected to many other issues that impact your quality of life. For example, community parks and the number of trees, the number of green spaces. Access to good food, access to gas, access to decent schools, access to transportation systems,” said Gabriel.
Despite past and ongoing segregation, North Omaha is pushing forward.
Millions of dollars are being poured into North Omaha through federal ARPA money. We sat down with community members to ask what they'd like to see that money used for.
“More restaurants, healthy restaurants at that. We would like to see more things in the community. We don't have a Whole Foods down here, we don't have a gas station on 24th Street, we have to go to Carter Lake or up to 30th for that,” North Omaha resident Keiria Marsha said.
Over these next few weeks, we're going to explore these topics, how we got here and what the community hopes for the future.
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