Christine Dillon didn’t know what she was getting into when she moved to Tucson in the 1950s.

When a real estate agent sold the home to her family, then living in Texas, neither party realized that they were legally barred from living at the Euclid Avenue house they’d bought. 

The Dillons were a Black family, and racial convenants restricted property ownership in many parts of Tucson.

When the Dillons arrived, their presence led to one of the city’s first historically Black neighborhoods. Sugar Hull, an L-shaped area, sits between North Stone Avenue and North First Avenue, just south of Grant Road.

Dillon died in 2020, but her account of her experience then is the one of the first tracks of 88 included in the Sugar Hill Oral History Project, initially launched shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first iteration project, still available on Soundcloud, ended about six years ago. The group plans to release the next round of interviews in two or three months.

But volunteers with the Sugar Hill Community Land Trust, a group formed to support neighborhood residents and combat gentrification in the area, plans to relaunch the project within a few months. 

“Hopefully it will come out sooner rather than later,” said Sadie Shaw, the trust’s founder and president.

Shaw — a Tucson Unified School District boardmember who was an unsuccessful City Council primary challenger last year — said she first started the project by herself as a student at the University of Arizona. It was modeled after the work of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.

“My goal was to archive the historic residents because we were losing so many,” she said.

‘Firsthand accounts’

The oral history project began at a time when Shaw had lost one of her own close relatives, who’d been considered the de facto family historian. 

Her own grandparents moved to Sugar Hill in the 1950s from St. Louis to a home on the corner of Ventura Avenue and Stone Avenue.

Her great-aunt bought a house in the neighborhood, where Shaw currently lives, in the ’70s. 

“Learning and hearing these firsthand accounts really puts the things we may have learned ourselves or in school into perspective,” she said.

During the start of the project, Shaw had been using recording equipment rented from the university’s library and working on it alone.

She’d always planned to resume it after her 2019 graduation, she said. But she didn’t have the chance to until the group’s work was discovered last year by the Mellon Foundation, and invited the group to apply for a grant.

The Mellon Foundation grant, $150,000 over two years, will help her recruit more interviewers and interviewees, pay them for their time, purchase more up-to-date equipment and buy editing software.

She plans to continue to release tracks through Soundcloud, and hoping to add more multimedia aspects, like photos and videos for the project’s social media.

“It’s not just one person doing this,” she said. “This is a community-led initiative”

‘Being accepted’

Shortly after the Dillons moved to Sugar Hill, their white neighbors started moving out. The social phenomenon was called “white flight,” but it made room for a thriving Black community.

Covenants and deed restrictions barring people of color of living in certain neighborhoods or subdivisions had been imposed throughout the United States by housing developers since the early 1900s, but were ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1948. These covenants were then deemed illegal under the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Barbea Williams, the founder of a performance company centered on African dance, said Sugar Hill was her first home in Tucson.

“We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re a powerful community,” she said. “I’m really glad I can claim it.”

She moved to the neighborhood with her sister in 1973 and lived there for three years. She later worked for nearly four years at the Northwest Neighborhood Center, renamed in 2011 to the Donna R. Liggins Recreation Center after another Sugar Hill resident.

The described that area during the ’70s and ’80s as close-knit and friendly. Countless dancers and alumni from the Barbea Williams Performing Company came from there, she said.

Though the percentage of Black residents in Sugar Hill has decreased rapidly since the ’80s —largely due to gentrification, Shaw said — it remains a hub for the Black community.

Because there was a concerted effort to erase Black history throughout the United States, Williams said, it was important to her that Sugar Hill’s history be recorded and accurately passed down.

“We haven’t stopped,” she said. “We’re still involved and we’re passing that torch to our children.”

Williams no longer works in the area, but she’s a frequent visitor and longtime supporter.

“It was community. It was also being accepted in a town that has dealt with their own restrictions and still deals with its restrictions, because it ain’t over,” she said.

On Thursday, Shaw said, she had a few lined up for interviews. 

At the mention of Williams, Shaw said she was her dance teacher as a child and she hoping to add Williams to that list.

And Williams, for her part, said she was willing to help out in any way she could.

Shaw said anyone else who was interested in involvement with or donating to the Sugar Hill Community Land Trust was welcome. They can email the group at sugarhillclt@gmail.com.

“It takes a village,” she said.