LEGACY:
THREE CENTURIES OF BLACK HISTORY
in Charlotte, North Carolina 2nd Edition
Pamela Grundy Queen City Nerve
LEGACY:
THREE CENTURIES OF BLACK HISTORY
in Charlotte, North Carolina
Pamela Grundy
CHARLOTTE’S ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER
Copyright © 2022, 2023 Pamela Grundy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. To request permissions, contact the publisher at info@qcnerve.com. Paperback: 979-8-89184-043-0 First paperback edition February 2022. Second paperback edition March 2023. Edited by Ryan Pitkin Cover illustration by Abel Jackson Layout and design by Justin LaFrancois Printed in the USA. Nerve Media Productions LLC Queen City Nerve 933 Louise Avenue STE 10124 Charlotte, NC 28204 www.qcnerve.com
To History Makers Past, Present and Future
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Building Charlotte
9
CHAPTER 1 Slavery & Revolution
13
CHAPTER 2 Growth, War, Freedom
21
CHAPTER 3 Accomplishment & Backlash
35
CHAPTER 4 Creating Brooklyn
49
CHAPTER 5 Civil Rights
61
INTERLUDE Women In The Charlotte Sit-Ins
75
CHAPTER 6 Urban Renewal
81
CHAPTER 7 Seizing Freedom
93
CHAPTER 8 Building Coalitions
107
CHAPTER 9 Two Cities
119
Afterword Acknowledgements Notes Suggested Readings Index
131 139 142 149 150
FOREWORD Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Charlotte’s Black residents have made invaluable contributions to this growth from slavery to today. Resiliency has been a consistent theme in Charlotte’s Black history from enslavement through segregation, civil rights, urban renewal, growth and gentrification. Black contributions include constructing the roads and railroads that sparked Charlotte’s early growth, nurturing generations of community leaders, and shaping the racial reconciliation that helped build the city’s national reputation. African Americans now hold top leadership positions in government, banking, health care, education, and many other areas. Black Charlotteans have shaped these opportunities in many ways. In the civil rights era, for example, Julius Chambers opened the first integrated law firm in North Carolina and became the leading civil rights attorney of his generation. Kelly Alexander headed the North Carolina NAACP and built up Black voting strength across the state. Dentist and activist Dr. Reginald Hawkins organized carefully targeted protests and mounted a historic campaign for governor. Sarah Stevenson led the merger of Mecklenburg County’s Black and white PTAs, served on the school board and mentored generations of young leaders. Dr. Bertha MaxwellRoddey worked to create lasting cultural and educational institutions, including UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies program and the Afro-American Cultural Center, now the Gantt Center. Another great example of resiliency was Blacks’ ability to rise from the ashes of urban renewal that razed the Brooklyn community in the 1960s. Brooklyn consisted of businesses, churches, and homes, and hundreds were displaced. Hard work rebuilt institutions and forged new community ties. But those communities are once again under siege, as the gentrification created by Charlotte’s rapid growth is forcing many Black residents out of their homes once again. Our younger generation needs to know our Black history, the struggle, sacrifice, and accomplishments that have marked this 300-year journey. Drawing on the knowledge that Legacy shares will help all Charlotteans engage in the process of creating a more vibrant, equitable, and just community. David Taylor President and CEO Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture
INTRODUCTION Building Charlotte
The railroad men stooped and lifted, stooped and lifted, their breath heavy in the October air. Beside them rose piles of hand-hewn oak crossties, each 7 feet long and 8 inches thick. One by one, the workers laid the ties across the gravel roadbed, two and a half feet apart, more than 2,000 per mile. They hefted iron rails into place atop the wood, each rail 18 feet long and weighing more than 300 pounds. The sound of hammers striking metal spikes rang through the air, mingling with shouted orders and perhaps scraps of song. The men had risen before sunrise and would work to sunset. A mile or so away, people in the town of Charlotte listened eagerly for the whistle of the train that resupplied the lines as they inched forward. One crosstie, one rail at a time, the railroad men were bringing prosperity to town.1 9
Southern railroad workers. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad, which linked farmers in the North Carolina Piedmont with the bustling port of Charleston, S.C., would transform the region. Until the trains arrived, Charlotte was just another North Carolina town, a handful of streets, homes and small businesses that housed about a thousand residents. When George Washington passed through in 1791, he famously termed it a “trifling place.” The people and goods transported on the rails linked the Queen City to the world and helped make it the metropolis it is today – a center of trade, manufacturing, and finance. On October 21, 1852, an enormous crowd met the first passenger trains that steamed to a stop at the newly completed depot, built on 2nd Street between College and Brevard. City officials had issued “a general invitation to the citizens of North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and the ‘rest of mankind’ personally to appear in the town 10
of Charlotte.” They promised an event of Biblical proportions – “the largest Barbecue that has been given since the flood.”2 Nearly 20,000 people heeded the call, coming to eat, dance, hear speeches, view fireworks and take in what the local paper called “the most brilliant and glorious day that the history of Charlotte has furnished for seventy-odd years.”3 Little of the ensuing prosperity, however, would trickle down to the people who did the hardest work. Across the South, railroads were built by Black men and women whose freedom had been stolen. They cleared trees, dug and blasted rocks, shoveled dirt and gravel, battled rushing water to build bridge piers, constructed depots, cooked and cleaned. They built Charlotte and the South. Their labor brought most of them little in return. Most local histories, even today, describe Charlotte as shaped by hardworking Scots-Irish Presbyterians, whose thrift and independence helped fuel the American Revolution and laid the foundation for an industrial boom. Numbers tell a different story. In 1850, almost half of Charlotte’s residents – 47 percent – could trace their ancestry to Africa. The vast majority were enslaved. The stories of these Black residents and their descendants mingle strength and hardship, accomplishment and setback, joy and pain. Kidnapped from their homelands, imprisoned in a system that cast them as less than fully human, they nonetheless endured, bonding with each other, looking out for opportunity and building resilient, supportive cultures. Through slavery, through war, through Jim Crow segregation and into the 21st century, Black residents from all walks of life have played essential roles in making Charlotte the city it is today, doing much with little and rarely getting full credit for their contributions. Everyone in Charlotte needs to know their stories.
11
1 Slavery & Revolution
Liberty is Equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage Equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other. -Lemuel Haynes, 1776
Mecklenburg County’s first permanent Black residents arrived in the 1750s, when ambitious European colonists embarked upon the newly opened Great Wagon Road that ran from Pennsylvania and Virginia to the North Carolina Piedmont. By then, people of African descent had become an integral component of colonial economy and society. Africans had joined some of the earliest North American explorations. In 1619, shortly after English colonists settled on the Virginia coast, an English privateer arrived with a group of enslaved Africans, whom the crew traded for supplies. Over the next century and a half, as the American system of slave labor solidified, enslaved Black workers built the tobacco fortunes of Virginia and eastern North Carolina and fueled the rice and indigo economy around the port of Charleston. When Europeans began to venture to the Piedmont, those prosperous enough to afford enslaved workers brought them along. 13
Map by Richard Baldwin of colonial settlements and Native American territories, London Magazine, 1755. Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
At that time, towering oaks, maples and poplars alternated with grassy meadows on the rolling hills, crossed by paths forged by the resident Catawba Indians. The Catawba resisted the influx of Europeans until 1759, when a smallpox epidemic drastically reduced their numbers. Survivors were forced to sign a treaty that restricted them to a small area around present-day Rock Hill, S.C., clearing Mecklenburg County for further settlement. The Piedmont’s hilly terrain and rocky, rushing rivers made it far less suited to plantation agriculture than North Carolina’s coastal plain, and most farms started as small family operations. New arrivals began by felling trees and digging rocks. They slept in their covered wagons while they cleared fields and built log homes. They raised sheep, cattle, hogs, geese, corn, and flax. They spun linen and wool for clothes, killed animals for meat, ground corn for bread, and distilled it into whiskey. Some families were content with self-sufficiency. Others, however, aspired to greater wealth – an ambition that they believed would require enslaved labor. Cash crops such as cotton or tobacco required more work than a family could provide. Since hired labor was scarce, local historian 14
SLAVERY & REVOLUTION
D.A. Tompkins later wrote, “each farmer had to do his own work until he could by diligence and economy save enough to buy a slave.”1 Those who amassed the means to expand their operations journeyed to the bustling slave markets in Charleston. Many of the people brought back in chains had come straight from Africa, bearing the weight of violent separation from their homes and the horrific Middle Passage. Survival was an extraordinary achievement. Life in their harsh new world would require similar fortitude.2 Over the years, Black North Carolinians came to know their surroundings well. Hunting and fishing were ways of life for most of the colony’s inhabitants, both enslaved and free. Scattered populations also meant that enslaved residents had to travel to see each other and to form families. Alan Parker of Chowan County recalled a common pattern – his father, Jeff Ellick, lived on a farm 10 miles away from the rest of the family. He “generally came home Saturday nights and now and then would come to us in the night during the week, as a slave did not mind a walk of ten miles after his day’s work if he could have a chance to see his loved ones.”3 Enslaved Mecklenburg County residents likely did the same.
Charleston auction, Illustrated London News, 1856. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 15
Enslaved residents also gathered for festivities such as communal corn shuckings, enlivened by music, dancing and flirtation; and for religious ceremonies that transcended the narrow version of the gospel preached to them by slaveholding whites. Carey Freeman, who grew up enslaved in Mecklenburg County, told her daughter, Eliza Washington, about a minister who “used to preach to the colored people that if they would be good . . . and not steal their master’s eggs and chickens and things, that they might go to the kitchen of heaven when they died.” Freeman and her companions prayed more expansively at night, often using a large, strategically positioned iron washpot to muffle their voices: “[They] had to turn the pots down to keep their voices from sounding,” Washington explained, “and they couldn’t sing at all.”4 But while enslaved North Carolinians found ways to snatch a few moments for themselves, they remained largely at the mercy of their enslavers, with virtually no legal rights. Their marriages had no legal standing, and North Carolina laws placed almost no limits on punishments they might receive.5 Whippings were common, administered by enslavers, by overseers, and by North Carolina courts, which specified that an enslaved person convicted for actions ranging from setting fires to playing cards to teaching someone else to read should receive “a whipping on his or her bare back, not exceeding thirty-nine lashes.”6 This precarious legal state had particular consequences for women. “The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear,” wrote Harriet Jacobs, who ran away from a lustful enslaver and then spent seven years hiding in a cramped Edenton attic, waiting for an opportunity to escape the South. “When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.”7
Revolution for Whom? By the 1770s, as American colonists began to chafe at British political and economic restrictions, Mecklenburg’s white residents leapt to the forefront. On May 31, 1775, they voiced their dissatisfaction with British rule in a set of declarations called the Mecklenburg Resolves. 16
SLAVERY & REVOLUTION
Participants would later assert that a week or so earlier, on May 20, they had drawn up an even more audacious Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence – the first full declaration of independence in the North American colonies. The “Meck Dec” and its invocation of “a free and independent people” would become a cornerstone of white Charlotte identity, and May 20 an occasion for celebration.8 Across the colonies, Black residents also warmed to words of freedom and independence. “Liberty is a Jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of heaven,” free Black soldier Lemuel Haynes wrote in 1776, adding that “Liberty is Equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage Equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.”9 But in the end, the lofty rhetoric of the American Revolution offered little to enslaved Americans. For more than a century and a half, North American colonists had reconciled the divide between their celebration of liberty and their dependence on enslaved labor by defining Africans as an “inferior” race, unworthy of the rights and privileges white men sought for themselves. While a few African Americans were recruited to the Continental Army, most of the enslaved who aspired to freedom had to take matters into their own hands. When the Revolution came to Charlotte, local whites harassed the British troops, prompting General Charles Cornwallis to call the town “a hornet’s nest.” Enslaved residents had other priorities. As D.A. Tompkins put it: “A great number took advantage of the exciting times and endeavored to escape.”10 Some of those who left joined the British forces, who offered freedom to men who fought with them. Across the course of the war, as many as 20,000 men of African descent fought with the British army.
Slaveholding Republic After the Revolution, Southern whites refused to consider abolishing slavery. While Northern states began to end the practice, neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights offered hope for emancipation in the South. Instead, restrictions tightened. Slaveowners had always feared rebellion – North Carolina’s slave code of 1741 was enacted in response to the bloody Stono Rebellion outside of Charleston in 1739. The 17
Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which an enslaved population overthrew French colonists and established a Black republic, heightened those concerns. In 1793, the Mecklenburg County court ordered officers to arrest all enslaved persons “ranging at large during public meetings in the town of Charlotte except such as carried passes from their masters.” In 1809, “six patrols were appointed for the Charlotte militia district, and these patrols were of much service in preventing troubles among slaves and in apprehending the runaways.”11
Night patrollers examining passes. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Such militias, often called “paddyrollers,” became an ever-present threat, not only to potential rebels and escapees, but to the many people who ventured out to hunt or fish, to visit family members or to attend clandestine dances or religious services. “They would go two, or three together mounted on horse-back, and generally accompanied by one or more dogs,” Alan Parker recalled of the Chowan County militias. “They were also armed with guns, and carried great whips, made of raw-hide or leather.” If militiamen sighted someone without the required pass, the traveler began a mad dash for home. “Being on foot he could take to the woods, which he was sure to 18
SLAVERY & REVOLUTION
do if hard pressed,” Parker explained. “Once in the woods he might be obliged to hide unless [they] had dogs with them, but even in that case he might manage to give them the slip, for if he came to a stream of water he would wade or swim across it, or he might walk in it for a little way. . . . In this way he often managed to evade his pursuers.” If someone was caught, “he would be tied to the nearest tree, what few clothes he had on would be taken off, and he would be given thirty-nine lashes on his bare back.”12 Resistance could be deadly. “I remember one time there was a dance at one of the houses in the quarters,” recalled Fannie Moore, who was enslaved by a South Carolina family with many ties to Mecklenburg County. The dancers were “a-laughing and a-patting their feet and a-singing” when a militia group “shove the door open and start grabbing us. Uncle Joe’s son he decide there was [only] one time to die, and he start to fight. He say he tired standing so many beatings, he just can’t stand no more. The paddyrollers start beating him and he start fighting.” Eventually, one of the men “take a stick and hit him over the head and just bust his head wide open. The poor boy fell on the floor just a-moaning and a-groaning. The paddyrollers just whip about half dozen others and send them home and leave us with the dead boy.”13 Still, neither fear of rebellion nor concern about the violence required to maintain a slave economy led Mecklenburg’s residents to reduce their reliance on an institution that built wealth. By 1800, census takers counted 10,439 residents in Mecklenburg County. Of those, 1,988 – 19 percent – were enslaved African Americans. As the century advanced, their numbers and significance would grow.
19
2 Growth, War, Freedom
We want the privilege of voting. . . . Men who are willing on the field of danger to carry the muskets of a republic, in the days of Peace ought to be permitted to carry its ballots. - ‘Colored Men of North Carolina’ to President Andrew Johnson, May 1865
In November of 1839, the editors of the Charlotte Journal filled their paper with all sorts of news: announcements of militia musters; reports on the price of bacon, rope and nails; a diatribe against the “train of evils” that would follow a decline in support for the state’s banks. They also printed a brief advertisement. RANAWAY from the subscriber, on the 25th of October, a negro man named ROBBIN, about 45 years old, five feet 8 or 10 inches high, dark complected and heavy made, has on his right hand some severe scars, having been torn by a Cotton Gin. He is a shrewd smart fellow and no doubt will endeavor to get in with some white man to assist him along. I think it probable he will make for Ohio or Indiana.1 21
Dozens of similar notices appeared in North Carolina papers in the first decades of the 19th century, offering tantalizing clues to the lives of the state’s enslaved African Americans. Tom, who left in 1816, was “about 16 or 17 years old, with a scar on his left arm, occasioned by a burn.” He was “born of African parents and can speak their language.” Nancy, described as “remarkably likely and of a pleasant expression of countenance” was reportedly “enticed away by her husband” in 1825.2 Nicodemus, a 29-year-old described as “5 feet, 6 or 7 inches high, dark complexion, a scar on one of his cheeks,” escaped from Capps Gold Mine in Paw Creek – since annexed into Charlotte – in 1829. Armisted, “a first rate Tanner and Harness Maker,” departed the tanning shop of Peter Brown in 1849, possibly using “free papers belonging to a free boy of Charlotte by the name of Isaac Adams.”3
Courtesy of the North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices Project, UNC Greensboro University Libraries.
The 19th century brought dramatic change to Mecklenburg County. The cotton gin that scarred Robbin’s hand was patented in 1794 and sparked a massive expansion in cotton farming – and in demand for enslaved labor – across the South. The discovery of gold in 1799 created a robust mining industry and brought a branch of the U.S. Mint to town. Charlotte’s neat grid of streets began to fill with homes, shops and workplaces, at a pace that quickened after the first railroad line arrived in 1852. 22
GROWTH, WAR, FREEDOM
Enslaved African Americans formed the backbone of this growth. By 1850, 5,473 of Mecklenburg County’s 13,914 residents – 39 percent – were enslaved, and it was “no uncommon thing to find the finest blacksmiths, carpenters, tanners, shoemakers and in fact all kinds of mechanics” among them.4 Enslaved men made and likely laid the bricks for institutions such as Davidson College, the Mecklenburg County Courthouse and the Charlotte Mint. They labored on farms, in workshops, in mines and in mills. They positioned the rail lines that would transform the region, maintained the tracks, and hauled wood and water for the big steam engines. Enslaved women did hard labor alongside their male counterparts – Carey Freeman, for example, “could lift one end of a log with any man.”5 They cared for children, cooked, cleaned, gardened, spun thread, wove cloth and made bedding and clothes. They also looked after each other. “They were remarkably true,” noted J.B. Alexander. “They would never give away one of their color. It was a noted fact that they would submit to the lash rather than tell on each other.”6
Hired Out The first half of the 19th century saw the start of Mecklenburg County industry – blacksmith forges, brickmaking operations, small textile mills, iron and gold mines. Ambitious entrepreneurs found ways to profit from enslaved labor in all of them. Slaveholders frequently enhanced their income by “hiring out” enslaved workers. “I will send you up Bill, one of my blacksmiths,” John Springs of York County, S.C., wrote to son-in-law A.B. Davidson in 1836. “You can hire him out or work him at home. I have had three or four applications [and] could get $250 next year for him without any trouble.”7 Gold mines provided one such opportunity. The discovery of gold in a Cabarrus County stream in 1799 sparked a rush of exploration. Enslaved workers were part of the endeavor from the start – one report described as many as 3,000 enslaved people assigned to sift through gravel deposits in a particularly productive streambed near Rutherford County.8 Gold mining in Mecklenburg County picked up when the focus shifted from streambed mining to underground excavation. Enslaved men, women and children joined local whites and recent immigrants in mining operations 23
Enslaved laborers boring a gold mine tunnel. Illustration by D.H. Strother, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1857. Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.
24
GROWTH, WAR, FREEDOM
around the county. In 1838, for example, the Capps Mine on Beatties Ford Road employed 28 enslaved men and 10 enslaved women. It was dirty, dangerous work. But it held possibilities. Miners were often paid in gold, and at times enslaved miners were able to keep some of it, by contract or by sleight of hand. An English geologist who visited North Carolina in the 1840s noted of the enslaved workers that they “appeared to be submissive in their manners and to work very hard,” but that they kept gold for themselves whenever they could.9 For those attempting to flee slavery, bustling mine camps and underground mining tunnels could be excellent hiding places, as well as potential sources of income. “Runaway” advertisements frequently suggested that fugitive individuals might be found near gold mines.
Free People of Color The practice of “hiring out” helped some African Americans forge paths to freedom. At times, enslaved workers were allowed to keep part of their wages and use them to “buy” freedom for themselves and other family members. Emerging from slavery was an extraordinary experience. “When, at length, I had . . . got my free papers, so that my freedom was quite secure, my feelings were greatly excited,” wrote boat pilot Moses Grandy of Camden County. “I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers.”10 The 1850 census enumerated 156 free Blacks in Mecklenburg County. Residents of one Charlotte neighborhood included Isaac Adams, the Virginia-born saddlemaker whose free papers the fugitive tanner Armisted had supposedly acquired; brickmason Thomas Reid; and Mary Pethel, who lived with her 6-year-old twins James and Elizabeth. There was little residential segregation in those days, and the neighborhood held many white households as well, including those of stonecutter James Biggerly and U.S. Mint “refiner” Andrew Erwin, as well as the carpentry establishment of Jonas Rudisill and the tannery of Peter Brown. The presence of free Blacks in North Carolina exposed the underlying contradictions in the myths white residents used to divide Blacks and whites. John Schenck, a Cleveland County native who would become one of Charlotte’s most prominent post-Civil War leaders, offers one example. 25
Black child using a rocker box to separate gold from sand and gravel. Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.
A highly skilled carpenter and businessman, Schenck used the wages he earned to purchase freedom for himself and his wife, Pauline. In addition to his multiple talents, he had a familial advantage – his enslaver was also his father. As slavery expanded, coercive relationships between slaveholders and enslaved women multiplied as well. Mixed-race individuals, known as mulattoes, became a growing share of North Carolina’s population. Many of the people whom slaveholders chose to emancipate were their direct descendants. 26
GROWTH, WAR, FREEDOM
Family Separation Most African Americans, however, remained at the mercy of enslavers, their fates dependent on the fluctuating rhythms of marriage and death, profit and loss. The transfer of Bill the blacksmith from John Springs to A.B. Davidson was part of one such shift. Davidson had just married Springs’ daughter Mary, and Springs’ wedding gift included a plantation in Lincoln County, half a dozen heifers and steers, three horses, a “full set of knives and forks compleat,” and 20 enslaved individuals, among them 51-year-old Bill, 21-year-old Fanny, 50-year-old Peggy, and 42-year-old Ann.11 The transaction marked a hard fact of enslaved life: family separation. Following a common practice, Ann was married to a man who was enslaved on a different plantation, and her husband was not part of the group. Springs informed Davidson that he had “an expectation of getting” the man, and that if successful he would send him to the Davidsons and take Ann’s oldest son, 15-year-old Wilbert, in return.12 Neither Ann, her husband or Wilbert had any legal say in the matter. Springs carefully recorded the transfer in his accounts. As was typical of the time, the price placed on the people exceeded that of the land they worked.
Section from John Springs’ account book, 1836. Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
By 1836, family separations were becoming more common, driven once again by the search for wealth. In the first decades of the century, U.S. troops pushed the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminoles out of their rich lands in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. Enterprising 27
planters sought new fortunes in those areas, primarily by growing the cotton that had become the driver of the worldwide Industrial Revolution. This expanding plantation system required new labor. North Carolina slaveholders began to pay their debts and supplement their incomes by moving to these new areas, or by selling enslaved workers “down South,” far beyond the reach of friends and family. “It was a terrible sight to see the speculators,” Fannie Moore explained of her plantation. “They would go through the fields and buy the slaves they wanted . . . When the speculator come, all the slaves start shaking. No one knows who is going.”13 Moses Grandy was at work on a Camden County canal one morning when he “heard a noise behind me.” He looked up and saw a line of people being led out of the county by a trader. Hearing one call his name, he went over to them. “I wondered who among them should know me, and found it was my wife,” he later wrote. “She cried out to me, ‘I am gone.’” The trader gave the couple a few minutes to talk. “My heart was so full, that I could say very little,” Grandy later recounted. “I gave her the little money I had in my pocket, and bid her farewell. I have never seen or heard of her from that day to this. I loved her as I loved my life.”14 Carey Freeman’s life was also shaped by this quest for wealth – she was forced to leave Mecklenburg County for Tennessee as a teenager, then to leave Tennessee for Arkansas as a new mother. “The white folks separated my mother and father when I was a little baby in their arms,” Freeman’s daughter, Eliza Washington, later explained. In Arkansas, when Carrie and Eliza gathered with other displaced African Americans for corn shuckings, the traditionally festive occasion included songs that “were pitiful and sad,” Eliza noted. One began: “The speculator bought my wife and child/And carried her clear away.” The rise in separations prompted growing numbers of people to run away – to seek out lost loved ones or to try to flee slavery altogether. Such endeavors were aided by a growing abolition movement in the North, which included a network of assistance run by Blacks and whites, known as the Underground Railroad. Hints of the Railroad’s operation surfaced in the 1839 advertisement that surmised that “shrewd smart” Robbin might “endeavor to get in with some white man” in an effort to reach Ohio or Indiana. Those relatively new states were free territory, and also home to many families whose 28
GROWTH, WAR, FREEDOM
opposition to slavery had prompted them to leave the South. Among them was Greensboro-born Quaker Levi Coffin, whose family had been helping people escape slavery since he was a boy. Coffin moved his family out of North Carolina in 1826, and soon set up an important Underground Railroad station along the Indiana-Ohio border.15
Tightening Restrictions As national tensions over slavery grew, escape was not the only act whites feared. In 1829, David A. Walker, a free Black abolitionist who had been born in Wilmington, sparked new fears of violence when he published a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” Although born free, Walker had left the South after he determined that he could not live in such a “bloody” land, one in which “I must hear slaves’ chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers.” Walker’s “Appeal,” which circulated widely in North Carolina, sharply denounced slavery and urged fellow African Americans to fight the institution in any way they could – including force.16
David Walker’s Appeal, 1830. Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. 29
Two years later, enslaved preacher Nat Turner led a violent revolt at the North Carolina-Virginia border, in which participants killed more than 60 whites. The uprising struck terror into whites across both states. Carey Freeman, who was still in Mecklenburg County at the time, told her daughter that “the white folks called all the slaves up to the big house and kept them there a few days. There wasn’t no trouble but they had heard that there was an uprising among the slaves . . . They didn’t do nothin’ to them. They just called them up to the house, and kept them there. It all passed over soon.” The uprising may have passed, but it was not forgotten. North Carolina legislators responded with new, more restrictive laws that made it much harder to free an enslaved person, and instituted harsh penalties for teaching enslaved people to read. In 1835, when the state constitution was extensively rewritten, the new version stripped free Black men of the vote. Like their counterparts across the state, white Charlotteans were keenly aware that the very existence of free African Americans challenged a system built on the idea that whites should rule and Blacks should obey. In September of 1852, a month before the city celebrated the arrival of the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad, white leaders lamented the “general and growing spirit of insubordination among our slaves,” especially as seen in a “bold attempt” by some “to make their way to the free States under forged free papers.” They called for all free African Americans to be banished from North Carolina, arguing that such actions “would not only elevate and improve their own social condition, but would also render that of our slaves more happy, contented, and tolerable.”17
Civil War In the spring of 1861, the national divide over slavery led to war. Union forces quickly seized much of North Carolina’s strategic coast, and hundreds of the enslaved people who lived near captured coastal towns made their way to Union lines. These once-enslaved North Carolinians would aid the Union in many ways, serving as soldiers, cooks, guides and spies. In 1863, several thousand Black North Carolina soldiers formed regiments that would become known as the African Brigade.18 In Charlotte, far from the front lines, freedom seemed less close to hand. Businesses hummed with new activity, producing gunpowder, clothing, cannon and other goods for Confederate troops. Charlotte’s 30
GROWTH, WAR, FREEDOM
African Americans join the Union Army in New Bern. Frank Leslie’s Illusstrirte Zeitung, 5 March 1864. Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.
railroad connections, combined with Wilmington’s blockade-running ships, created a major route for moving goods into and out of the region. In 1862 the Confederacy moved its naval production yard to Charlotte from the beleaguered port of Norfolk, employing several hundred ironworkers to cast propellers, anchors, gun carriages, ammunition and other items for Confederate ships. Enslaved African Americans played essential roles in all these endeavors. An 1864 advertisement calling for the capture and return of 29-yearold Dick noted that he had worked as a railroad brakeman on the North Carolina Railroad, and had spent the previous summer employed by “the Navy Yard in Charlotte.” He might well be “lurking” around Charlotte, the ad continued, because his wife had been hired to work there.19 31
When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, early in 1863, white Charlotteans did their best to ignore it. “We do not think it prudent to publish such stuff, and we hope that southern papers will take as little notice of it as possible,” wrote the Charlotte-based Western Democrat.20 A few months later, however, the paper’s editors lamented that Mecklenburg County had seen a surge in escapes, which they attributed to “devilishness or improper influences.”21 Fighting drew closer as the war neared its end. At the start of 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his troops cut a path of destruction through South Carolina, attracting a growing crowd of liberated African Americans. Charlotte residents fearfully tracked Sherman’s approach, sighing in relief when he decided to veer east towards Raleigh. General George Stoneman’s Raiders swept through the western Piedmont, wreaking havoc in Greensboro, Salisbury, Statesville, Lincolnton and Gaston County. They burned the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad’s Catawba River bridge, but they did not come to Charlotte. Events moved swiftly after that. On April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. On April 14, John Wilkes Booth shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln. Five days later, fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrived in Charlotte, where he held his final Cabinet meetings. He left town on April 26 and was captured in Georgia on May 10. That same day a group of Black North Carolinians made it clear that they expected the full rights of citizenship. In a petition addressed to President Andrew Johnson, they proclaimed, “We want the privilege of voting. It seems to us that men who are willing on the field of danger to carry the muskets of a republic, in the days of Peace ought to be permitted to carry its ballots.”22 A new world – and new struggles – lay ahead.
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33
3 Accomplishment & Backlash Thus far the Negro has done well, he has answered all questions. His destiny is to make his race the equal of the best race in history and to be distinct only as to color. -Star of Zion, 1897
On October 4, 1891, Rev. Dr. Daniel Jackson Sanders ascended the pulpit at the Biddle University chapel to deliver his first sermon as Biddle’s president. He chose his text from Hebrews: “Seeing we . . . are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.”1 It was an auspicious occasion. Founded just after the Civil War to educate African Americans, Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University) had become one of Charlotte’s most substantial institutions, the embodiment of Black ambition. The red-brick tower of Biddle Hall, where Sanders delivered that first address, soared grandly above Charlotte’s western skyline, as it still does today. 35
Biddle Hall. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
In 1867, when Biddle first opened its doors, all the school’s teachers had been white. But times had changed. Sanders, who had been born in slavery, was Biddle’s first Black president. All but one of the professors in his audience were African American as well. The change had sparked controversy. While many white Charlotteans supported the idea of a school for African Americans, they were far less enthusiastic about a school run by African Americans. “It is not probable that the negroes can successfully manage such an institution of learning,” the Charlotte Chronicle groused after Sanders’ appointment. All four of Biddle’s white Southern trustees resigned over the matter.2 Sanders had no trouble proving his critics wrong. When he was born, in 1847, laws forbade enslaved people to learn to read and write. He learned shoemaking as a child, and earned money for the man who claimed to possess him until freedom came and he could strike out on his own. A brilliant man with a commanding personality, he became a widely admired minister and educator, as well as publisher of the influential Africo-American Presbyterian newspaper. At Biddle, he worked tirelessly to raise funds, expand course offerings and modernize the curriculum. Faculty likened him to Moses. Students dubbed him “Zeus.”3 36
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The “New South” Across Charlotte, African Americans displayed similar ability and resolve. Times were changing in many ways. Amid the wreckage of Civil War defeat, North Carolinians had vowed to shape a “New South” based on commerce and industry. Residents of Charlotte were especially keen on the promise of the New South. They built new rail lines, farm supply stores, banks and a growing number of cotton mills, all of which promoted commerce and swelled the city’s population. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Charlotte had 2,265 residents. By 1900, it held 18,091. It would soon pass the port city of Wilmington to become the largest city in the state. As in the slavery era, this new economy depended on African American labor. Charlotte’s Black population expanded in the years after the war, as hundreds of thousands of newly emancipated people took to the road, looking for opportunity and seeking to reunite with
Biddle University Class of 1894. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. 37
lost family members. Many headed for growing cities such as Charlotte, where branches of the federal Freedman’s Bureau assisted with jobs, health care, legal matters and the search for lost family members. “They sold my mother, sister and brother to old man Askew . . . and they were shipped to the Mississippi bottoms in a box-car,” Patsy Mitchner of Raleigh told an interviewer. “I never heard from mother any more. I never seed my brother again, but my sister come back to Charlotte. She come to see me. She married and lived there till she died.”4 Black residents made up 42 percent of Charlotte residents in 1870, 47 percent in 1880, and 40 percent in 1900. As always, Black Charlotteans did the city’s hardest, dirtiest and most essential work: washing clothes, scrubbing floors, digging ditches, maintaining railroad lines, loading and unloading 500-pound bales of cotton. The 1880 census classified 78 percent of Black workers as “unskilled laborers.” Some of the toughest work and most systematic exploitation involved the paved roads that undergirded local commerce. In 1885, Mecklenburg County leaders persuaded the state legislature to pass
Charlotte’s bustling “Cotton Wharf,” on College Street between 3rd and 4th, depended on the Black stevedores who loaded and unloaded 500-lb bales of cotton, as well as the Black men who maintained the railroad tracks. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room. 38
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the “Mecklenburg Road Law,” which allowed the county to institute a property tax for building roads and to use convicts – the vast majority of whom were African American – to do the back-breaking work. The county built a temporary encampment for these convicts, a complex known as the “Stockade,” on West Trade Street near Biddle University. Treatment was harsh. One 1904 visitor listened to the superintendent explain that “it would be impossible to work colored convicts successfully without plenty of corporal punishment,” and subsequently concluded that “the negro convict is a slave.”5 Despite these obstacles, some Black residents created opportunities. By the 1880s, Charlotte boasted a growing Black middle class that taught school, practiced law and medicine, sold real estate, and operated businesses that included drugstores, restaurants, barbershops, saloons, newspapers, and the national publishing house of the AME Zion Church. Carpenter John Schenck, who first came to Charlotte to work on a building for the Freedman’s Bureau, opened a popular saloon and became a key political leader.6 William Houser, who had learned brickmaking in slavery, founded the city’s most successful brick factory, and supervised the construction of dozens of buildings around town, including a new city hall, a railroad depot, multiple schools and stores, Friendship Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church and Biddle University’s Carter Hall.7 Successful African Americans invested in fine homes and substantial churches, often on the same streets as white homes and institutions. Thaddeus Tate built an Italianate brick mansion on 7th Street, close to his upscale barber shop. AME Zion Bishop George Wylie Clinton, publisher of the Star of Zion newspaper, lived on Myers Street in a Colonial Revival home surrounded by an enormous porch. Female leaders such as schoolteacher Mary Lynch worked together with white women to promote community welfare and raise charitable funds, most notably for the all-Black Good Samaritan Hospital, which opened in Third Ward in 1891. Thanks in part to the political acuity of John Schenck, African American candidates regularly won election to Charlotte’s Board of Aldermen, and at one point held as many as three of the 12 seats. Such achievement built confidence and optimism. “Thus far the Negro has done well, he has answered all questions,” the Star of Zion 39
AME Zion Bishop George Clinton, center, and friends at his Myers Street home. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
proclaimed in 1897. “His destiny is to make his race the equal of the best race in history and to be distinct only as to color.”8
Political Strife Such gains, however, were far from secure. Statewide, competing social and economic visions fueled bitter political battles that in the final decades of the 19th century remade the political and racial order several times. After the Civil War, in the era known as Reconstruction, African Americans across North Carolina had moved immediately into politics, claiming the same rights and freedoms as their white counterparts. Most joined the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. In 1867, Charlotte’s Black residents chose May 20, the anniversary of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, to form the local Republican Party.9 That morning, Black members of the Union League of America formed a procession “at least half a mile in length” that ended at a stage on Tryon Street. Speaker H.M. Pritchard proclaimed “a new era in the 40
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history of man in this vicinity,” announcing “that God in His infinite wisdom had made America a free country, and that we are here upon equality under the law, as American citizens.” Subsequent speakers “admonished whites to lay their prejudices in the grave of slavery,” and urged Blacks to “seek education, lands and money.”10 One speaker directly invoked the Meck Dec, describing May 20 as “hallowed by its associations, and connected to liberty and the political equality of man with his fellow.” He then asserted that Republicans stood strong for “the advancement of the races” and for “peace and prosperity for the land of our homes . . under the ample folds of the glorious old full starred American flag!” A year later, a group of Black Republicans that included John Schenck played key roles in writing North Carolina’s new Constitution. They removed barriers to voting, endorsed expansion of public schooling and improved the state penal code. Across the state, Black men made up about 35 percent of North Carolina’s voters.11 But many white leaders refused to accept these changes. Under the aegis of the Conservative and then the Democratic Party, they fought back with ballots and at times with violence, often employing newly formed chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, which was especially active in the eastern part of the state.12 In 1877, they returned Civil War-era leader Zebulon Vance to the governor’s office. That same year, Congress ended the Reconstruction era by withdrawing the federal troops who had protected African American rights since the Civil War ended. White Democrats ran North Carolina from 1877 into the 1890s, using their power to favor commerce and industry and to restrict political participation. At the start of the 1890s, however, a nationwide depression opened a new window of opportunity for Republicans. The economic downturn was particularly hard on the state’s small-scale white farmers, who began to look for alternatives to Democratic rule. Many joined the newly formed Populist Party. In 1894, the Populists and the predominantly Black Republican party struck an alliance they called “Fusion,” which went on to win control of the state legislature in 1894 and elected Republican Daniel Russell governor in 1896. Fusion governments put forth policies that challenged the growing dominance of large landowners and urban 41
industrialists: They capped interest rates, proposed new railroad taxes, removed barriers to voting, and appropriated more funds for public schools. Elite whites reacted with self-righteous outrage. Fusionists, lamented Charlotte mayor J.H. Weddington, sought “to take the government out of the hands of the men who own the property and put it in the hands of those who are ignorant and own no property.”13
White Supremacy Democrats across the state began to search for an issue that could fuel their comeback. They chose white supremacy. White supremacy had a long history in North Carolina. When Europeans first settled the area, they had used the concept to justify taking land from Native Americans. They then made it the foundation of two centuries of race-based slavery. In 1898, elite whites put the ideology to new use: splitting the Fusion coalition. They devised a carefully coordinated statewide campaign that revived and intensified old racial stereotypes. Articles, speeches and ghoulish political cartoons portrayed the state’s African Americans as foolish, dishonest and dangerous. Most dramatically, Democrats claimed that African American men had been emboldened by political power, and thus posed a threat to white women. The year leading up to the election saw sensationalized coverage of a handful of alleged black-on-white rape cases – accusations that resulted in several public hangings and three lynchings, including those of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer in Cabarrus County. Campaigners urged rural whites to leave the Fusion alliance and unite with Democrats to protect their wives and daughters. “Proud Caucasians,” one campaign song ran, must defend their women’s “spotless virtue” with “strong and manly arms.”14 Additional rhetoric denounced “Negro Rule” and warned of “black domination.” Many of the state’s rising young political stars played key roles in the White Supremacy Campaign – which is what its leaders proudly called it. Josephus Daniels, future U.S. Secretary of the Navy, turned the Raleigh News and Observer into an effective propaganda machine. Up-and-coming Charlotte participants included future state Supreme 42
ACCOMPLISHMENT & BACKLASH
White supremacist cartoon published in the Raleigh News and Observer, 1898. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
Court justice Heriot Clarkson and future governor Cameron Morrison, who would move to the city a few years after the election. In Charlotte, the campaign culminated with a massive parade and rally just before Election Day. “Tryon Street was full of horsemen from one end to the other,” the Observer reported. Participants held banners that proclaimed “White Supremacy” and “White Government.” Nearly 1,500 schoolchildren cheered as the marchers passed the white graded school.15 On Election Day, the prospect of violence kept many African Americans and their remaining white allies from going to the polls. Democrats won handily across the state. “Once more the white man’s party will take possession of that which is its right by every law of birth, intelligence and principle,” the Observer reported.16 Three days later, on November 11, 1898, African Americans in Charlotte awoke to even more devastating news from Wilmington. “Eleven Negroes Dead,” the Observer proclaimed. “Whites in Control.”17 43
Wilmington was a Republican stronghold, with a Republican mayor, a number of Black public officials and a large Black voting population. Emboldened by the Democrats’ sweeping statewide victory, Wilmington’s old-line white elite staged an armed revolt. They rampaged through the city, seeking out and murdering Black leaders. Hundreds of African Americans fled into the swamps around the city. The insurgents then marched on City Hall, where their leader, Alfred Moore Waddell, declared himself the new mayor. It was the first and only successful coup d’etat in American history.
Disfranchisement, Jim Crow and the Lost Cause Elite whites moved quickly to lock in their power. In 1900, they persuaded voters to approve an amendment to the state constitution that allowed the use of poll taxes and literacy tests to limit who could vote. While the amendment did not mention race, it was targeted at African Americans. Local voter registrars were given the power of creating the literacy tests and determining who had passed. They gave easy tests to whites and near-impossible ones to Blacks. These restrictions, combined with the ongoing threat of violence, proved devastatingly effective. In Charlotte, in 1903, African Americans made up 39 percent of the population, but only 2 percent of registered voters. Without Black allies, working-class whites lacked the voting strength to challenge elite priorities, and their voting rates declined as well.18 To solidify their hold over the state, white leaders wove white supremacy into every aspect of daily life, building a system that became known as Jim Crow. New laws and regulations forced African Americans to drink from separate drinking fountains, live in separate neighborhoods, ride at the back of streetcars, and even use separate Bibles in courtrooms. In every case, facilities for African Americans were made deliberately and obviously inferior to those for whites. The rise of white supremacy also fueled the “Lost Cause” movement, which romanticized slavery and the Confederacy while wiping African American resistance and accomplishment out of public view. Confederate memorials began to multiply, often created through the efforts of elite white women. 44
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Charlotte’s first monument, a soldier’s memorial sponsored “by the women of Charlotte,” went up in Elmwood Cemetery in 1887. Three new monuments were added in the 1910s, including a “common soldier” statue at Mt. Zion Church in Cornelius. An imposing granite marker was placed on Kings Drive in 1929, lauding Confederate veterans for the way that they “preserved the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South and became master builders in a re-united country.”19
Elmwood Cemetery Confederate monuments. Photo by Ryan Pitkin.
To Leave or Stay As the 20th century dawned, North Carolina’s African Americans faced hard choices. Violence and intimidation persisted. W.H. Houser’s brick factory burned in May of 1902, and Houser “was inclined to believe that it was the work of an incendiary.” A month later, the Charlotte Observer gave front-page coverage to a detailed account of the lynching of Harrison and James Gillespie, aged 16 and 13, in nearby Salisbury.20 45
Houser eventually left town to join his sons in Arkansas. Many African Americans chose to abandon the South altogether, joining the Northern exodus that would become known as the Great Migration. U.S. Congressman George White bluntly stated his reason for departing: “I can no longer live in North Carolina and be a man.”21 Those who chose to stay turned inward, focused on self-improvement and self-reliance. African Americans “must exercise much prudence, great patience, unceasing perseverance and a firm faith in God,” AME Zion Bishop Clinton wrote in 1903. “If these things be done and he continues to educate his children, acquire homes and land, improve his morals . . . his course will be ever onward and upward.”22 Black businesses began to cluster in the Second Ward neighborhood, joining Black institutions such as the Myers Street School and the Brevard Street Library. Smaller enclaves consolidated in communities that included First Ward, Third Ward, Biddleville, Greenville, Cherry and Griertown (now known as Grier Heights). In Second Ward, entrepreneurs hired Black builder and designer W.W. Smith to construct handsome office and retail buildings, including the still-standing Mecklenburg Investment Company Building on Brevard Street. Proud of their accomplishments, Second Ward’s residents began to call their neighborhood Brooklyn, an homage to New York City’s fashionable new borough. There, in the spaces they had created for themselves, they worked and watched for opportunity.
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47
4 Creating Brooklyn
Brooklyn was the best place in the world to live. I’m telling you the truth. -Connie Patton
For a stretch of time in the mid-1910s, anyone who took a latenight ramble past Johnson C. Smith University and onto Martin Street could see the darkened silhouette of Samuel Banks Pride as he sat on his porch, shotgun close to hand, watching for potential trouble. Born into slavery in 1857, Pride had risen rapidly after the Civil War. He trained as a barber and used his earnings to finance a college education. He then became a mathematics professor, postmaster, active Republican, prominent Presbyterian, and board member of the Blackowned Coleman Cotton Mill in nearby Concord.1 After the violent white supremacy campaign of 1898 pushed Black North Carolinians out of politics and dashed hopes for equality, many of Charlotte’s African Americans left for the North. Samuel and his wife Jessie stayed to rebuild. They both took teaching jobs at the Myers Street 49
Samuel Pride. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
School, founded in 1882 as Charlotte’s first public school for African Americans. In 1906 Samuel succeeded Isabella Wyche as principal. Charlotte opened its first public high school for whites in 1908, and Samuel began to lobby for a Black high school as well. In their pursuit of racial uplift, Samuel and Jessie Pride walked a fine line between opportunity and peril. Many white Southerners saw any hint of Black advance as an insult to white supremacy. Violence remained common. The Prides’ prominence made them the target of periodic threats – hence the need for Samuel’s armed vigil on the family porch.2 But the Prides and their compatriots also found white allies. Charlotte’s business leaders – then as now – were obsessed with building up their city. They could not succeed without African Americans, who continued to fill the low-status but essential jobs at the bottom rungs of the economy. By the 1910s, Charlotte’s white business elite had grown anxious about that workforce. Barred from the ballot box, Black Southerners were increasingly voting with their feet in the Great Migration to northern cities. In an effort to stem that tide, some of North Carolina’s white leaders began to respond to African American concerns. 50
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Members of the Friday Evening Social Club, all of whom taught at the Myers Street School. Jessie Pride is third from left. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
Schools had been a top priority in Black communities for many years. When, for example, the Chicago-based Rosenwald Fund began to help rural Black communities build new schools, Mecklenburg County’s Black residents responded with enthusiasm, eventually raising matching funds for more than two dozen Rosenwald Schools.3 As it became increasingly clear that building Black high schools would encourage Black families to remain in North Carolina, school boards across the state began to find the needed funds. In the fall of 1923, Charlotte’s Second Ward High School opened its doors at the corner of 1st and Alexander streets. The three-story brick structure with its imposing front stairway became one of Black Charlotte’s most cherished institutions.
Communities and Institutions By the 1920s, African Americans lived in several enclaves scattered across Charlotte, including First Ward, Third Ward and Fourth Ward as well as Second Ward. The Cherry neighborhood, at the edge of stately Myers Park, was home to families who worked for the city’s wealthiest white families. Further east, another group clustered in Griertown, around the Billingsville School. Westside communities included Greenville, Biddleville and Washington Heights, which became Charlotte’s first Black streetcar suburb in 1913. Like their counterparts across the South, Charlotte’s Black communities encompassed a rich mix of hardship, ambition and 51
Second Ward High School. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
achievement. Charlotte’s white residents had sorted themselves by income, separating into wealthy suburbs such as Myers Park, and working-class enclaves such as the mill villages around North Davidson Street. The constraints of segregation, which sharply limited where African Americans could live, meant Black communities were far more varied, with janitors and housekeepers often living on the same streets as doctors and professors.4 At the center of it all sat Brooklyn. The neighborhood filled nearly 50 blocks in the southeast quadrant of the center city, bounded by 4th Street, Brevard, Morehead and the now-vanished Long Street, just east of McDowell, where I-277 now runs. Like Black communities across the South, Brooklyn was located in one of the less desirable parts of town; parts of it were low-lying and swampy. Sugar Creek ran along its eastern boundary. A railroad yard marked the western end. Fine homes and substantial churches sat near ramshackle rental shotgun houses. Amenities such as paved streets were few and far between. 52
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“After a heavy rain or snow, the sidewalks often became almost impassable because of the deep sticky mud,” Rose Leary Love wrote in a memoir of Brooklyn’s early years. “Grown-ups and children would slip and slide along the street trying their best to maintain an upright position. Occasionally, an unfortunate person would lose his balance and fall screaming into the gooey mixture. Sometimes, a lonely overshoe was left sticking up in the mud, a sign that there had been a struggle between its owner and the mud.”5 Still, Brooklyn quickly filled with a growing range of independent institutions, from churches to dance halls to funeral homes. At the Blackrun AME Zion Publishing House, a handsome three-story brick building on Brevard Street, African American editors and printers pumped out hymnals, newsletters and other materials for a worldwide audience. Just across the street sat the branch office of the Afro-American Insurance Company, designed by Black builder W.W. Smith and headed by barber and businessman Thad Tate. A long-running tent revival run by evangelist “Sweet Daddy” Grace made Charlotte a center for the United House of Prayer for All People,
Students from the Alexander Street School, which served Black families living in First Ward, 1935. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room. 53
Board members of the Afro-American Mutual Insurance Company: Thad Tate is standing; Samuel Pride is seated at far left; Henry Houston, founder of the Charlotte Post, is at center, looking at the camera. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
a charismatic denomination that would eventually count 3 million adherents around the world. The House of Prayer’s exuberant annual parade, accompanied by the church’s jazzy trombone “shout bands,” became a Brooklyn institution. “It never rained on the Sunday when Daddy was in town and had his parade,” longtime resident Vermelle Ely recalled.6 Social organizations also thrived. Caesar Blake, Jr., who lived on East 1st Street, headed the national Prince Hall Masons from 1919 to 1931, and in 1929 won a Supreme Court case that prevented white Masons from expelling Black organizations from the order. Mary McCrorey, wife of Johnson C. Smith president H.L. McCrorey, started the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA on South Davidson Street, became an influential figure in the national black club women’s movement, and played a key role in integrating the YWCA’s national leadership. In 1937, the Black YMCA rented the old Williams Hotel at 416 East Second St. and turned it into the Second Street Y. Calendars filled with concerts, lectures, dances and sports events. All this activity meant that, despite the racism and hostility that suffused the outside world, Brooklyn felt like home. 54
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“Brooklyn was the best place in the world to live. I’m telling you the truth,” Connie Patton told an interviewer in 2007. “You really didn’t have to go out of Brooklyn for anything. Everything was right there, Social life. Everything. Right there . . . They didn’t have many businesses way out, so we could walk to work. Everything was downtown.”7
Brooklyn business district on South Brevard Street. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
“We never had keys to our houses, everybody left their doors open, a skeleton key would fit everybody’s door in Brooklyn,” Barbara Steele recalled. “And everybody knew everybody and we went to each other’s homes and if you were at my house when we got ready to eat my momma sat a place on the table for you to eat, I went to your house to eat your mom would do the same thing . . . Everybody knew everybody and everybody was somebody and God was for all, right there in Brooklyn.” 8
Civility African Americans also began to step cautiously back into politics. The Negro Citizens League, founded in 1917, took a more public role in civic affairs, holding monthly meetings and regularly presenting Black community concerns to elected officials. 55
Brooklyn as shown on the “Official Map of Charlotte,” 1954. Courtesy of the RobinsonSpangler Carolina Room.
The League’s interactions with white officials followed a code that historian William Chafe would later term “civility.” If Black leaders politely presented modest requests, white leaders would politely listen, and probably grant some of them. Any sign of anger or rudeness, however, brought the negotiations to an end. The strategy allowed whites to appear reasonable and magnanimous while staying fully in control.9 When, for example, League members called on the city to rebuild the dilapidated Myers Street School, the editors of the Observer judged the request “within bounds” and predicted “that the council will proceed to meet their requirements to the best of its ability under existing circumstances.” The editorial, titled “Negro Citizenship,” went on to remind readers that the Observer had frequently praised the city’s African American population “as among the most orderly and the most intelligent of any city in the South.”10 When, however, the League asked the city school board to create a separate Black board that would manage Black schools, the Observer tone shifted to condescending dismissal. “It would seem to be a case of the leaders of this race seeking a desirable objective and mistakenly concluding that the only way to 56
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secure such an objective is to have placed racial rulership in this matter in their hands,” editors wrote. Still, they added, since the group’s goal of improving Black schools was “altogether reasonable and valid,” the request would serve to remind white school board members of their “duty to be more alert and scrupulous and conscientious in their official management of the matters appertaining to negro school administration.”11
Police, Prisons and Chain Gangs Black leaders also targeted police and prisons, a prominent arena of abuse. Police harassment and beatings were routine, and courts often handed down harsh sentences on flimsy evidence; men could be sentenced to death for burglary, for example. Between 1910 and 1930, North Carolina executed 15 white men and 93 Black men, 24 of whom had been convicted of crimes other than murder.12 Proponents of North Carolina’s “Good Roads” movement had persuaded state officials to expand the use of convict labor systems for constructing state and county roads. Their efforts sparked a major expansion of the “chain gang” system. In 1930, records for 45 North Carolina camps listed 523 white and 1,272 Black prisoners. Most of the men on the chain gangs had been convicted of low-level crimes such as vagrancy, theft, or drunkenness. Treatment remained harsh; men were chained as they worked, badly fed, and housed in outdoor camps and in vehicles that were essentially cages on wheels, moved from place to place as needed.13 A 1935 scandal at a Mecklenburg County prison camp revealed such brutality that an all-white state inspection team, which had come to Charlotte “in a rather skeptical mood,” emerged shaken from the hearings and announced, “We cannot see how human beings could do things that we are forced to believe have been done.”14 Two 19-year-old Black convicts, Woodrow Wilson Shropshire and Robert Barnes, had lost their feet to gangrene after spending two weeks chained to the bars of a freezing cell. Their horrific story received nationwide publicity. But although a state investigation led to five indictments of camp officials, a judge dismissed the charges against two of the men and a jury acquitted the other three.15 57
At times, however, Charlotte’s African Americans were able to make some small advances in this area, as illustrated by one 1929 incident. On January 22, the Observer reported, detectives Ed Correll and W.H. Cousar “invaded” a house on Long Street to search for “stolen stuff.” Correll headed to a back room, where Clive Fowler and Rosalee White were in bed. Fowler shot detective Correll twice in the chest and fled. Correll died on the scene.16 Police blocked off highways, isolated Black neighborhoods and searched dozens of homes. Over the next three weeks, “scores of city policemen, detectives and rural officers, augmented by several hundred armed citizens” scoured the area for Fowler, accosting and arresting many innocent men along the way.17 Officials jailed Rosalee White and beat her until she agreed to testify for the prosecution. South Carolina deputies captured Fowler on February 10 following a late-night chase through the woods outside Grier, S.C. He was taken to the Spartanburg jail, where he maintained he did not know that the man who burst into his bedroom was a police officer. North Carolina officers quickly whisked him off to the state prison in Raleigh “for safe keeping.” They put him in a cell on death row.18 In Charlotte, however, the situation proved more complicated than state officials realized. Black Charlotteans were fed up with having officers burst into their homes unannounced, and they made their dissatisfaction known to public officials. In response, former mayor Thomas LeRoy Kirkpatrick accepted the NAACP’s request to defend Fowler. At the trial, Kirkpatrick argued that Fowler did not realize Correll was a police officer, and that he was “protecting the sanctity of his home” when he pulled out his gun and shot. If the jury members did not give Fowler “even-handed justice,” he concluded, “you are cringing cowards.”19 The argument did not get Fowler acquitted. The jury convicted him of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to 20 years in jail. But it marked the first time in North Carolina history that a Black man accused of killing a white police officer was not sentenced to death. It also held other lessons for both whites and African Americans. “The trial without question will have a tremendous effect upon the Negroes of the southland,” wrote local Black journalist Trezzvant Anderson. “White policemen were told publicly to cease rushing into 58
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Negro homes without giving warning. White policemen saw one of their members shot down and another wounded by a southern black man who [had] the courage to protect his home against white officers who forget the law. And white policemen saw this Negro murderer perform another unusual feat – he escaped the electric chair.”20
Voting African Americans continued to make cautious moves into the public arena. By the late 1930s, the growth of independent Black institutions meant that a few people could even run for office without risking white retaliation. In 1937, Mary McCrorey entered the race for the Charlotte Board of Education, making her North Carolina’s first-ever black female candidate. That same year, A.E. Spears of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company and Zechariah Alexander of the Alexander Funeral Home vied unsuccessfully for city council seats.21
Mary McCrorey with her husband, Johnson C. Smith University president Dr. H. L. McCrorey. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
The Black vote remained small – a mere 625 of Charlotte’s 35,000 African American residents had successfully registered to vote in 1936, compared to nearly 10,000 white registrants. No African American would win a Charlotte election until Zechariah Alexander’s son, Frederick Douglas Alexander, was elected to the city council in 1965. Still, groundwork was being laid. 59
5 Civil Rights
It was instilled in us that anything was possible. We could do anything we wanted to. -Madge Hopkins West Charlotte High School Class of 1960
In the spring of 1939, 32-year-old John T. Richmond sat down to take a federal civil service test. The son of a laundress and a railroad brakeman, Richmond aspired to be a mail carrier, a job typically denied to African Americans in Charlotte. The civil service exam was his first step. By all accounts, Richmond passed with flying colors. But Charlotte postmaster Paul Younts refused to promote him above the traditionally “Black” job of janitor. White mail carriers, Younts claimed, simply would not work with African Americans. Richmond, he suggested, should be happy to have a job at all. 61
Black Charlotteans sprang into action. “Charlotte Fighting for Mailman,” proclaimed the state’s most prominent Black newspaper, the Durham-based Carolina Times.1 That September, residents packed the Second Ward High gymnasium to hear representatives of the NAACP and the National Association of Postal Employees denounce Younts’ decision and call for change.
Writer and activist Trezzvant Anderson, 1938. Courtesy of the National Civil Service Personnel Records. 62
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The assertive tone signaled a new era in Charlotte activism, as a new generation came on the scene. Along with longtime community leaders, the campaign organizers included two younger men: journalist Trezzvant Anderson and Kelly Alexander, the son of influential funeral home director Zechariah Alexander. These new activists were operating amid a new political reality. For decades, the rest of the country had ignored or actively supported the South’s racial apartheid. But growing Black voting strength in Northern states was beginning to shift attitudes and actions, especially at the federal level. If the post office petitioners did not “get satisfaction in Charlotte,” the Carolina Times noted, “they intend to take the matter to Washington.” Although Paul Younts was one of Charlotte’s most prominent political power brokers, he soon found himself the target of a federal investigation into his election-related activities. Part of the evidence used against him had been provided by Black Charlotteans. In July of 1941, the Postal Service fired him.
The Double V Campaign and the Postwar Boom Five months later, the U.S. entered World War II. African Americans, among them John Richmond and Trezzvant Anderson, signed up in droves and performed with distinction. Black leaders described their participation as part of a “Double V” Campaign, linking victory over fascism abroad with victory over racism at home. They won a major home-front victory in 1948, when President Harry Truman issued an executive order to desegregate the armed forces. Black activists kept pushing on multiple fronts, employing a variety of strategies. Charlotte’s Black female laundry workers joined the Laundry Workers Union of America and spent four months on strike for better pay. Trezzvant Anderson and Johnson C. Smith student council president Reginald Hawkins organized protests at the Post Office to demand better jobs for college graduates. Charlotte’s Black teachers joined colleagues across the state to successfully lobby for equal pay with whites. In Grier Heights, a group of WWII veterans led by James Polk formed the East Side Council on Civic Affairs and began meeting with city officials about community services. Kelly Alexander revitalized Charlotte’s NAACP and launched projects that included a “Votes for Freedom” campaign that 63
registered more than 5,000 new Black voters. In nearby Union County, NAACP chapter president Robert Williams formed a local chapter of the National Rifle Association and advocated for armed self-defense.2 Younger people caught the spirit as well. In Grier Heights, James Ross recalled, he and his teenaged companions often refused to comply with segregated seating on the buses they rode to and from downtown, taking advantage of being the last stop on the line. “No bus driver that I knew ever came back and tried to physically make somebody move back. That would have been not a very smart thing to do,” Ross later explained. “The bus driver knew that he had to come back to that end of the line . . . And usually when we would do this, it would be a group of us on the bus. So you’d have a bunch of guys on there and the bus driver couldn’t beat five, six guys.”3 This energy was fed by a booming economy that helped African Americans build up their communities. Charlotte’s Black residents, who represented just under a third of the city’s total population, nearly doubled their numbers between 1940 and 1960, growing from 31,000 to 56,000 residents. This influx fueled an expansion of Black-owned businesses that included restaurants, banks, insurance companies, beauty parlors, gas stations, dry cleaners, photography studios and more.
Black soda shop. Photo by James Peeler. Courtesy of the Peeler Family and the Inez Moore Parker Archives at Johnson C. Smith University. 64
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Vermelle Diamond Ely, queen of the Queen City Classic, in 1947. To her right is Second Ward principal J.E. Grigsby, and to her left is West Charlotte principal C.L. Blake. Courtesy of the Second Ward High School National Alumni Association and the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
Cultural institutions thrived. Johnson C. Smith continued to expand, and its students, professors and alumni played increasingly prominent roles in cultural, economic and political life. The west side’s Excelsior Club, founded in 1944, hosted many of the nation’s most prominent Black musicians and broadcast Sunday night shows on WGIV, Charlotte’s first Black-oriented radio station. The city’s second Black high school, West Charlotte High, opened in 1938, and students from Second Ward and West Charlotte competed fiercely with each other in academic competitions, debate tournaments, and sports. “The fact that there were two predominantly black schools in the city just brought on the competitiveness,” explained West Charlotte graduate Rudolph Torrence. The Queen City Classic, the annual matchup between the Second Ward and West Charlotte football teams held at Memorial Stadium, became a Charlotte institution that buoyed community spirits. “For us growing up, I mean, that was the event,” recalled Second Ward graduate Arthur Griffin. “All these Black people just filling up a big huge arena. Every year you’d just wait ‘til the Queen City Classic.”4 65
Young people began to view the future with new confidence. “It was instilled in us that anything was possible,” explained West Charlotte graduate Madge Hopkins. “We could do anything we wanted to.”5 Much of the postwar growth took place on the west side. In the 1900s, as segregation hardened, Charlotte developers had begun using restrictive covenants and unwritten agreements to designate the west side as the Black side of town. By the 1930s, as downtown Black neighborhoods grew crowded, families headed to westside communities such as Biddleville, Greenville, and Washington Heights.
“Residential Security Map,” Charlotte, 1937. Black neighborhoods in black type; white neighborhoods in white type. All Black neighborhoods were coded red (seen as white space in this version). Courtesy of the National Archives. 66
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Purchasing homes was especially challenging for African Americans. In the 1930s, as American homeownership began to grow, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created “Residential Security Maps” that purported to assess the risks of making home loans in neighborhoods across the country. These maps uniformly designated Black neighborhoods as “red” – the highest category of risk. This designation, known as “redlining,” became a standard tool for lenders of all kinds, including the all-important Federal Housing Administration, whose loan guarantees became the engine behind the nation’s postwar suburban boom. As a result, Black families found it nearly impossible to get bank loans to buy or improve property in historically Black neighborhoods. Such discrimination kept Black families from building wealth through homeownership, fueling a Black-white wealth gap that persists today.6 On the growing west side, however, entrepreneurial Charlotteans managed to carve out a few exceptions to these restrictions. While most FHA guarantees backed low-cost home loans in all-white developments, Charlotte developers, including Kelly Alexander’s brother Fred, were able to convince FHA officials to guarantee loans for a few newly built Black neighborhoods.7 Ever entrepreneurial – especially when money could be made without challenging the racial status quo – Charlotte developers seized on these opportunities. Backed by FHA mortgages, the west side began to fill with neat brick homes in new developments such as University Park, Oaklawn Park, McCrorey Heights, Dalebrook and Northwood Estates. The area saw other improvements as well. In the fall of 1954, westside residents marveled at the modern, million-dollar campus of the new West Charlotte Senior High School, built at the heart of University Park. The original West Charlotte, on Beatties Ford Road, became Northwest Junior High.
The Effects of ‘Moderation’ The new West Charlotte High opened at a moment of anticipation and anxiety. A few months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued one of the most far-reaching decisions in its history, ruling in Brown v. Board that school segregation violated the Constitution. 67
The decision brought howls of protest and promises of defiance from around the South. North Carolina’s white leaders, in contrast, took a more “moderate” path. Four days after the ruling, the keynote speaker at a gathering of state leaders announced that “as good citizens we have no other course except to obey the law laid down by the United States Supreme Court.”8 After this performance of progressivism, however, legislators turned around and created the Pearsall Plan, which gave local school boards full control of the desegregation process. This approach, which allowed districts to move at a snail’s pace, both prevented school integration and helped the state evade federal sanctions. “You North Carolinians have devised one of the cleverest techniques of perpetuating segregation that we have seen,” an Arkansas admirer would later write.9 Not until September of 1957 would North Carolina’s first handful of Black students enter historically white public schools. Four of them were in Charlotte: Gus Roberts at Central High School, his sister Girvaud at Piedmont Junior High, Delois Huntley at Alexander Graham Junior High, and Dorothy “Dot” Counts at Harding High. Delois Huntly and the Roberts siblings arrived at their schools with little fanfare. Dorothy Counts’ debut was another matter. Encouraged in part by members of a newly organized White Citizens’ Council, a mob was waiting when 15-year-old Counts, wearing a new dress made by her grandmother, arrived at Harding. Dramatic photos of the composed young woman wading through a sea of angry whites circled the globe. Johnson C. Smith graduates Vera and Darius Swann, who knew the Counts family well, saw the images in a newspaper in India. Writer James Baldwin was struck by the “unutterable pride, tension and anguish” he saw in Counts’ expression “as she approached the halls of learning, with history, jeering, at her back.” Soon after, when Baldwin embarked on a reporting journey through the South, he made Charlotte his first stop.10 Counts and her family were shaken – “I expected something,” Counts told a reporter. “But, really, I didn’t expect it to be like that.”11 Charlotte police warned White Citizens’ Council members to stay off school grounds and made sure there were no more mobs to photograph. But a few days later, after students continued to harass Counts in class, and 68
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Dorothy Counts walking into Harding High School, 1957. Charlotte Observer photo by Don Sturkey. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
after a rock crashed through the back window of her brother’s car as he arrived at school to take her home, she decided to withdraw. She enrolled in an integrated private school in Pennsylvania, and national attention turned to the protracted standoff between Arkansas governor Oral Faubus and president Dwight Eisenhower over the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. Charlotte’s white leaders breathed a sigh of relief.12 When James Baldwin came to town, shortly after Counts left Harding, the city appeared calm. He described it as “a bourgeois town, Presbyterian, pretty – if you like towns.” He summed up the racial atmosphere in measured tones: “I was told several times, by white people, that ‘race relations there were excellent,’” he wrote in Partisan Review. “I failed to find a single Negro who agreed with this.”13 Still, what the Counts family called “the situation with Dot” served as a warning. The photographs of Counts amid the angry crowd undercut the vision of orderly progress that Charlotte’s image-conscious business leaders saw as essential to growth and prosperity. Anxiety about the city’s image heightened as civil rights activity around the South, along with the often-violent retaliation it provoked, claimed a growing share of national attention. 69
Turning Civility on Its Head Early in 1960 yet another generation of activists emerged on the Charlotte scene. The strategy they deployed turned North Carolina’s obsession with civility and image-building to their advantage. On February 1, four students from North Carolina A&T University walked into Greensboro’s Woolworth’s, took seats at the whites-only lunch counter, and refused to leave until they were served. The bold gesture spoke directly to restless young African Americans across the South. Two days later, Johnson C. Smith students Charles Jones and B.B. DeLaine called a meeting about holding sit-ins in Charlotte. More than 200 students showed up. They headed downtown the next day.14 Sit-ins turned the concept of civility – so often used to retard progress – on its head. The calm, well-dressed students who sat at lunch counters and politely asked to be served embodied civility’s rules. When whites reacted with anger or violence, it was they who violated the code. The well-organized Smith students made regular treks downtown for five months. Combined with a Black boycott of downtown businesses, the action turned the center city into a ghost town. By July, store owners gave in. As police held back shouting hecklers, Black students were ushered to the lunch counters, where they sat and finally ate. In the years that followed, black activists pressed forward and white leaders strategically retreated. A group of Freedom Riders, including future congressman John Lewis, came through town in 1961, testing a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation in interstate travel. Further South, the Riders would endure some of the most extreme violence that civil rights activists had yet experienced. Their stop in Charlotte, however, passed almost without incident. Joseph Perkins staged a “shoe-in” at a shoeshine chair in an allwhite barbershop. He was arrested – the first arrest of the famous journey – and he spent two nights in jail. But as soon as he appeared in court, to everyone’s great surprise, the judge ruled in his favor and sent him on his way.15 Two years later, Reginald Hawkins, who had become one of the city’s most outspoken civil rights leaders, organized a march to protest segregation at Charlotte hotels and restaurants. In Birmingham, such marches were met with fire hoses and police dogs. In Charlotte, Chamber 70
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of Commerce members called a meeting and then announced that the city’s hotel and restaurant owners had agreed to serve all patrons equally.16 A few days after the announcement, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Charlotte to address a joint graduation ceremony for Mecklenburg County’s six black high schools: West Charlotte, Second Ward, York Road, J. H. Gunn, Sterling, and Torrence-Lytle. A few weeks earlier, in jail in Alabama, King had written the widely circulated “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he sharply chastised national religious and political leaders for their refusal to pursue racial justice. His words in Charlotte held more hope. He praised county leaders for their good sense, lauded young people for their activism, and urged everyone to press ahead. His words made a lasting impression on many of the graduates, including West Charlotte senior Isaiah Tidwell. “He spoke about the winds of change that were beginning to blow in this country, and how doors that had been closed to our parents would be open to us,” Tidwell later recalled. “I’ll never forget it.”17
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on a visit to Charlotte in 1966. Reginald Hawkins is bending over King, papers in hand. Reginald Hawkins Papers. Courtesy of J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte.
Work continued. The mid-1960s saw a spate of federal legislation that gave local activists new tools to work with. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public places and outlawed workplace 71
discrimination. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned the use of literacy tests and established federal oversight of voter registration in areas with low rates of nonwhite registration. In 1964 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent attorney Julius Chambers to open a Charlotte office dedicated to civil rights law. In the fall of 1965, Fred Alexander became Charlotte’s first Black city council member since the 1890s. Still, tensions simmered. In September of 1965, westside residents went before the city council to report two disturbing incidents: a cross burned on the Johnson C. Smith campus and shots fired into Reginald Hawkins’ home.18 Then, early in the morning of November 22, bombs exploded at four westside houses: those of Reginald Hawkins, Fred Alexander, Kelly Alexander, and Julius Chambers. The blasts did extensive damage. Teenaged Kelly Alexander, Jr., asleep in his front-facing bedroom, felt one of the bombs explode against his wall and heard glass from the shattered windows shoot across the room. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured.19 City leaders, Black and white, immediately condemned the act, and a rally called to denounce the violence gathered an integrated crowd of 2,500 participants. But the bombers were not identified, and some Black leaders quickly grew frustrated with the response. On December 7, a group of ministers led by Rev. Elo Henderson, who lived near Hawkins in the McCrorey Heights neighborhood, sent an open letter to civic leaders about the bombings. They pointed out that despite “the great outpouring of fine sentiments” nothing had happened to change the racial status quo. They called for action on multiple fronts: full school desegregation, an “open occupancy” law to help desegregate neighborhoods, more African Americans on city and community boards, better police and fire protection, and a “curb” on “insult and brutality” from police.20 The ministers’ frustration was heightened by the realization that even as African Americans inched slowly towards new opportunities, other developments were tearing at the social fabric that had sustained them during the long era of Jim Crow. When Charlotte mayor Stan Brookshire sought to refute the ministers’ critique, he included the “demolition of some 2,000 slum dwellings” in his list of “tangible programs to provide opportunity and encouragement to individuals who want to improve their standard of living.”21 Those demolitions were part of Charlotte’s highly touted “urban 72
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renewal” program, which had razed the Brooklyn neighborhood and was eating into several other Black communities. Despite an outpouring of upbeat publicity, urban renewal would prove far more destructive than any bomb.22
Reginald Hawkins points to damage from the 1964 bomb that exploded at his home. Charlotte Observer photo. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
73
INTERLUDE Women in the Charlotte sit-ins
You don’t hear our voices very much. But you cannot look at a picture and not see a female in it. -Edith Strickland DeLaine
On a crisp February morning in 1960, Hattie Ann Walker put on her new suit with the sailor collar, fixed her hair, and joined a group of fellow Johnson C. Smith students for the two-mile walk to downtown Charlotte. As the students approached the city center, they began to catch sight of the establishments that refused to treat them as equals – Kress’s five and dime, where they could buy hot dogs but not sit down to eat them; Belk’s department store, where the only restrooms they could use were in the basement; the palatial Carolina Theater, where they were not allowed at all. Walker struggled to look cheerful, but inside she was trembling. “I knew that it was something I wanted to do, and I should do,” she explained. “But in spite of that, I was afraid. I was really afraid.”1 75
Sit-in at Charlotte Woolworth’s, 1960. Hattie Walker is third from right, looking at camera. Charlotte Observer photo. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
Her group headed to Woolworth’s and sat down at the counter. As they waited, a photographer snapped the picture that would become the icon of the Charlotte sit-ins, capturing the students at the height of the civility that was their greatest weapon. Well-dressed, well-behaved and exuding quiet dignity, the students exposed the absurdities of segregation for everyone to see. At the center of the image, Hattie Walker looked calmly at the camera. Women were at the heart of the sit-in demonstrations. While men usually assumed the public roles of speaking and negotiating, women marched and strategized, suffered blows and insults, defied the law and went to jail. “You don’t hear our voices very much,” noted Edith Strickland DeLaine, who helped plan the Charlotte sit-ins. “But you cannot look at a picture and not see a female in it.” With their courageous actions, these young women transformed Charlotte. They also transformed themselves. Sitting in her gracious living room, dressed in a trim suit and with each hair in place, Hattie Walker looked every bit the lady that she was when caught on film decades before. But she was not the same inside. “I was afraid every time I marched. I really was,” she explained. “I was a person that was afraid of doing things. But that sit-in demonstration taught me a lesson. I figured if I could get through that, then I could weather the storm with other things. I’m not afraid anymore.” 76
WOMEN IN THE CHARLOTTE SIT-INS
Lessons From the Past While the sit-ins sought a sharp break with an unjust past, the strategy drew heavily on the students’ own upbringing and the lessons Black colleges had taught for generations. Most students had been raised to be disciplined, religious and respectful. They also shared a strong sense of self-worth and moral determination. All those qualities would serve them well as they faced the hostility their action would at times provoke. The roles that women played reflected similar continuities. An effective sit-in required a balance between action and response. In the face of physical threats, men could serve as protectors. But violence from whites was not the main concern. A successful sit-in depended on students’ ability to remain calm, to offer a sharp contrast to the injustice of segregation and the violent outbursts that demonstrations could provoke. It was not an easy task. Edith DeLaine believed the presence of women helped to tamp down emotion on both sides. “I think a lot more men would have been killed if women had not been present,” she stated. “Women sort of keep a calm. Even in a segregated society – a very mean segregated society – the women can cause calm.” Women could also defuse potential confrontations. “In our Black families there’s a thing they call ‘the eye,’” DeLaine explained. “Parents can look at you – especially women. And when they give you the eye, you know that you need to change something in your behavior. Our eyes tell a story. And during the movement, I think we used it a lot.”
Lessons for the Future For some young women, defying segregation also meant a step toward independence. Betty Houchins Lundy learned this lesson after she took part in one of the students’ most daring actions. One day, the sit-in organizers learned that the owner of Ivey’s department store had declared that no African American would ever eat a meal in his lunchroom. They asked Lundy and fellow student Thomas Wright, both of whom had extremely light skin, to prove him wrong. With some trepidation, Lundy agreed. She and Wright headed for the Ivey’s lunchroom, were seated, and ate an uneventful meal. 77
Sit-in, downtown Charlotte, 1960. Charlotte Observer photo. Courtesy of the RobinsonSpangler Carolina Room.
When the two students joined their protesting companions outside the store, the indignant reaction their ruse provoked sparked enough furor to make the evening news, which Lundy’s parents watched in horror. “My parents were against this because they were so used to their way of life,” Lundy explained. “They were used to one way of life, blacks in one place and whites in one place. They saw this on television, and my father became very afraid. He told my mother to tell me to stay out of that white man’s store.” Faced with their parents’ disapproval, some students downplayed their involvement. Others, however, argued back. Mary Anna Neal Bradley’s parents were among those who objected. But she felt she could stand firm because “they also brought us up to do the right thing. Although we were sheltered, we were brought up: ‘If you’re going to do something, do it right.’” The sit-in campaign required months of patience and determination. Store owners and city officials stalled, dissembled, and offered excuse after excuse. But the young people’s resolve, backed by a broader Black boycott of the stores in question, finally forced owners to relent. 78
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Those first meals were memorable. “When we could finally sit down to eat, we were given money by various organizations so we could go down to eat,” Hattie Walker remembered. “And that was so rewarding. I got a big Coca-Cola. In the cup – a fountain drink. And the only thing I’d had was Coke from a bottle. So I wanted the fountain drink. That was a special moment to get that Coke from that fountain.” “I knew in my heart that this was something that I wanted to do,” she concluded. “And I knew that if we were able to accomplish the goal, that this was something that not only I would benefit from but my children and my grandchildren would also benefit. I just knew it was the right thing to do.”
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6 Urban Renewal
Everybody in Brooklyn was very upset about it. Somebody was always speaking out, you’d see people standing on the streets speaking out about it, how they were taking homes from people. But whatever they wanted to do, that’s what they did. -Barbara Steele
In February of 1960, when the first wave of Charlotte sit-in activists embarked on the two-mile trek from the Johnson C. Smith campus to the center city, their journey took them through a landscape shaped by six decades of Jim Crow segregation. Behind them, a network of Black neighborhoods fanned out to the north and west, including Biddleville, University Park, Lincoln Heights, Druid Hills and Greenville. Just down the road, they passed through the western edge of a circle of white neighborhoods that ringed the center city, among them Seversville, Wilmore, Dilworth, Belmont and Midwood. Closer in, they walked by two smaller Black communities: Fairview, which centered on Fairview Elementary School, and the Black section of Third Ward, grouped around Isabella Wyche Elementary and the all-Black Good Samaritan Hospital. 81
Official map of Charlotte, 1962. Predominantly Black neighborhoods in black text, predominantly white neighborhoods in white. Sit-in activists’ path indicated by dotted line. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
Across the South, student-led sit-ins galvanized national attention and brought new energy to the civil rights movement. But they were far from the only forces affecting Black communities. In many cities, including Charlotte, civil rights gains took place against a backdrop of community destruction. On January 18, 1960, Charlotte’s city council approved a “slum razing” project funded by a massive federal program called “urban renewal.” It targeted the Brooklyn neighborhood – the historic heart of Charlotte’s Black community.1 Less than three months later, on April 8, the city unveiled plans for a massive new highway system that routed two major expressways – I-77 and the Northwest Expressway (now the Brookshire Freeway) – through Black neighborhoods on the west side of town. The results were devastating.2 82
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“The church I attended – leveled,” recalled Ed Anderson, whose childhood home fell victim to the urban renewal bulldozers. “The elementary school I attended – leveled. My home – erased. All of our little community was just wiped out and we were scattered everywhere.”3
“Urban Renewal” Charlotte’s white leaders had set their sights on Brooklyn as early as 1912, reasoning that “this section, because of its proximity to the center city, must sooner or later be utilized by the white population.”4 In general, Charlotte’s white business and political elite championed small government and resisted federal involvement in local affairs. But when the Housing Act of 1949 allocated federal funds to purchase and demolish “slum housing,” they leaped at the chance to wipe Brooklyn off the map.
Rental homes on East 2nd Street, in front of the Mecklenburg County Courthouse. Charlotte Redevelopment Commission Records. Courtesy of J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte. 83
The rhetoric that accompanied the city’s efforts no longer focused on race. Rather, white leaders lamented that some of Charlotte’s “potentially most valuable property” was “covered with houses that are among the worst in the entire city.”5 This theme of substandard housing saturated the urban renewal endeavor. In December of 1961, at the ceremony that marked the project’s start, Mayor Stan Brookshire picked up a sledgehammer and sent it crashing into the porch of the dilapidated house at 310 South Davidson. He then turned to Redevelopment Commission Chairman Elmer Rozier, who stood waiting with a second hammer at the other end.
Stan Brookshire (left) and Elmer Rozier begin the “urban renewal” process, 1961. Charlotte Redevelopment Commission Records. Courtesy of J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte.
“In the years to come,” Rozier proclaimed before taking his swing, “no one in Charlotte will have to live in a house like this.”6 That simple statement obscured far more than it revealed. 84
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Most important, it failed to acknowledge the many lovingly maintained dwellings that contradicted claims that Brooklyn was simply a “slum” that needed to be razed. “My momma had renovated that house,” Barbara Crawford Steele recalled of her Brooklyn home. “We had electric lights – they put electric lights in the house and they put a furnace in. We had three bedrooms, we had a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a great big front yard and a great big backyard. It meant everything to us. We loved that house.”7 It also overlooked the way that the practice of “redlining,” established back in the 1930s, made it almost impossible for Black families to obtain loans to purchase or improve homes in historically Black neighborhoods such as Brooklyn. Finally, it conveniently ignored one of the main reasons substandard housing existed to begin with: Renting rundown dwellings to low-income African Americans was highly profitable. “The investment is low, return high and taxes negligible,” Charlotte Observer writer Joe Doster explained in a 1960 article. According to Doster’s assessment, the average Brooklyn rental had a tax value of about $1,000, cost just over $15 in annual property taxes, and if rented at the typical $10 a week could bring in $520 a year.8 Rental houses were often owned by absentee white landlords who had acquired Brooklyn property in the 1920s and 1930s. “As many of the older [Black] citizens died out, their property was turned over to new landlords,” recalled Rose Leary Love, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1910s. “Large lots were dissected. New alleys were created and lined with undesirable houses that were packed one on the other with hardly any space between them . . . In other places, creeks and ditches were used as homesites, and homes were placed as near the water as possible in the owners’ efforts to eke out a spot on which to erect four walls for a house.”9 The house at 310 South Davidson, where Mayor Brookshire took his well-publicized swing, was a prime example. Built in the 1910s, it sat on a parcel of land that had been purchased by AME Zion Bishop Thomas Lomax in 1900. After Lomax died in 1908, the land ended up in the hands of retired white physician Alexander Redfern. Although the Redfern family left Charlotte for Virginia in the 1930s, they continued to own the property and rent the houses on it until the Redevelopment Commission purchased it in 1961.10 85
Development at Any Cost Finding better homes for families was not the Redevelopment Commission’s top priority. As Observer columnist Kays Gary noted, the Commission chose to start Phase One of the project in one of Brooklyn’s most prosperous areas, a place that held plenty of houses “in good condition,” as well as “smoke shops, grills, drug stores, one of the city’s two Negro theaters, a few food stores, barber and beauty shops . . . some churches and the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA.” Urban renewal, Gary made clear, had far more to do with white leaders’ desire to remake downtown than with the welfare of Brooklyn residents.
Urban Renewal Areas, 1972. “P.H.” stands for “public housing.” Charlotte Redevelopment Commission Records. Courtesy of J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte. 86
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“Thoroughfare planners have cited an immediate need for rights-ofway here,” he continued, referencing the highway plan. “One block of the area is required for the new government center.” The area was also “closest to the central business section and consists of land most readily marketable for most-needed building sites in expansion of the midtown business district.”11 The sweeping changes underscored African Americans’ limited political and economic power. “Everybody in Brooklyn was very upset about it,” Barbara Steele explained. “Somebody was always speaking out, you’d see people standing on the streets speaking out about it, how they were taking homes from people. But whatever they wanted to do, that’s what they did.”12
Disruption and Dispersal The Redevelopment Commission began buying Brooklyn land early in 1961 and started tearing down houses at the end of the year. But the process moved slowly, one demolition at a time. Devastation followed. By August of 1963, Brooklyn held several hundred “vacant, rotting buildings.” Fires became common.13 Highway construction extended the disruption into neighborhoods on the Black west side. Expressways consumed huge amounts of land – the roads themselves could be 200 to 300 feet wide, and interchanges covered as much as 50 acres each. Charlotte’s expressway plan sent I-77 plunging through Lincoln Heights, joined it to the Northwest Expressway (now the Brookshire Freeway) in the heart of Greenville, and then to the Independence Expressway (now I-277) at the edge of Third Ward. The Northwest Expressway continued on through Biddleville, just above the Johnson C. Smith campus, on its way out to I-85. What had once been a landscape of closely linked communities became a group of islands divided by wide swaths of concrete. As Brooklyn’s residents scrambled to find new homes, Black leaders such as Reginald Hawkins and Kelly Alexander called on the city to build more public housing. But city officials were more responsive to Charlotte’s powerful real estate sector, which staunchly opposed the idea. Federal 87
regulations finally forced the city to build some new public housing – most prominently First Ward’s Earle Village. But most Black families ended up fending for themselves on the open market.14 Then as now, Charlotte suffered from a shortage of affordable housing. Urban renewal added to the problem. The housing shortage, along with persisting discrimination, sharply limited options for low-income Black renters, who often ended up paying higher rents than whites for comparable dwellings. The relatively low prices paid by the city when it bought Brooklyn homes also limited homeowners’ choices. “From what they gave us for our house, we couldn’t buy another house, we had to pay down on a house in order to move in,” Barbara Steele explained. “We had to move in a house that wasn’t as nice as the one we were in, but we had no choice, we didn’t have enough money to get something else.”15 As growing numbers of Black renters looked for new places to live, entrepreneurial investors turned their eyes to the white working-class neighborhoods just outside downtown. By 1965, homeowners in Belmont, Seversville and similar communities were inundated by a “flood of real estate men” eager to make money by purchasing homes that they could rent to Black tenants.16 Blockbusting – using the threat of an influx of Black neighbors to frighten white owners into leaving – became a common tactic. “He asked me if I were interested in selling,” one Belmont resident told a reporter about the man who stopped by her home in the fall of 1965. “I said ‘No.’ He said he just thought with so many colored people moving in I might want to sell it.”17 Neighborhoods tried to rally together, and city officials denounced blockbusting on several occasions. But by the mid-1970s the ring of closein neighborhoods had become predominantly Black. As Black families left, cleared Brooklyn land was sold to the highest bidders at prices few Black institutions could afford. In 1965, white First Baptist Church made plans to move to Brooklyn, spending $439,000 on 8.5 acres of land between Caldwell and Davidson streets. Barely a block away sat Friendship Baptist, an African American church that had occupied the corner of First and Brevard since William Houser laid its first bricks in 1893. As the bulldozers neared, Friendship’s members opted to spend $35,000 on land for a new, larger building in suburban Northwood Estates. 88
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Official map of Charlotte, 1982. Predominantly Black neighborhoods in black text, predominantly white neighborhoods in white. Smaller type indicates public housing projects. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
“There were questions as to why First Baptist can move [to Brooklyn] and we can’t,” Friendship pastor Coleman Kerry, Jr. said of his parishioners. “They have to accept the answer. They know we didn’t have $400,000.”18
Aftermath In 1960, Brooklyn held more than a thousand structures and nearly 9,000 residents. The other affected communities –Third Ward, First Ward, Greenville, a corner of Dilworth – contained still more. By the early 1970s, most of those people had scattered, and most of the buildings were gone. The endeavor had cost nearly $60 million in public funds.19 89
Only four of Brooklyn’s buildings remain today: Second Ward High’s gymnasium, on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd; Grace AME Zion Church and the offices of the Mecklenburg Investment Company, both at 3rd and Brevard streets; and the former McCrorey YMCA, at 3rd and Caldwell. Two historic Black buildings remain in First Ward: First United Presbyterian at 7th and College streets, and Little Rock AME Zion at 7th and McDowell. Black Charlotteans tried to make the best of a situation over which they had almost no control. At the end of the last service conducted at Brooklyn United Presbyterian Church, parishioners held hands and formed a friendship chain around the sanctuary, just as the church’s founders had done more than 50 years before. Singing and praying, they pledged to carry on.20 They eventually joined with First Ward’s Seventh Street Presbyterian to form First United Presbyterian. Displaced businesses sought out new locations, primarily on the west side. But with their customers dispersed across the city, they faced an uphill climb. Some prospered. Many did not. In 1972, residents of Greenville filed a lawsuit that eventually forced the city to create more low-income housing for displaced residents. But supply continued to fall far short of need. Most Black homeowners in the west side’s newer suburban neighborhoods remained in the neat, modern homes they had worked so hard to acquire. Families able to buy new homes could for the first time look beyond the old Jim Crow boundaries. Those who were forced to rent had fewer choices. Some found homes in the city’s few public housing complexes. Others moved from one rental to another, dependent once again on absentee landlords who profited from renting to low-income Black tenants. Amid the “root shock” of displacement, many families struggled to reweave the supportive social fabric that had served them so well during segregation. “We lost contact with a lot of people,” Ed Anderson recalled. The results of that trauma remain with us today.21
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7 Seizing Freedom
We just knew that somebody had to do something. It was exciting. It was scary too. It was really, truly a scary time. But somebody had to do it. -Carrie Platt Graves
In the summer of 1966, a hand-illustrated flyer made its way around Charlotte’s Black neighborhoods. “There are more than 6,000 women in Charlotte employed as Domestic Workers” it announced, adding that many were “grossly underpaid and extremely overworked.”1 “LET’S TALK about YOUR need for CHILD CARE, WAGES, HOURS,” organizers urged. “ALONE WE CAN DO LITTLE. UNITED WE CAN DO MANY THINGS.” 93
North Carolina Fund Records. Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
The meeting sparked the creation of Domestics United, one of many local efforts to turn national civil rights gains into on-the-ground realities. The Supreme Court’s rejection of legal segregation in 1954, followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, had given Black Charlotteans new tools for challenging inequality. Anti-poverty programs provided new sources of support as well – Domestics United was one of many endeavors sponsored by the Charlotte Area Fund, the local arm of the federal War on Poverty. Old and young, natives and newcomers navigated the webs of expanding possibilities amid a tumult of events that included police surveillance, political assassinations, targeted violence, and tensions over the growing war in Vietnam. “We just knew that somebody had to do something to say: ‘You have the right to do all these things,’” explained Carrie Platt Graves, who helped plan protests and demonstrations, and who ran for city council in 1969. “You know what I mean? It was exciting. It was scary too. It was really, truly a scary time. But somebody had to do it.”2 94
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Domestics United The plight of Charlotte’s domestic workers revealed the multilayered challenges that Black residents faced as they sought to build a more just society. Black women had cooked, cleaned and raised children in white families’ homes for centuries, work that produced a bounty of sentimental rhetoric but few concrete benefits. Like many Black-dominated jobs, domestic work had been excluded from federal minimum wage legislation. In 1966, when the minimum wage was $1.40 an hour, many Black women who worked in Charlotte homes made less than half that amount. The work was physically demanding, kept women away from their own families and left them vulnerable to exploitation. In a survey conducted by Domestics United, nearly three-quarters of the respondents said they would change jobs if they could. When the opportunity to confront these inequalities arose, Charlotte women were ready. Wilhelmenia Adams, who had deep roots in the Cherry neighborhood, stepped up to lead the organization, employing the connections and abilities she had honed during years of neighborhood leadership. “Her arms were always open to greet you,” Carrie Graves recalled of the formal and informal gatherings Adams hosted at her Cherry home over the years. “If you had something that you were struggling with, you knew that you could go and sit down and talk with her and you didn’t have to worry about your business making the paper.” Within months Adams and her team had signed up 600 dues-paying members and organized them into six chapters around the city. After conducting a survey on wages, hours and other concerns, they presented Charlotte political and religious leaders with a list of goals that included wages of $1.50 an hour, sick pay, and support for a day care center. Privately, the organization also gave women a place to talk about abuses that many of them had endured for years, ranging from verbal disrespect to sexual abuse. “The women began to know that they had support, that they could talk about the things happening to them on the job,” Graves explained. “Some of the things that you heard that was happening to these women back then, today a lot of people would be in prison.” Adams would eventually move into national leadership, becoming vice chair of the National Committee on Household Employment, which lobbied for changes in federal laws covering domestic work. Several busloads of 95
North Carolina workers attended the Committee’s first national conference in Washington D.C. “If we stick together,” Adams assured the gathered women, “there’s no way they can’t give us what we want.”3
Labor Action The Black men who manned Charlotte’s garbage trucks saw openings as well. In the spring of 1968, striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, won significant concessions from the city, including pay raises and union recognition. The victory boosted interest in labor organizing among Black municipal employees around the nation. Charlotte’s sanitation workers were classed as laborers, the city’s lowest employment grade, and their wages ranged from $1.91 to $2.10 an hour. “We just don’t get enough money,” one explained to a reporter. “There’s no way to feed your family on what we get.”4 In August of 1968, more than 300 men arrived at work but refused to take out their trucks. As garbage piled up on residential streets, baking in the August heat, city officials quickly offered a modest pay raise and higher pay for working overtime. A few weeks later, the workers voted to form a chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and set their sights on further gains.
Making Law Reality Another effort unfolded in area courtrooms, led by attorney Julius Chambers. Born in nearby Mt. Gilead, Chambers had overcome the third-rate education provided by that community’s profoundly unequal public schools to graduate first in his class at UNC Chapel Hill’s newly desegregated law school. The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund tagged him as a rising star and sent him to Charlotte to pursue civil rights cases.5 The short, soft-spoken Chambers would become the most celebrated civil rights litigator of his generation. At a time when judges were especially open to applying legal remedies to racial wrongs, he and partners that included Adam Stein and James Ferguson II filed hundreds of cases and devised innovative legal strategies that produced landmark Supreme Court rulings in education, employment, and voting rights. 96
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Julius Chambers. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
“We were the legal arm of the civil rights movement in North Carolina,” Ferguson, who came to Charlotte from Asheville, explained. “We were litigating in court every day fully confident that we were going to bring about some change in the social and political fabric that had fostered three centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, bigotry, prejudice, and brutality against Black people. . . It was exciting to prepare a case. It was exciting to talk to people who had a problem because you felt like there was something you could do through the courts to make a difference.”6 97
Young Activists As Chambers and his colleagues pursued legal action, other activists tried other strategies. In many cases, youth stepped to the fore. Charlotte’s jobs and universities had long attracted ambitious young people. Federal youth programs such as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) brought others to the city. Young newcomers such as T.J. Reddy, Jim Grant, and Ben Chavis soon became familiar figures around town. Reddy, a native of Savannah who spent his teenage years in New York City, became involved in community activities shortly after enrolling at Johnson C. Smith in 1964. He was on the track team, and one day he decided to extend his training session beyond the campus. “I was running around in circles, and I said, ‘Ok, I think I’ll run off campus,’” he later explained. “‘I’ll go down around here and see what’s happening in the community. Over the railroad tracks and down by this little path and across this little ravine.’ And lo and behold I went down in there and it was dilapidated and decrepit and people looked sick. You could tell that there was poverty and illness. And it stopped me in my tracks.”7 Reddy began to volunteer at a nearby school, and soon branched out into other activities. Ben Chavis came to study political science at UNC Charlotte, and immediately began to organize Black students. Chavis came from a storied North Carolina family – his great-great grandfather, John Chavis, had fought for the U.S. during the American Revolution, and then spent decades tutoring the children of prominent white families. The Black Student Union that Chavis helped create pressed demands for a Black Studies program, more Black faculty members and higher wages for university housekeepers, custodians and food service workers. Opportunities for projects abounded. Elementary school teacher Bertha Maxwell-Roddey organized the Volunteer Teacher Corps, a summer program where Black teachers taught reading to children whose families could not afford to pay for preschool. The Charlotte Bureau on Employment, Training and Placement, headed by Grier Heights activist James Polk, encouraged businesses such as Southern Bell to hire their first Black employees. Polk also teamed up with minister and activist Elo Henderson to organize the Black Solidarity Committee. The committee’s participants drew from a broad range of Black residents that included Julius Chambers, 98
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Reginald Hawkins, Rev. George Leake, and postal workers Willie Stratford and Jim Richardson. The committee campaigned against police brutality, opposed policies that concentrated low-income housing projects on the west side, lobbied for more Black history in the schools and sought to nurture Black-owned businesses.8
Ben Chavis speaking at a protest conducted by the UNC Charlotte Black Student Union, 1969. Courtesy of J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte. 99
Charlotte-based activists also fanned out across the region. Chavis had connections around the state and frequently traveled to consult on local actions. Jim Grant, a native of Beaufort, S.C., came to Charlotte as a VISTA employee, and was soon involved in efforts that included a school boycott in Hyde County, a hospital workers’ strike in Charleston and anti-war efforts in Fayetteville. Local leaders counted on him. “When you call Jim Grant, he’s coming,” one woman explained. “He’s coming right away, and when he gets here, I’m telling you, you will think that God sent you an avenging angel.”9 Opposition remained fierce. In 1971, an arsonist burned the Chambers law firm to the ground. When Grant and Reddy challenged Army recruiting in low-income Black neighborhoods, handing out flyers that asserted Black men were dying in Vietnam at three times the rate of whites “for a war that is none of our business,” they were hauled off to a nearby police station, although they had not committed any crime.10 When members of UNC Charlotte’s Black Student Union dramatized their cause by replacing the campus American flag with an all-black banner, the university responded with a show of force. “The police barricaded all of the roads,” recalled Reddy, who had enrolled at the university in 1967. “Into and out of the campus were all barricaded. Then there were armed troopers up on the Atkins Library, on the top with high powered rifles.”11 Activists ran into challenges even when they were just trying to have fun. One October Sunday in 1967, Reddy joined three white VISTA workers – including his future wife, Vicki – on an outing to the nearby Lazy-B horse ranch. The owner turned them away, later stating that he rented horses “like I want to, to who I want to.” They got the chance to ride only after they returned with a larger group, a newspaper reporter and the threat of a lawsuit.12 Still, it was a heady time. “It just seemed like they were all a different breed,” recalled Carrie Graves, who worked alongside Chavis, Grant and Reddy on multiple projects. “Just being a human being that cared about other human beings, that was them. Your Bens and the Jims and the TJs. It was like they were born and bred for who they were and what they did. They showed no fear about nothing or nobody, but in the same time they showed compassion and care. You felt really cared about.”
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Carrie Platt Graves. Charlotte Observer photo. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
Politics Black Charlotteans also expanded their political activities, working primarily with the Democratic Party, which had become the strongest champion of civil rights nationwide. Even with voter registration gains, however, electing Black officials remained a challenge. City and county officials were elected at-large – voted on by the entire population. Since African Americans made up only 30 percent of Mecklenburg County’s population, Black candidates needed significant white support to win. Statewide races were even more challenging, since African Americans were only 22 percent of North Carolina’s population. In 1968, Reginald Hawkins entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary seeking to energize Black voters and demonstrate Black voting strength. Hawkins denounced the Vietnam War and promised to expand state spending on social services, seeking to reverse “the ghetto’s dehumanization and exclusion from the prevailing political, economic and social concerns of the state.” His campaign suffered a significant setback in April when Martin Luther King Jr., who was scheduled to come tour the state with him, was 101
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking anguish throughout Black America. Still, Hawkins won nearly 130,000 votes and inspired Black residents around the state.13 The next year both Ben Chavis and Carrie Graves ran for Charlotte City Council under the sponsorship of a new group called the Black Political Organization. Although none of the candidates expected to win, they were making a statement about both race and class. “We did it to say, you can run, you have the right to run,” Graves explained. “It doesn’t matter who your parents are, where you went to school. All the thing is your age, that’s it. We did it to show a lot of Blacks that ‘Hey, it don’t matter where you live. You can run.’”
School Closings The need for greater Black political power became clear in 1969, when Julius Chambers won a stunning legal victory in a school desegregation case he had filed back in 1965. Brought by several Black Charlotteans, including Kelly Alexander and Reginald Hawkins, the case was called Swann v. Board after lead plaintiffs Darius and Vera Swann, who had returned to Charlotte from missionary work in India to fight for civil rights. It reached federal Judge James McMillan in the spring of 1969. Chambers’ arguments convinced Judge McMillan to order full desegregation of every school in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ 83,000-student system – the most sweeping desegregation order in the nation. Because the legal victory was not backed by Black political clout, however, it brought harsh consequences. White parents quickly organized in force against McMillan’s order, forming an organization known as the Concerned Parents’ Association and packing anti-busing rallies. The members of the nearly all-white Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board, whose election depended on white votes, adopted a strategy common across the South. Instead of integrating historically Black schools, they simply closed them. The board had closed several Black schools in 1966, soon after the Swann suit was first filed. In July of 1969, following McMillan’s order, board members voted to shutter all of the center city’s historically Black schools: Fairview, Alexander Street, Bethune, Isabella Wyche and – the greatest shock of all – Second Ward High.14 102
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The announcement sparked widespread outrage. A protest petition gathered 19,000 signatures. African American residents packed the next school board meeting. “You force our back against the wall and you ask us once again to have good faith,” AME Zion minister George Leake thundered at board members. “Every time we have faith, you treat us like a bunch of dogs.”15 Coleman Kerry Jr., the board’s only Black member, called on his colleagues to rethink the plan. But the majority stood fast. None of the targeted schools opened that fall. “There was a lot of ‘Uh-oh. I see what they’re going to do to us,’” recalled Angela Wood Fritz, whose father worked at Second Ward. “‘They’re going to close down all of our schools and make us move.’ . . . It was just all of a sudden, bam: ‘This is how it’s going to be. Deal with it.’ There was a lot of anger.”16 The closing of Black schools meant the loss of Black jobs. The 1966 closings had resulted in the firing of nearly 200 Black teachers and a quarter of the system’s Black principals.17 For the 1968-69 school year, just before the second round of closings, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools hired 722 new teachers. Only 17 were Black. In 1965, African Americans held 44 percent of the county’s teaching jobs. By 1969, they were down to 22 percent.18
Economic Backlash Efforts aimed at economic justice also met resistance. Business leaders throughout North Carolina had built their fortunes on cheap labor. The state’s wages were the lowest in the nation, and state and local leaders had been vehemently anti-union for nearly a century. Back in 1945, when more than 600 of Charlotte’s Black female laundry workers joined a union and spent four months off the job calling for better pay, the laundry owners steadfastly refused to meet with them, despite consternation among customers and mediation efforts by ministers and city officials. North Carolina was one of only a few U.S. states that barred local and state governments from signing contracts with unions.19 The 1968 victory marked a high point for Charlotte’s sanitation workers. Subsequent walkouts had limited success, and a final effort in September of 1970 brought a forceful response from mayor John Belk. City leaders would 103
“not allow this unjustifiable threat to the health and safety of our citizens,” Belk announced. “Any employee of the Sanitation Department who does not report to go to work on Tuesday morning, September 22, 1970, will be dismissed.” More than 150 workers lost their jobs.20 Domestic workers won some gains at the national level, especially when Congress added them to federal minimum wage legislation in 1974. But after a few initial successes, Domestics United faced resistance from employers and struggled to maintain funding. “They Raised Maids’ Wages But Can’t Pay Themselves,” the Charlotte Observer reported early in 1970. The group disbanded soon afterwards.21 These and other obstacles to campaigns for better pay would have profound consequences for Charlotte’s Black communities in the decades ahead.
The Charlotte Three Charlotte activists also found themselves caught up in the law enforcement dragnet that targeted Black activists nationwide. In January of 1972, T.J. Reddy, Jim Grant and Freddie Parker were charged with burning a barn at the Lazy-B horse stables, where Parker had joined Reddy in challenging segregation policies back in 1967.22 Although the barn had burned nearly a year after the confrontation, two Charlotte residents jailed for other crimes had told agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that Charlotte activists had set the fire out of revenge. Eager to prosecute such prominent Black activists, federal, state and local officials worked together to drop many of the pending charges against the two informants; financed a three-month, pretrial stay at Atlantic Beach; and paid them $4,000 each in relocation expenses once the trial ended. In the absence of any physical evidence, the case rested solely on the informants’ testimony. Still, prosecutors successfully portrayed Reddy, Grant and Parker as Black militants prone to violence. The jury took only two hours to find the three men guilty. Judge Frank Snepp, who had been openly hostile to the defendants throughout the trial, handed out especially harsh jail sentences: 10 years for Parker, 20 for Reddy and 25 for Grant. The verdict highlighted the complications civil rights workers faced as they pressed for broader gains. The legal arguments that Julius Chambers and his partners so carefully prepared had profound influence on the law. 104
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In the early 1970s, the firm won three landmark Supreme Court rulings – in Swann and in the employment discrimination cases Griggs v. Duke Power and Moody v. Albermarle Paper. But the public outcry provoked by the Swann ruling, along with court cases such as that of the Charlotte Three underscored how hard it would be to overcome the deep-seated fears, beliefs and interests that had animated centuries of racial inequality. In 1972, James Ferguson served as the lead defense lawyer in three major criminal cases against Black activists: the Charlotte Three, the Wilmington Ten and the Raleigh Two. Despite a stunning lack of physical evidence, the activists in all three cases were sentenced to significant jail time. The Charlotte Three would remain in jail until 1979, the year an international outcry prompted governor Jim Hunt to commute their sentences.23 “Sometimes the system works to bring about some measure of justice,” Ferguson later surmised. “And sometimes it doesn’t work at all.”24
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8 Building Coalitions
There is room for pioneers. A black man can be successful because he is not limited to the black community. He can go downtown. The field is wide open for young aggressive men. -Restaurant owner John McDonald, 1983
On the afternoon of February 25, 1974, supporters of West Charlotte High gathered at the school, preparing for yet another march from the west side to downtown. It was a sight that had become familiar over the years – a group of Black Charlotteans assembling to traverse the distance between their community and the center of city power. But this march had a key difference. Earlier processions had pressed city leaders to desegregate historically white institutions. This one sought to save a beloved Black school. Ever since Julius Chambers had convinced Judge James McMillan to order full desegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, officials had struggled to maintain enrollment at West Charlotte High, the city’s only surviving 107
Community march to demand that West Charlotte High School remain open, 1974. Photo by James Peeler. Courtesy of the Peeler family and the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
historically Black high school. Earlier that month, staff had proposed to turn West Charlotte into a magnet school – an untested concept at the time. Fearing the change was the first step on the road to closure, West Charlotte’s supporters took action. They met with key officials, gathered 3,000 petition signatures, then organized the march. “The Black community rallied like I had never seen it before,” West Charlotte graduate Stan Frazier later recalled. “Churches got together and talked about it publicly. It was one of the few times I saw the Black community just really get together and say, ‘Enough is enough. You did this to Second Ward. You will not close this school.’”1 “It was my first civil rights protest,” recalled Latrelle Peeler McAllister, then a West Charlotte sophomore and daughter of community photographer James Peeler. “We have pictures of us marching up Beatties Ford Road. It was the whole community that gathered around, and the House of Prayer’s church band came. We all gathered to rally around our neighborhood school.”2 108
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Equally dramatic protests had not saved Second Ward. But times had changed. Faced with opposition from residents and from Judge McMillan, Superintendent Rolland Jones withdrew the magnet school plan, stating that the outpouring of community opposition made it unworkable. The overwhelmingly white board, “dumbfounded” by the pushback, was unable to agree on an alternative. The march, combined with the board’s inertia, made it clear that pressing issues such as school desegregation could only be effectively addressed if Blacks and whites worked together on a more equal basis than before. There was some precedent for this. When Julius Chambers came to Charlotte, the first partner he hired was white lawyer Adam Stein. Black and white Parent Teacher Associations had created an integrated PTA council in the 1960s. At UNC Charlotte, Black activist students could count on the support of founding donor Bonnie Cone. As other Charlotte leaders came to understand this new reality, the 1970s became a vibrant period of coalition-building and civic engagement.
National Model The value of working together showed most dramatically in the schools. Charlotte’s residential segregation meant schools could only be fully integrated through massive cross-town busing. Under pressure from Chambers and McMillan, the school board tried one half-hearted busing plan after another, only to be thwarted by families who maneuvered to avoid it – especially white families assigned to historically Black schools like West Charlotte. Black and white families grew increasingly angry with the constant shifts. That anger intensified when the school board steadfastly refused to bus children out of the city’s wealthiest white neighborhoods, a decision that increased the amount of busing required of everyone else. Parents packed demonstrations; fights broke out at schools. As the conflict dragged on, economic leaders began to worry that the prolonged strife was once again threatening Charlotte’s cherished reputation. These concerns opened the way for a new approach. In the fall of 1973, a group of 25 residents, Black and white, formed what they called a Citizens Advisory Group. Participants came from across the county and the political spectrum, among them Cherry neighborhood activist Phyllis Lynch, Myers 109
Park homemaker Maggie Ray, NAACP stalwart Kelly Alexander and Hickory Grove industrialist Jim Postell. Through meetings and dinners, group members aired their concerns and hammered out a set of principles they thought would make the plan as fair as possible. Once the school board’s efforts collapsed, the Advisory Group’s work won the backing of Judge McMillan and some of the community’s most powerful political leaders.3 The proposal the group crafted spread the burden of busing far more evenly across the county. Most dramatically, it assigned students from the high-wealth neighborhoods of Eastover and Myers Park to West Charlotte High. Realizing that their city’s future was at stake, civic leaders such as C.D. and Meredith Spangler and Jim and Mary Lou Babb put their children on the bus. Across the county, parents, teachers and students went to work. The plan would make Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools the most desegregated major school system in the nation for nearly a quarter century. Over time, that accomplishment became a major source of community cohesion and a key point of civic pride.
Students at desegregated West Charlotte High School, 1985. Courtesy of the RobinsonSpangler Carolina Room. 110
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Growth and Optimism The favorable publicity that came from effectively addressing the challenge of school desegregation put Charlotte in a prime position to take advantage of the growing national interest in Sunbelt cities. Between 1970 and 1990, more than a thousand new firms moved to Mecklenburg County, and the population swelled by more than 150,000 residents. Civic leaders routinely cited desegregation as a key factor in that growth. “I believe public school desegregation was the single most important step we’ve taken in this century to help our children,” leading banker Hugh McColl would famously write. “Almost immediately after we integrated our schools, the southern economy took off like a wildfire in the wind. I believe integration made the difference. Integration – and the diversity it began to nourish – became a source of economic, cultural and community strength.”4 School desegregation did more than bring together students. As families, teachers and community members worked together to support their children’s schools, they pooled their talents, learned about each other, and formed cross-racial bonds – connections that would serve the city well in multiple arenas. As the plan solidified, many Black residents began to view the change with optimism. Future mayor Anthony Foxx, born in 1971, grew up in the westside home owned by his grandparents, schoolteachers James and Mary Foxx. The Foxxes had moved to Charlotte after Belmont’s Reid High School, where James was principal, was closed as part of Gaston County’s desegregation plan. James Foxx had to settle for a new job as a seventhgrade math teacher. His grandson, in contrast, saw endless possibility. “I knew that I had a different opportunity in front of me,” Anthony Foxx explained. His grandparents “had worked to make the best of opportunities available within the confines of hand-me-down books, hand-me-down uniforms, hand-me-down facilities and so forth. I didn’t have to deal with that stuff. And all they wanted me to do was knock it out of the park. I definitely felt that I was being given an opportunity they didn’t have. And their impetus for me was just ‘Go as far as you can, young man. Do as much as you can.’”5
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Employment African Americans also set their sights on better jobs, their efforts aided by a handful of courageous Black workers who joined Julius Chambers and his partners in challenging discriminatory employment and promotion practices. Victories in Griggs v. Duke Power, Robinson v. Lorillard, and Moody v. Albermarle Paper forced the elimination of practices such as tests not related to job performance, and seniority systems that perpetuated past discrimination.6 As with school desegregation, legal and legislative victories did not change employment practices overnight. But they gave workers tools they could use to stand up for themselves. In the mid-’70s, for example, Omega Autry was working for the N.C. Department of Social Services in Charlotte when a white woman with family connections was promoted over more accomplished African Americans. “It affected morale incredibly,” Autry recalled. A group of Black women filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Although they did not win that particular suit, in subsequent years “we began to see different people get promoted.”7 Gradual shifts in employment showed up in census figures. In the 1970 Census, 42 percent of Mecklenburg County’s Black workers were classified as service workers, farmers or laborers, and 9 percent were professional, technical or managerial. In the 1980 Census, 32 percent were service workers, farmers or laborers, and 14 percent were professional, technical or managerial. In 1970, 33 percent of Charlotte’s African Americans lived below the poverty line. By 1980, that number had dropped to 27 percent.8
Politics Hard work and coalition-building brought Black residents greater political clout. One advance involved the structure of elections. For decades, Charlotte’s at-large voting system had favored a small group of wealthy white leaders. Since African Americans made up less than a third of residents in Charlotte and less than a quarter in Mecklenburg County, at-large voting made it difficult for Black candidates to win. It also caused problems for white activists from less-prominent neighborhoods, who often found themselves stymied by well-funded candidates from wealthier areas. 112
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Jesse Jackson (second from right) registers Charlotte voters during a South-wide voting registration drive, 1983. Note card for Arthur Griffin’s school board campaign. Photo by Nancy Pierce, Nancy Pierce Photo/Archive.
In 1977, Black and white activists who had worked together on school desegregation successfully promoted a public referendum that changed city council elections from five at-large seats to a hybrid mix of four at-large and seven district seats. In 1979, two Black candidates – political veteran Charlie Dannely and newcomer Ron Leeper – captured district seats. In 1980, three African Americans won election to the nine-member school board: incumbent Phillip O. Berry, PTA leader Sarah Stevenson and AME Zion minister George Battle Jr. Minister and community activist Bob Walton, running at-large with backing from both Black and white leaders, took one of the five seats on the county commission. In the mid-1980s, both the school board and the county commission would also switch to hybrid elections, opening further opportunities.9 Greater Black political representation helped solidify a coalition between Black and white political leaders interested in using government to promote economic growth. White leaders counted on Black votes to elect development-minded candidates, and to approve measures such as the bonds needed to expand the city’s airport. In turn, those leaders supported key Black politicians and strategically invested in Black businesses.10 113
A coalition of Black and white leaders also helped push through an innovative strategy known as “scattered site” public housing. Rather than concentrating low-income residents in large developments – often placed in existing low-income communities – scattered site housing built smaller clusters of units in better-off neighborhoods, with the idea that families – especially children – would benefit from greater access to the opportunities found in those neighborhoods. Charlotte became a national leader in that effort, eventually placing scattered-site developments in every part of the city.
Change Throughout the City As African Americans expanded their influence, they took on new prominence in historically white organizations. They also created new Black institutions, aimed at preserving Black history and nurturing Black culture. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, who had become a professor of education at UNC Charlotte, worked with students to create a pioneering Black Studies program at the school. In 1974 she teamed with fellow professor Mary Harper to found the Afro-American Cultural Center, which would eventually become the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.11 Second Ward High graduate Vermelle Ely led the creation of the Second Ward High School National Alumni Association, which focused on preserving the connections and memories created during the school’s long history. Rudolph Torrence and Mae Clark Orr formed the West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association, Inc., to preserve the school’s history and support its ongoing activities. In other arenas, a mix of newcomers and long-time activists that included Samuel (Sam) Young, Bob Davis, Mildred Baxter Davis, Sarah Stevenson, Jim Polk and Jim Richardson organized institutions such as the Charlotte Business League and the Charlotte Urban League. Their Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club drew participants from across the city to discuss issues of interest to Black communities. While white residents attended the Tuesday Morning meetings and sometimes made presentations, the Black founders kept control of the agenda. Early on, Stevenson recalled, a friend cautioned: “Sarah, let’s be careful about letting white folk in, because if we let white folk in they will take over.” But Stevenson had worked with whites for years, most prominently as 114
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Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey in her UNC Charlotte office with T.J. Reddy. Courtesy of J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte.
a leader in the 1960s merger of the county’s Black and white PTAs. Her reply was simple: “Not if we don’t let them.”12 Postal worker Willie Stratford continued his decades of involvement in civic affairs, using his influence in both Black and white communities to broker agreements designed to help Black neighborhoods. Aspiring politicians, regardless of race, “had to know Willie Stratford,” recalled fellow politician Harvey Gantt. “And they had to meet him at the Excelsior Club or wherever to get his blessings.” Stratford put particular energy into the YMCA, where he worked tirelessly to improve facilities in Black neighborhoods and opportunities for African Americans across the organization.13
Growing Promise As Charlotte grew, it began to draw ambitious African Americans from around the country, a phenomenon highlighted in a story titled “The Changing Profile of Charlotte,” published in Black Enterprise in 1983. “There is room for pioneers,” restaurant owner John McDonald told the Black Enterprise reporters. “A black man can be successful because he is 115
not limited to the black community. He can go downtown. The field is wide open for young aggressive men.”14 Black Charlotteans knew that the divides created by centuries of inequality could not be overcome in a few short years. They still faced discrimination in many forms. A poverty rate of 27 percent was better than the 33 percent of 1970 or the 64 percent of 1960, but still far higher than the 6 percent rate for whites. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked a conservative resurgence that would lead to sharp cuts in employment and housing programs that had been designed to right old wrongs. Still, there was cause for optimism. The economy was strong. School desegregation remained a point of civic pride – Reagan himself met with a famously chilly reaction when he visited the city and described busing as “a social experiment that nobody wants.”15 In 1983, Harvey Gantt won the mayor’s office, making Charlotte the first majority-white Southern city to elect a Black mayor. Originally from Charleston, Gantt had been the first Black student at Clemson University, where he studied architecture. He subsequently moved to Charlotte and became interested in politics. Local leaders, Black and white, encouraged his involvement, appointing him to the city council and then backing his mayoral run. “Here’s a kid from Clemson, from South Carolina, who becomes a council member and then a mayor in a little over a decade,” Gantt later noted. “And so I saw this as a progressive community.”16
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Superior Court Judge Clifford Johnson administers the mayoral oath of office to Harvey Gantt. Charlotte Observer photo. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.
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9 Two Cities
Our history is so important. To know where you’re going, you need to know from whence you came. -Tim Gibbs, West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association
On September 4, 2012, Charlotte mayor Anthony Foxx ascended the podium at the city’s downtown arena, where delegates of the Democratic National Convention had assembled to renominate Barack Obama, the first Black president in the nation’s history. Foxx’s words rang with optimism. “Our city is a hub of energy and commerce, a place where business and government work together and make things happen,” he proclaimed. “And in this election, we are the city where Americans have come together to move our country forward and make great things possible. We have always been that kind of city.”1 Anthony Foxx embodied the possibilities that generations of dedicated work had created for Charlotte’s African Americans. He attended desegregated schools, including West Charlotte High, which helped him 119
Anthony Foxx speaking in Charlotte, 2014. Photo by Nancy Pierce, Nancy Pierce Photo/ Archive.
build connections all across the city. He graduated from Davidson College, then from the NYU School of Law, and in 2009, at the age of 38, he became the second Black mayor in Charlotte’s history. He would soon rise still higher – in April 2013 Obama would name him U.S. Secretary of Transportation. He would serve with distinction for the rest of the 44th president’s term. Foxx’s success was no exception. When he left for Washington, African Americans held positions of power and prominence throughout Charlotte. Retired teacher Mary McCray chaired the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. County manager Harry Jones had spent more than a dozen years running county affairs. An elegant museum of African American art named for Harvey Gantt filled a prominent corner of the city’s downtown arts district. North Carolina basketball legend Michael Jordan owned a majority share of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets – then the Bobcats – the only majority Black owner in the league. Still, all was not well. A year after the convention, in the summer of 2013, Harvard University researchers released a large-scale study that examined economic advancement for children born in poverty in the 120
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Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education president Mary McCray, 2016. Photo by Nancy Pierce, Nancy Pierce Photo/Archive.
early 1980s, focusing on how many moved from the bottom to the top of their community’s income ladder. To the shock of almost everyone in the prosperous Queen City, of the nation’s 50 largest urban centers, Charlotte ranked dead last. In overall mobility, Charlotte ranked 98th out of 100 cities studied. Most of the young people the report tracked were African American.2 The discontent created by such disparities exploded in September of 2016, when Charlotte police officers shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, a Black man who had been waiting in his car for his children to get home from school. That evening, an angry crowd marched from Scott’s neighborhood onto I-85, blocking the flow of traffic. For the next several days, marches and demonstrations filled the center city. Police and National Guard troops deployed riot shields, gas masks and tear gas canisters. Amid the turmoil, one young man was shot and killed. The contrast between the dramatic unrest and the image of New South prosperity that Charlotte’s leaders had so carefully cultivated was lost on no one. The marches and confrontations topped national newscasts for 121
days and drew the attention of journalists from around the world. “The banking mecca — the Southeast’s second-largest city — has tended to see itself as an avatar of modernity and moderation in a state where both are uneven,” noted one article. But although “gleaming skyscrapers and chain restaurants seem to suggest a city that is both without, and untethered from, history, the Queen City was built on slavery and its racial politics remain fraught, just like those of nearly every other city.”3
Dual Trajectories Such disparities highlighted the dual trajectories traced by African Americans in the years since the height of the civil rights movement’s gains. Charlotte remained a boomtown through the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st, drawing new residents from around the nation and the world.4 Between 1980 and 2020, Mecklenburg County nearly tripled in size, growing from 404,270 residents to 1,115,482. Many Black families shared in that prosperity. By 2021, African Americans made up 32 percent of Mecklenburg County’s population. While Black incomes remained substantially below those of whites, the median Black household income of just over $52,000 meant that many Black families were solidly middle class. Still, those at the bottom of the economy continued to scramble and struggle. North Carolina’s wages remained among the lowest in the nation, and many Black Charlotteans still labored at low-paying service jobs. In 2018, 16 percent of Black families in Charlotte lived below the poverty line, and many others hovered not far above it.5
The Shape of Division Racial and economic divides were mirrored in area development. In 1983, Harvey Gantt had campaigned for the mayor’s office on a platform of balanced growth and opportunity. Those promises proved difficult to keep. Charlotte’s growth helped Gantt build a thriving architecture firm. He found it much harder to influence the direction of local development. “The forces you’re fighting against are major,” he recently explained. “First, the people who set public policy have an almost fixed notion about 122
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how things should be. And a lot of that is influenced by their understanding of race . . . There’s also the people outside of government that are very influential. Developers play a big role in that.”6 The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 ushered in a period of conservative retrenchment across the United States that brought sharp cutbacks to federal antipoverty programs. At the same time, as Charlotte’s population expanded, private and public investment focused on building and providing services to the fast-growing, increasingly influential suburbs. The single-family homes that filled these new neighborhoods were beyond the reach of lower-income Black families, few of whom had benefited from the wealth created by the postwar homeownership boom. Thanks to hard work by local leaders, Charlotte’s scattered-site public housing, which aimed to give low-income families access to the resources found in wealthier neighborhoods, had been one of the most successful in the nation. But the program had been “fought tooth and nail, by neighborhoods and others,” Gantt recalled. In the late 1980s, cuts in federal funding brought it to an end. Charlotte’s lower-income Black residents remained concentrated in aging center-city neighborhoods, in a pattern known as “the crescent and the wedge.”
Race/ethnicity (left) and income distribution maps, Mecklenburg County, 2019. The light-colored “crescent” areas indicate higher percentages of nonwhite residents in the race/ethnicity map and lower incomes in the household income map. Quality of Life Explorer. Courtesy of the City of Charlotte. 123
Families living in these neighborhoods also faced new challenges. In the 1980s, when a destructive wave of crack cocaine surged through the nation, dealers found havens in Black neighborhoods that were grappling both with lack of investment and the long-term disruptions of urban renewal and highway construction. As handguns became increasingly easy to obtain, gun violence grew. The federal War on Drugs, which focused on drug dealing in Black communities, sent significant numbers of the city’s young Black men to prison, with profound consequences for their future job prospects.7 Divisions between the prosperous suburbs and the struggling center city were compounded when school desegregation came to an end. Racial and economic segregation had been rising in schools since the late 1980s, when suburban discontents pressed community leaders into backing away from the robust desegregation plans of the earlier busing era. Then, in 1997, a group of suburban families filed a new lawsuit – Cappachione v. Board – that challenged the use of race in school assignment. Two years later, a ruling by federal Judge Robert Potter put an end to busing for desegregation.8 When a neighborhood-based assignment plan went into effect, many schools quickly resegregated by race and by income. Black students living in low-income neighborhoods found themselves concentrated in schools where most students were Black and virtually all were poor – a distinct difference from the segregated era, when all-Black neighborhoods and schools served families from a range of economic backgrounds. Despite efforts to provide extra assistance to high-poverty schools, most were unable to establish the staffing stability or the range of opportunities found in schools that served better-off communities.9 A few years later, the social mobility study highlighted precisely these circumstances: Mobility was so low in cities such as Charlotte in part because isolation in high-poverty neighborhoods sharply limited young people’s opportunities.
New Interest in Black History and Community The first decades of the 21st century saw a resurgence of public interest in Black history and in historically Black parts of town – a striking 124
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development in a city that tended to focus on the future rather than the past. In 2018, following decades of effort on the part of Vermelle Ely and fellow members of the Second Ward High School National Alumni Association, Mecklenburg County reopened the Second Ward High gym – the only piece of the school that remained standing – as a public recreation center. The center included a historical display about Second Ward and a pair of murals by artist Tommie Robinson that depicted life in the school and the community. Robinson’s murals joined an array of public art focused on Black history, including Abel Jackson’s “Historic Brooklyn,” which depicted Thad Tate, J.T. Williams and W.C. Smith on the side of the Mecklenburg Investment Company building; Jamil Steele’s “Biddleville,” painted along the Trade Street corridor approaching westside neighborhoods; and “Manifest Future,” a series of historic and Afrofuturistic Trade Street murals created by Janelle Dunlap, Georgia Nakima and Sloane Siobhan. Center city institutions such as the Harvey B. Gantt Museum of African American Art + Culture, the downtown Mint Museum of Art, the Levine Museum of the New South and Romare Bearden Park – named in honor of the Charlotte-born, internationally renowned artist – have showcased multiple aspects of local Black art and history. Under the long-term direction of Monika Rhue, staff at the Inez Moore Parker Archives at Johnson C. Smith have played a prominent role in preserving and displaying westside history. “Our history is so important,” noted Tim Gibbs, stalwart member of the West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association. “To know where you’re going, you need to know from whence you came.”10
LGBTQ+ Residents Step Forward Charlotte’s Black LGBTQ+ residents shaped their own cultural renaissance. Miami native Jermaine Nakia Lee came to town to attend UNC Charlotte in the fall of 2000 and was shocked by the invisibility of Black LGBTQ+ communities. “I was just like ‘Where are we?’” he said. That would soon change, as native Charlotteans and enthusiastic transplants created spaces that brought people together to nurture what Lee called an “unapologetic way of living.”11 Rev. Tonyia Rawls of the LGBTQ+ focused Unity Fellowship Church met with a warm reception when her denomination chose the Queen City 125
Charlotte Black Pride board members Miles Perry (left) and Clarence Williams at the Black Pride Juneteenth celebration, 2023. Photo by Grant Baldwin.
to start its first Bible Belt church. “One of the things that excited me about Charlotte was the possibilities,” Rawls recently explained. “She’s a city that’s still not finished yet, and I love that about her.” The first services opened “a floodgate of interest,” including parishioners “who would literally travel three hours or more twice a week just to come to a safe place to worship.”12 Church services, events such as the Organic Funk spoken-word nights held at the now-shuttered Club Myxx, and growing political involvement forged connections and confidence. After getting the “runaround” from the white organizers of Charlotte’s Pride festival, in 2005 Black organizers started their own Black Pride festival, which drew a record-breaking attendance of 5,000 in its first year.
The Challenge of Gentrification Activists also faced new challenges. A growing nationwide enthusiasm for urban living led to new investments and significant transformations in older neighborhoods throughout the city. As elsewhere in the country, persisting racial wealth gaps meant that “gentrification” involved large numbers of non-Black families moving to historically Black neighborhoods. As dilapidated rental homes gave way to new, high-priced construction, 126
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J’Tanya Adams in front of an Underground Railroad mural in a pop-up park she helped create, 2021. Photo by Grant Baldwin. Courtesy of Queen City Nerve.
the shift displaced families who could no longer afford to live in their old neighborhoods, whether along Beatties Ford Road or in communities such as Cherry, Belmont and Villa Heights. By 2016, the previously all-Black neighborhood of Cherry had become predominantly white. Biddleville, which had been founded as a Black community, and which had been 96 percent Black in 2010, had become 25 percent white.13 African Americans working to revitalize historically Black neighborhoods thus had to fight to preserve the cultural and neighborly connections that made up the rich Black heritage of those areas. Community organizer J’Tanya Adams was one of many Charlotteans who took up that challenge. She grew up in the Steele Creek community, and when she was young “the land of milk and honey for Black people was Beatties Ford Road . . . Anything you could want or desire to be was on Beatties Ford Road.” In 2010, as she watched the racial makeup of westside communities change, she decided to invest in “the area that I believed in.” She purchased a home in Seversville and organized the Historic West End Partners, which focused on building up economic and cultural assets and nurturing small businesses.14 As the area grew, investment followed. The west side gained new 127
buildings, restored parks and community spaces, a YMCA named for Black activists Willie Stratford and Jim Richardson, and a range of Black-owned businesses and Black-run cultural programs. Oaklawn Park, where many homes still belonged to the families who first purchased them in the 1950s, achieved local historic district status. In 2021, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, Charlotte’s first Black female mayor, announced a racial equity initiative that included plans for significant investments in Johnson C. Smith University. But although multiple organizations were also working to create affordable housing opportunities that would allow longtime residents to stay in their neighborhoods, those efforts were dwarfed by the need, and many families were once again set adrift. One 2019 analysis concluded that meeting the needs of Mecklenburg County’s low-income families would require nearly 37,000 new units of affordable housing. No housing effort operated at anything like that scale.15 Ongoing challenges were especially evident in the schools that served center-city neighborhoods, which continued to have some of the highest poverty rates in the city. Housing instability meant that students regularly shifted from school to school, as their families moved from place to place.
Despite Charlotte’s prosperity, children in communities such as Brookhill Village, an affordable housing complex with an uncertain future, face many challenges. Alvin C. Jacobs, Family and Friends, 2018, Welcome to Brookhill. Generously donated by Alvin C. Jacobs. Permanent Collection of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. 128
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Far too many – more than 4,700 in 2018-19 – had no fixed home at all. The COVID pandemic, which hit Black communities especially hard, only intensified the pressures faced by low-income families.
Looking Ahead Charlotte’s African Americans thus face a future of opportunity and challenge — much like their ancestors. Jermaine Nakia Lee summed up the energy and optimism felt by many Black Charlotteans. “There is so much opportunity in Charlotte,” he said. “And certainly there are disparities — all that’s real. But in a certain setting Black folk and other marginalized people are able to push through some of those disparities. And I think Charlotte has that setting. There’s enough affirmation, enough representation, that people can push through and come out on top.”16 At the same time, longtime civil rights attorney James Ferguson II noted, progress can never be taken for granted. “Yes, we had an explosion of rights in the sixties,” he said. “But it could go away. And we see it going away and it tells us what can happen to our society when we don’t continue to focus on bringing people together and keeping people together for generations and generations and generations. The time may ultimately come when you don’t have to wake up every day and say ‘Oh my God, what do I have to do to maintain a just society?’ But we’re not there.”17
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AFTERWORD RECOVERING BLACK HISTORY IN CHARLOTTE
Mural by Abel Jackson next to Grace AME Zion Church on South Brevard Street. Photo by Pamela Grundy.
Three larger-than-life Black men gaze out over South Brevard Street. Their dark suits and stiff white collars mark them as belonging to another time: the era of the Gothic Revival-style Grace AME Zion Church in front of them and the elegant Mecklenburg Investment Company office building rising behind. From the 1880s into the 1940s, Thaddeus Lincoln Tate, John Taylor Williams and William C. Smith played key roles in building up Black Charlotte, most notably the center-city neighborhood called Brooklyn, where the Brevard Street mural sits today. Tate established the city’s most 131
celebrated barbershop; Williams became one of North Carolina’s first Black doctors; and Smith edited and published Charlotte’s first Black newspaper, the Charlotte Messenger. Below the men, artist Abel Jackson has painted three boys from a more recent era, their backs to the street, looking up. The juxtaposition links past, present and future. But it holds more than that.
Three boys watching as Second Ward High School is demolished. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
The photograph on which Jackson modeled the seated boys tells a far different story. In that image, taken in the early 1970s, the boys are watching the demolition of Second Ward High School, one of the last buildings to fall victim to the bulldozers that erased the Brooklyn neighborhood in the name of “urban renewal.” By transporting the boys away from the scene of Brooklyn’s demise and placing them at the feet of the neighborhood’s creators, Jackson sought to refocus viewers’ perspectives on Black history, following a shift that he had made in his own outlook. 132
“Before you know the fullness of our history, there’s a concentration on destruction,” he explained. “What men like these were doing and the profoundness of what they were doing – I missed out on it because I was just focused on the destruction.”1
Abel Jackson works on a Charlotte Black history mural, “Past, Present and Future,” at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. Photo by Angel Butler. Courtesy of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.
Throughout Charlotte’s three centuries of Black history, creation and destruction have tightly intertwined. The ghosts of urban renewal haunt South Brevard. Only four Brooklyn buildings escaped the bulldozers: Grace AME Zion, the Mecklenburg Investment Company, the McCrorey YMCA building on Caldwell Street and the Second Ward High School gymnasium on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Those ghosts speak to a fundamental fact of Black life and Black history: displacement. Bricks from the wreckage of Second Ward High were scattered, carried off by generations of devoted graduates. “I can remember when they started tearing the building down,” Rufus Spears recalled two decades after the demolition. “There were a lot of students, former students who came back just to get one brick to save as a memento.”2 133
Similarly, Brooklyn residents who lost their homes were dispersed throughout the city and beyond, each bearing their own memories and possessions.
Putting the story together Like artists, historians seek to pull parts of these experiences back together, searching out artifacts of memory and record and arranging them to illuminate both past and present. Legacy draws on sources that include census records, newspapers, family documents, photographs and oral history interviews. Thanks to decades of work by historians from many backgrounds, such endeavors are far more feasible today than they were a few decades ago. Researching African American history can be a challenge. Standard historical sources — government records, mainstream publications, documents preserved in archives — generally provide scant, deeply biased information on Black lives. The only published works that focus on pre-Civil War Charlotte center almost exclusively on the activities of whites, with African Americans appearing for brief, stereotyped moments as loyal servants, annoying runaways, or comic relief. In 1916, the celebratory booklet that accompanied the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence festivities simply erased Charlotte’s Black residents. The booklet contained 40 pages replete with effusive accounts of Charlotte’s history, industry, and culture. But although African Americans made up a full third of Charlotte’s residents, the only hint that any Black person had ever set foot in the city came in a brief note that, of the 6,981 students enrolled in Charlotte schools, “4,770 are white and 2,211 colored.”3 The multiple upheavals Black communities have endured have also made it hard to effectively preserve the records that could challenge such erasures. Before urban renewal came violence and disfranchisement. Thad Tate, J.T. Williams and W.C. Smith started their Charlotte careers in the hopeful years of the 1880s and 1890s. All around them, newly emancipated Black men and women were building homes and businesses, participating in politics and — they thought — moving toward full equality in American life. But at the turn of the century, when white supremacist violence thrust 134
African Americans out of political life and began to shape the separate-andunequal segregation known as Jim Crow, many Black Charlotteans left the state and the South, taking their records and memories with them. Those who remained turned inward, using the resources they could muster to painstakingly build up communities such as Brooklyn — until the bulldozers arrived. These multiple disruptions mean that much of Black community history has been preserved in private homes rather than institutions. It has taken patient, collaborative effort to bring documents, artifacts and memories back into public view. Historian Janette Greenwood learned about these community resources back in 1983, when she set out to document Black Charlotte history for Charlotte’s Historic Landmarks Commission. Standard sources had little to offer. When, for example, Greenwood contacted the North Carolina State Archives about newspaper records, archivists told her that while a Black newspaper called the Charlotte Messenger had been published in Charlotte in the 1880s, only a single issue had survived. Then, however, community historian and longtime Johnson C. Smith University professor Rev. DeGrandval Burke caught wind of the project. He phoned the commission and recommended that Greenwood visit a woman who lived on Beatties Ford Road. Greenwood arranged a meeting and appeared at the appointed time. After asking a few questions, Rosa Smith, the daughter of W.C. Smith, “started bringing down these massive leatherbound volumes.”4 Smith had 150 issues of her father’s newspaper stored in her attic. Greenwood began to make regular visits to Smith’s home, where she’d spend a few hours at a time paging through the century-old volumes, “leather flaking on my fingertips,” and learning about a remarkably rich, largely forgotten world. The Messenger became the central source for Greenwood’s book Bittersweet Legacy, about the hopeful post-Emancipation era. Soon afterward, Rosa Smith donated the newspapers to Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Harvey B. Gantt Center), founded by UNC Charlotte professors Bertha Maxwell-Roddey and Mary Harper in 1974. The papers were microfilmed, then digitized, and are now available on DigitalNC for anyone to read. Other efforts were underway as well. Vermelle Diamond Ely spearheaded the formation of the Second Ward High School National 135
Alumni Association, filled her basement and the Second Ward Alumni House with artifacts, and with her fellow graduates told the school’s story at every opportunity. Rudolph Torrence and May Clark Orr helped form a similar organization for West Charlotte High School. Historian Tom Hanchett, who had worked with Greenwood at the Historic Landmarks Commission, researched and published Sorting Out the New South City, which included detailed accounts of Black neighborhood development.
The images captured by photographer James Peeler during his decades-long career provide invaluable insights into Black Charlotte history. Courtesy of the Peeler family and the Inez Moore Parker Archives at Johnson C. Smith University.
In February of 1991 the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library launched a photography collection effort spearheaded by revered community leader Elizabeth Randolph and Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room director Pat Ryckman. Partly funded through a benefit performance by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the project involved several day-long photography sessions that captured high-quality copies of more than 1,500 Black family photographs. These have become a go-to resource for researchers and communities; many of the images in Legacy come from the library’s collections. In 2004, when a tragic fire took the life of longtime community photographer James Peeler and damaged his backyard studio, staff at the 136
Levine Museum of the New South and the Johnson C. Smith archives worked with the Peeler family to rescue, restore and preserve more than 200,000 negatives, creating another invaluable resource. Oral history projects, whose participants have generously shared their thoughts and recollections, have helped expand the record, documenting the experiences of people such as Barbara Davis and Leroy “Pop” Miller, leading figures at West Charlotte High; Charles Jones, B.B. DeLaine and Edyth Strickland DeLaine, who helped organize the Charlotte sit-ins; and activists such as James Ross from Grier Heights; Wilhelmenia Adams from Cherry; and Edith Shearin from McCrorey Heights. Many of these interviews are now available online through the Special Collections and University Archives at UNC Charlotte and the Southern Oral History Program at UNC Chapel Hill. As this accounting of online resources makes clear, technological advance has greatly aided historians’ endeavors, especially in areas such as Black history. The advent of digital searching makes it far easier to trace the clues to Black life scattered throughout mainstream sources. It also made it possible to scan through the 2,300 Works Progress Administration interviews done with formerly enslaved individuals across the country and locate the single one — recorded with Eliza Washington in Little Rock, Arkansas — that held stories about Mecklenburg County. Access to these sources, along with a renewed interest in Black history among young people, has sparked dynamic discussions and creations across our city. Legacy is our addition to this mix, and we are proud to have Abel Jackson’s mural on the cover. We hope these accounts of courage and commitment will inspire other Charlotteans to pursue further research and share additional stories, helping to assemble a more complete story of our city’s past. There is so much left to learn.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is only possible because of the generosity of the many people who have shared their stories and expertise with me over the thirty years I’ve spent as a historian in Charlotte. Writing Black history as a white woman is a thorny challenge, and I have needed all the help that I could get. My introduction to Black Charlotte history came through alumni of Second Ward and West Charlotte high schools, who introduced me to their schools’ rich past when I came to Charlotte to curate an exhibit on the history of area basketball for the Levine Museum of the New South. The lessons I learned went well beyond the histories of the schools themselves and sparked an enduring interest in the remarkable stories of Charlotte’s African American communities. I owe a particular debt to Vermelle Ely, who has played such a central role in preserving and sharing the history of Second Ward High, and who has supported my work and that of others with such great warmth and generosity. As well as sharing stories and resources, Vermelle arranged for me to serve a term on the Second Ward High School National Alumni Association board, a transformative experience. As I began work on a history of West Charlotte High School, West Charlotte alumni showed similar generosity. I learned from Rudy Torrence, Mae Clark Orr, Malachi Green, Deacon Jones, Harriet Love, Stan Frazier and many, many others. Members of the West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association, Inc., especially Ella Dennis and Tim Gibbs, were always ready to answer questions, share resources, and make connections. 139
The many mornings I spent at Sarah Stevenson’s Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club introduced me to a broad range of people and issues important to African American communities. I cherish my friendships with Sarah, with Barbara, James, Jay and Reneisha Ferguson, with Dorothy Counts-Scoggins, with Arthur Griffin, and with many other Charlotteans whose passion for history, education and justice have aided and inspired me through the years. Tom Hanchett introduced me to Charlotte, back when we were graduate students at UNC Chapel Hill. Few can match Tom’s love for and understanding of Charlotte history, and it was a great day for the city when he returned to Charlotte as the Levine Museum historian back in 1999. Sheila Bumgarner has been an indispensable ally at the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, using her knowledge of the library’s archives to locate and share images and sources of all kinds. I remain in awe of the skill and patience with which J. Michael Moore unearths property and census records. Willie Griffin, a Charlotte native and part of a rising generation of historians whose work is transforming African American history, introduced me to the remarkable career of Trezzvant Anderson, and to the activist world in which he lived and worked. I look forward to learning more from Willie’s work, and from that of new generations of African American scholars. I have drawn on a rich array of scholarship about North Carolina, especially the works in the Suggested Readings section. Fellow writers Jill Snider, Jerma Jackson, Pam Kelley, and Carol Polsgrave, as well as Tom Hanchett, read and critiqued the entire manuscript, sometimes multiple times. I’m fortunate to have Queen City Nerve’s Ryan Pitkin as an editor – one of the best I have ever worked with. Support and encouragement from Betsy Mack at the Charlotte Hornets Foundation has helped keep me moving forward. I began this project in the summer of 2020, when the growing prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement sparked new interest in Black history, especially among young people. As there was no substantial summary of Black Charlotte history available, I decided to write one. I might not have been the ideal author, but I was privileged to have the time. Ryan and Justin LaFrancois at Queen City Nerve agreed to publish a series of Black history articles that summer, and we have expanded the project from there. 140
Sarah Stevenson (left) and Pamela Grundy, 2015.
This second edition adds new material to chapters 8 and 9; an afterword that describes some of the challenges of researching and writing Black history; and an index. I am also delighted to note that the success of the first edition has connected us with the dynamic staff at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture, who are using these stories to expand their efforts to preserve, present and celebrate Charlotte’s Black history. I look forward to the results. I was not paid for writing the pieces published in the Nerve, and all proceeds from Legacy sales go to the Nerve’s Black Writer’s Fund, which pays Black writers to write stories for the Nerve about Black subjects. A digital version of the work is available at no charge at www.qcnerve.com/ legacy.
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NOTES INTRODUCTION - Building Charlotte 1. North Carolina Whig, 6 October 1852, 2. For information about slave labor on railroads, see Keri T. Peterson, “The North Carolina Railroad, Industrial Slavery, and the Economic Development of North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., UNC Greensboro, 2017). 2. North Carolina Whig, 29 September 1852, 2. 3. North Carolina Whig, 3 November 1852, 2. CHAPTER 1 - Slavery & Revolution 1. D.A. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, Vol. 1 (Charlotte: Observer Printing House, 103), 84. 2. J.B. Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County (Charlotte: Observer Printing House, 1902), 75. 3. Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worchester, Mass: Chas. W. Burbank & Co., 1895), 28-29. For more on Parker, see core.ecu.edu/newmanj/cecelskid/dcintro.htm. 4. Eliza Washington interview by S.S. Taylor, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 7 (Library of Congress, 1941), 53. 5. Ernest James Clark, Jr. “Aspects of the North Carolina Slave Code, 1715-1860.” The North Carolina Historical Review 39 (April 1962), 148-164. An 1817 law allowed for enslavers to be prosecuted for the death of an enslaved person, but such actions rarely occurred. 6. “Slaves and Free Persons of Color,” a compilation of North Carolina laws regarding slavery, docsouth.unc.edu/nc/slavesfree/slavesfree.html. 7. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 51. 8. Despite a lack of documentation, the “Meck Dec” became a part of local and state lore. May 20, 1775 was placed on the North Carolina state flag in 1861 and has remained there ever since. Queen City Nerve, 20 May 2020. 9. Ruth Bogin, “‘Liberty Further Extended’: A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (Jan. 1983), 85-105. 10. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, 86. 11. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, 86. 12. Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times, 28-29. 13. Fannie Moore interview by Marjorie Jones, 21 September 1937, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Volume II, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2, (Library of Congress, 1941), 132. Members of the white Moore family, which owned the Walnut Grove plantation on the Tyger River in Spartanburg County, were staunch Presbyterians who lived in the Mecklenburg County area before moving on to South Carolina in the mid-1700s. In the 1870s, descendants of the enslaved Moores founded Moore’s Sanctuary AME Zion Church in Charlotte. Thanks to J. Michael Moore for pointing out these connections. CHAPTER 2 - Growth, War, Freedom 1. libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/158/rec/1. All the advertisements cited and pictured in this chapter come from the North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices project, housed at the University Libraries of UNC Greensboro, dlas.uncg.edu/notices. Notices can be searched using “Mecklenburg County” in the county list and the names of the individuals. 142
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/156/rec/4 http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/1732/rec/5 Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County, 125. Eliza Washington interview, 49-56. Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County, 331-32. John Springs to A.B. Davidson, 8 December 1836. Davidson Family Papers #204, Subseries 1.1, Folder 1, “1827-1838,” scans 33-34, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. Digitized versions of many the items in this collection can be viewed at finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/00204/. Herman J. Bryson, Gold Deposits in North Carolina, Bulletin 38 (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, 1936), 9-10. Jeff Forret, “Slave Labor in North Carolina’s Antebellum Gold Mines,” North Carolina Historical Review 76 (April 1999), 148. Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America (London: C. Gilpin, 1843), 40. “Inventory and valuation of the Property given off to Mary Davidson,” December 1936. Davidson Family Papers, #204, Subseries 1.1, Folder 1. John Springs to A.B. Davidson, 8 December 1836. Fannie Moore interview, 131. Walnut Grove was in Spartanburg County, S.C. Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 15-16. Like the abolition movement, the Underground Railroad was run by both Blacks and whites, but white leaders like Coffin generally received more notice. “David Walker, 1785-1830,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979-1996), docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/bio.html. North Carolina Whig, 29 September 1852, 2. David S. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 58-54. libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/6175/rec/6. Western Democrat, 13 January 1863, 3. Western Democrat, 16 June 1863, 3. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom, 175.
CHAPTER 3 - Accomplishment & Backlash 1. Africo-American Presbyterian, 14 March 1907, 2. 2. Charlotte Chronicle, 19 June 1891, 2. 3. Africo-American Presbyterian, 14 March 1907, 2; R.A. Massey, “Daniel Jackson Sanders,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ncpedia.org/biography/sanders-daniel-jackson. 4. Patsy Mitchner interview by T. Pat Matthews in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Volume XI, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 (Library of Congress, 1941), 119-20. 5. Alex Lichtenstein, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: ‘The Negro Convict is a Slave,’” Journal of Southern History 59 (Feb., 1993), 109-110. 6. The best account of the growth of Charlotte’s post-Emancipation Black community is Janette Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850-1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 7. Catherine Bisher and Tom Hanchett, “William H. Houser,” in North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary, ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000611. 8. Star of Zion, 29 April 1897, 1. 9. Western Democrat, 28 May 1867, 2. 10. Weekly Standard, 29 May 1867, 4. 11. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 55. 143
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom, 206-07. Thomas Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 83. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 91. Charlotte Observer, 5 November 1898, 5. Charlotte Observer, 9 November 1898, 5 Charlotte Observer, 11 November 1898, 1. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 224. UNC Chapel Hill Library, “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina,” docsouth.unc. edu/commland/. Charlotte News, 6 May 1902, 6; Charlotte Daily Observer, 11 June 1902, 1. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 131. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 226.
CHAPTER 4 - Creating Brooklyn 1. Charlotte Observer, 17 March 1917, 5. 2. Alison Stewart, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), 120-21. 3. Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 65 (October 1988), 387-444. 4. Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City, 142-43 5. Rose Leary Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies: A Memoir (Charlotte: Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, 1996), 5. 6. Vermelle Ely interview by Katheryn B. Wells, 25 March 2004, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte. 7. Connie Patton interview by Robert Bemis, 2 April 2007, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte. 8. Barbara C. Steele interview by Amy Hodgin, 1 April 2004, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte. 9. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 8-9. 10. Charlotte Observer, 26 September 1930, 8. 11. Charlotte Observer, 20 September 1936, 40. 12. North Carolina Department of Public Safety, “Lists of Persons Executed,” ncdps.gov/ adult-corrections/prisons/death-penalty/list-of-persons-executed. 13. Susan W. Thomas, “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935” (Ph.D. diss. UNC Greensboro, 2011), 12-20. 14. Charlotte Observer, 14 March 1935, 1, 7. 15. Thomas, “Chain Gangs,” 209-221. 16. Charlotte Observer, 23 January 1929, 1. 17. Charlotte Observer, 27 January 1929, 1. 18. Charlotte Observer, 11 February 1929, 1. 19. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 30 March 1929, 7. 20. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 30 March 1929, 7. Charlotte-based historian Willie Griffin has done detailed, deeply insightful on Trezzvant Anderson’s remarkable career, elevating the perspective of African Americans on this and other key events. See Willie James Griffin, “Courier of Crisis, Messenger of Hope: Trezzvant Anderson and the Black Freedom Struggle for Economic Justice,” (Ph.D. diss. UNC Chapel Hill, 2016). 21. Charlotte Observer, 27 April 1937, 1. 144
CHAPTER 5 - Civil Rights 1. Carolina Times, 22 July 1939, 8. For more about Anderson and his work in Charlotte and across the nation, see Griffin, “Courier of Crisis, Messenger of Hope.” 2. For postwar developments in Black Charlotte, see Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 27-28, 35-38. For Robert Williams, see Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 3. James Ross interview by Pamela Grundy and Tom Hanchett, 10 February 2000, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. 4. Grundy, Color and Character, 26; Arthur Griffin interview by Pamela Grundy, 7 May 1999, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. 5. Grundy, Color and Character, 38. 6. For redlining in Charlotte, see Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City, 229-32. 7. Grundy, Color and Character, 26-27. 8. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 48. 9. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 70. 10. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), 50. Although Baldwin recalls seeing the photograph of Counts in Paris, he had already returned to the U.S. when she first entered Harding. 11. Charlotte Observer, 5 September 1957, 1, 6. 12. Davison Douglas: Reading, Writing and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 71-75. 13. James Baldwin, “Letter from the South,” Partisan Review 26 (Winter 1959), 75. 14. Grundy, Color and Character, 44-45. 15. Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79-80. 16. Grundy, Color and Character, 46-48. 17. Charlotte Observer, 30 June 1995, 1-C. 18. Charlotte Observer, 5 September 1965, 19. 19. Grundy, Color and Character, 47-48. 20. Charlotte Observer, 11 December 1965, 1-C 21. Charlotte Observer, 13 December 1965, 8-B 22. Two of the pastors who signed the letter, Rev. Smith Turner of Grace AME Zion, and Rev. Ezra Moore of Brooklyn Presbyterian, pastored churches in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Presbyterian had held its final service just a month before the letter was written. INTERLUDE - Women in the Charlotte Sit-ins 1. Parts of this narrative appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer, 9 February 2003, D-1. CHAPTER 6 - Urban Renewal 1. Charlotte Observer, 19 January 1960, 1-A. 2. Charlotte Observer, 9 April 1960, 1-A. 3. Grundy, Color & Character, 64. 4. Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City, 144. 5. Charlotte Observer, 25 January 1950, 1-B. 6. Charlotte Observer, 21 December 1961, 1-B. 7. Steele interview by Hodgin. 8. Charlotte Observer, 11 January 1960, 1-B. 9. Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies, 182. 10. Thanks to J. Michael Moore for doing the research to document the house history. 145
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
Charlotte Observer, 20 January 1960, 1-B. Steele interview by Hodgin. Charlotte Observer, 26 August 19631-B. Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City, 247-51. Steele interview by Hodgin. Grundy, Color & Character, 63 Charlotte Observer, 27 October 1965. Charlotte Observer, April 18, 1965. “Statistical Summary of Urban Renewal Program: October 1972” (Charlotte: Redevelopment Commission of the City of Charlotte, 1972). Charlotte Observer, 1 November, 1965. Grundy, Color & Character. For the concept of “Root Shock” see Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: New Village Press, 2016).
CHAPTER 7 - Seizing Freedom 1. Folder 4079, “Domestics United,” Subseries 4.5, Charlotte Area Fund. A number of digitized records related to Domestics United can be viewed at: finding-aids.lib.unc. edu/04710/#folder_4079. 2. Carrie Graves interview by Pamela Grundy, 9 November 2021, in Grundy’s possession. 3. New York Times, 18 July 1971, 1. 4. Charlotte Observer, 25 August 1968, 1-C. 5. Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 6. James E. Ferguson II interview by Rudolph Acree, Jr., 3 and 17 March 1992, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. 7. T.J. Reddy interview by Bridgette Sanders, 28 June 2004, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte. 8. Sonya Ramsey, “Caring is Activism: Black Southern Womanist Teachers Theorizing and the Careers of Kathleen Crosby and Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, 1946-1986,” Educational Studies 48 (2012), 251-52; John Christopher Schutz, “’Going to Hell to Get the Devil:’ The ‘Charlotte Three’ Case and the Decline of Grassroots Activism in 1970s Charlotte, North Carolina (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 1999), 85-88; Charlotte Observer, 6 September 1968. 9. David Cecelski, “Jim Grant, in Memory,” davidcecelski.com/2021/12/06/jim-grant-inmemory/ 10. Charlotte Observer, 10 August 1968, 1-C. 11. Reddy interview by Sanders. 12. Charlotte Observer, 31 October 1967, 8-A. 13. Evan Faulkenbury, “Reginald Hawkins, the 1968 North Carolina Democratic Primary, and the Future of Black Political Participation,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 5 (Fall/Winter 2019), 68-88. King had committed to campaign for Hawkins at the start of April but was diverted to Tennessee to support the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. He was shot in Memphis on April 4, the day he had originally been scheduled to arrive in Charlotte. 14. The Swann suit was initially dismissed, but Chambers reopened the case when the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County expanded the Court’s desegregation mandate. 15. Grundy, Color & Character, 55-56. 16. Grundy, Color & Character, 64. 17. Douglas, Reading, Writing and Race, 112. 18. Carolina Times, 14 June 1969, 1. 146
19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
Charlotte Observer, 20 July 1945, 1-B; 21 September 1945, 1-B. Charlotte Observer, 22 September 1970, 1-A. Charlotte Observer, 26 January 1970, 9-A; For analysis of some of the challenges faced by Domestics United see Cathie Fogle, “Background Paper on Domestics United,” 19 April 1968. Folder 4079 “Domestics United” Subseries 4.5, Charlotte Area Fund. For details of the trial see Rosen and Mosnier, Julius Chambers, 235-56. Ben Chavis was acquitted in the Raleigh Two case but convicted in the Wilmington Ten case. Ferguson interview by Acree.
CHAPTER 8 - Building Coalitions 1. Grundy, Color & Character, 76 2. Grundy, Color & Character, 76. 3. Galliard, Dream Long Deferred, 150-169. For developments at West Charlotte High School, see Grundy, Color and Character. 4. Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1. 5. Anthony Foxx interview by Pamela Grundy, 11 November 2012, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. 6. Rosen and Mosnier, Julius Chambers, 193-223. See also Robert Samuel Smith, Race, Labor, and Civil Rights: Griggs versus Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008) 7. Omega Autry interview by Pamela Grundy, 25 May 2021, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte. 8. Among whites, 7 percent were below the poverty line in 1970 and 6 percent in 1980. 9. Gaillard, Dream Long Deferred, 173-77. 10. Smith, Boom for Whom, 40-42 11. Sonya Ramsey, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022). 12. Sarah Stevenson interview by Pamela Grundy, 7 April 2017, in Grundy’s possession. 13. Harvey Gantt interview by Pamela Grundy, 6 July 2021, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte. 14. Black Enterprise, June 1983, 182. 15. Grundy, Color & Character, 112. 16. Gantt interview by Grundy. CHAPTER 9 - Two Cities 1. politico.com/story/2012/09/anthony-foxx-dnc-speech-transcript-080659. 2. Charlotte Observer, 26 January 2014, 22-A. 3. The Atlantic, 22 September 2016. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/charlotterace-history/501221/. 4. Limited job opportunities meant that few immigrants came to the South between the Civil War and the 1980s. Charlotte’s first significant 20th century stream of immigration started when a handful of Greek merchants settled in the city in the 1920s and built up a Greek community. Starting in the 1960s, a few Latin American immigrants arrived, especially from Cuba, along with some Germans connected to the textile industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, Charlotte became home to a significant group of refugees displaced by the end of the war in Vietnam. After that, as the economy grew, people arrived from all over the world. Working-class families from Latin America made up the largest group. See, for example, William Graves and Heather Smith, eds., Charlotte N.C.: The Global Evolution of a New South City (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2012). 147
5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
In 2021, the median income for white families in Mecklenburg County was just over $91,000 and the white poverty rate in Charlotte was 6.7 percent. Gantt interview by Grundy. Grundy, Color & Character, 114-16; 143-49. For a detailed account of the interactions of drug dealing and history in Charlotte, see Pam Kelley, Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South (New York: The New Press, 2018). Grundy, Color & Character, 121-23; 133-37. Lower-income immigrant families, especially from Latin America, also became part of the “crescent and wedge” development, and faced many of the same consequences of economic isolation, but they tended to move into neighborhoods in the east and southwest, rather than into historically Black westside neighborhoods. For specific challenges faced by West Charlotte High School in the post-busing era, see Grundy, Color & Character, 140-179. Grundy, Color & Character, 189-90. Jermaine Nakia Lee video interview by Pamela Grundy, 7 October 2022. Tonyia Rawls video interview by Pamela Grundy, 23 March 2023. Charlotte Observer, 22 March 2016, A-1. Queen City Nerve, 18 December 2020. National Low Income Housing Coalition, “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Housing” (March 2021), 25. Jermaine Nakia Lee interview by Grundy. James and Barbara Ferguson interview by Pamela Grundy, 6 September 2016, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
AFTERWORD 1. Abel Jackson telephone interview by Pamela Grundy, 16 February 2022. 2. Souvenir Program: Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (Charlotte: Washburn Press, 1916), 25. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/ t9z03kd7w&view=1up&seq=27. 3. “Enduring Rivalry,” video created for exhibit “The Most Democratic Sport: Basketball and Culture in the Central Piedmont,” Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, N.C., 1994. 4. Janette Greenwood telephone interview by Pamela Grundy, 9 February 2022.
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SUGGESTED READINGS David S. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Davison Douglas, Reading, Writing and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Frye Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 3d edition, 2006. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Janette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850-1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Thomas Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998, 2020. Pam Kelley, Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South. New York: The New Press, 2018. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Rose Leary Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies: A Memoir. Charlotte: Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, 1996. La Shonda Mims, Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists: Queer Women in the Urban South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Fannie Flono, Thriving in the Shadows: The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Charlotte: Novello Festival Press, 2006. (Updated version of Elizabeth Randolph and Pat Ryckman, An African American Album, 1992) Sonya Ramsey, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022. Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Jill Snider, Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Sarah Thuesen, Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020. 149
INDEX Abolition, in Northern states, 17, 28 Absentee landlords, 85, 90 Adams, Isaac: free papers of used by runaway Armisted, 22, 25; as free black saddle maker in Charlotte, 25 Adams, J’Tanya: background of, 127; on Beatties Ford Road, 127; founding of Historic West End Partners by, 127; photo of, 127 Adams, Wilhelmina: on Cherry neighborhood, 95; as leader of Domestics United, 95-96; on solidarity, 96 Affordable housing, 88, 90, 127 Africa, 11, 15 African Brigade, 30 African American history in Charlotte: Afro-American Cultural Center and, 114; UNC Charlotte Black Studies program and, 114; comment on importance of by Tim Gibbs, 119, 125; efforts to preserve in public spaces, 125, 127-28; historic preservation and, 125-27; Inez Moore Parker Archives and, 125 Africo-American Presbyterian, 36 Afro-American Cultural Center, 114, 135. See also Harvey B. Gantt Museum of African-American Art + Culture Afro-American Mutual Insurance Company, building design of, 53; photo of board members, 54 Alexander, Frederick Douglas: as Charlotte developer, 67; election to Charlotte City Council of, 59, 72; home of bombed, 72 Alexander Graham Junior High School, desegregation of, 68 Alexander, J. B., on loyalty among enslaved persons, 23 Alexander, Kelly: brother of Fred Alexander, 67; as Citizens Advisory Group member, 110; call for public housing by, 87; home of bombed, 72; role of in NAACP, 63-64; Swann v. Board and, 102 Alexander, Kelly, Jr., 72 Alexander Street School (First Ward): closing of, 102; photo of students at, 53 Alexander, Zechariah, 59, 63 AME Zion National Publishing House, 39, 53 American Revolution: appeal of rhetoric of to African Americans, 17; support in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., for, 16-17 American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, sanitation workers’ strike and, 96 Anderson, Ed, on urban renewal, 83, 90 Anderson, Trezzvant: civil rights activism of, 63; on Clive Fowler murder case, 58-59; photo of, 62; WWII enlistment of, 73 Ann, separation of family of during enslavement, 27; as wedding gift to A. B. Davidson, 27 Armisted, escape of from Peter Brown tannery in Charlotte, 22 Autry, Omega, on discrimination at N.C. Dept. of Social Services, 112 Babb, Jim and Mary Lou, and school busing, 110 Baldwin, James: on Dorothy Counts, 68, 145ch5n10; on visit to Charlotte, 68-69 Battle, George, Jr., election of to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 113 Barnes, Robert, treatment of in prison camp, 57 Beatties Ford Road: Capps Mine on, 25; J’Tanya Adams on, 126; gentrification of, 125-26; march along to save West Charlotte High School, 108 Belk, John, sanitation workers’ strike and, 103-4
150
Belk’s Department Store, segregation by, 75 Belmont neighborhood (white), 81; blockbusting in, 88; gentrification of, 127 Berry, Phillip O., reelection of to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 113 Bethune Elementary School, closing of, 102 Biddle College. See Biddle University Biddle University: appointment of first African American president of and resignation of white faculty members over, 35-36; photo of Biddle Hall at, 36; photo of class of 1894, 37; “Stockade” for convict labor near, 39. See also Johnson C. Smith University Biddleville neighborhood, 46, 51, 66, 81; “Biddleville” mural in, 125; description of by T. J. Reddy, 98; gentrification of, 127; highway construction through, 87 Biggerly, James, stonecutter in Charlotte, 25 Bill, hiring of as blacksmith, 23; given as wedding gift to A. B. Davidson, 27 Billingsville School, 51 Black Political Organization, sponsorship of Charlotte City Council campaigns by, 102 Black Solidarity Committee, 98-99 Blake, Caesar Jr., national leader in Prince Hall Masons, 54 Blockbusting, 88 Bombings, 72 Boycott, of downtown Charlotte businesses, 70, 78 Bradley, Mary Anna Neal: protest at Ivey’s by, 78; on parents’ disapproval of activism, 78 Brevard Street Library, 46 Brooklyn neighborhood: African Americans’ comments on urban renewal in, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89; building of Second Ward High School in, 51; businesses in, 53; comments on move of white First Baptist to, 89; description of by Rose Leary Love, 53; map of, 55; departure of Friendship Baptist from, 88; dispersal of residents from, 134; Myers Street School in, 49-50; photo of business district, 55; naming of, 46; photo of rental homes and residents, 83; survival of buildings in, 90, 133; United House of Prayer for All People in, 53-54 Brooklyn United Presbyterian Church, merger to form, 145ch5n22 Brookshire Freeway. See Northwest Expressway Brookshire, Stan: 85; photo of, wielding sledgehammer, 84; response of to open letter from African American ministers, 72 Brown, Peter, as tanner and slaveholder in Charlotte, 22, 25 Brown v. Board of Education: Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and, 67-68; white resistance to, 68 Burke, Rev. DeGrandval, 135 Busing: Citizens Advisory Group and, 109-10; ended by Cappachione case, 124; as factor in Charlotte’s growth, 111; interracial coalition and, 109; response to Ronald Reagan’s comments on, 116; white resistance to, 109 Cappachione v. Board of Education, resegregation as result of, 124 Capps Gold Mine, use of enslaved labor by, 22, 25 Carolina Theater (Charlotte, N.C.), refusal of to admit African Americans, 75 Carolina Times (Durham, N.C.), editorial on discrimination by Charlotte Postmaster Paul Younts, 62-63 Central High School, desegregation of, 68 Central High School (Little Rock, Ark.), desegregation of, 69
Chambers, Julius: as Black Solidarity Committee member, 98; civil rights litigation by, 96, 102, 105; home of bombed, 72; labor litigation by, 112; law office of bombed, 100; law partners of (Adam Stein and James Ferguson II), 96, 105, 109; life and early career of, 96-97; opening of NAACP Legal Defense Fund office by, 72; photo of, 97 Charlotte Area Fund, 94 Charlotte Black Pride, 126 Charlotte Board of Aldermen, African American member of, 39 Charlotte Bureau on Employment, Training, and Placement, 98 Charlotte Business League, 114 Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, 70-71 Charlotte City Council: African American candidates for, 59, 102; African American members of, 113; referendum to reform election of, 113; “slum razing” project of, 82-85 Charlotte Journal, news topics in 1839, 21 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education: African American candidates for, 59; African American members of, 103, 113, 120; reform of election model of, 113 Charlotte Messenger, 132; 135-36 Charlotte, N.C.: African American labor in post-Civil War economy of, 37; African American registered voters in (1936), 59; African American percentage of population of (1903), 44; civil rights activism in, 62-64, 67-73, 7579, 81-82, 93-100; comments on self-perception of, 122; Confederate Navy Yard in, 31; descriptions of 1011, 22, 30-31, 69; enslaved persons in, 16-18, 21-22, 25, 31; high-poverty neighborhoods in, 124; growth of African American business in, 39, 64; growth of African American population of, 1840-1900, 38, 1940-1960, 64; growth of general population of, 1860-1900, 37, 1970-1990, 111; growth of industry in, 1970-1990, 111; immigration to, 122, 147ch9n4; labor organization in, 63, 93-6, 103-4, 112; moderate strategy by city leaders of, 67-69; news in 1839 in, 21; school desegregation as factor in growth of, 1970-1990, 111; Scots-Irish Presbyterians in, 11; social mobility in, 120-21, 124 Charlotte Observer: on Clive Fowler trial, 58; on Domestics United funding, 104; on lynching, 45; on Myers Street School funding, 56; on Negro Citizens’ League request for separate African American school board, 56-57; on rental practices in Brooklyn, 85; on urban renewal in Brooklyn, 86-87 Charlotte Post, founder Henry Houston in photo, 54 Charlotte Redevelopment Commission, 84-87 Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad, 30, 32; use of enslaved labor by, 9-11 Charlotte Three (T. J. Reddy, Freddie, Parker, and Jim Grant): lawyer for, 105; trial and conviction of for arson at Lazy-B horse ranch, 104 Charlotte Urban League, 114 Chavis, Ben: as Charlotte City Council candidate, 102; activism of as student at UNC Charlotte, 98; acquittal of in Raleigh Two case, 147ch7n23; background of, 98; conviction of in Wilmington Ten case, 147ch7n23; off-campus activism of, 100; photo of, at Black Student Union protest, 99 Cherry neighborhood, 46, 51, 95, 109; gentrification of, 127 Citizens Advisory Group, interracial effort on busing by, 109-10 Civil Rights activism in Charlotte. See Charlotte, N.C. Civil Rights Act of 1964, 71-72 Civil War: African American labor for Union Army during,
30; African American soldiers in, 30; use of enslaved labor in Charlotte wartime industries during, 31 Clarkson, Heriot, in White Supremacy Campaign, 42-43 Clinton, George Wylie, Bishop, on African American selfreliance and self-improvement, 46; photo of, with friends, 40; as publisher of Star of Zion, 39 Club Mixx, 126 Coffin, Levi, as Underground Railroad operator, 29 Coleman Cotton Mill (Concord, N.C.), 49 Colored Men of North Carolina, petition of for voting rights, 21, 32 Concerned Parents’ Association, anti-busing rallies of, 102 Confederate monuments, 45 Convict labor: prison camps and, 39, 57; treatment of in prison camps, 57; Good Roads Movement and, 38-39, 57 Cornwallis, Charles, comment on Charlotte in American Revolution, 17 Correll, Ed, shooting of in raid on home of Clive Fowler, 58 Cotton Wharf (Charlotte, N.C.), photo of African American stevedores working at, 38 Counts, Dorothy “Dot”: on experience integrating Harding High School, 68; James Baldwin on action of, 68; White Citizens’ Council protests against, 68-69; photo of, surrounded by mob, 69; withdrawal from Harding High School of, 69 Cousar, Detective W. H., in raid on home of Clive Fowler, 58 Crack cocaine epidemic, 124 “Crescent and wedge” pattern: Harvey Gantt on, 123; immigrant families and, 148ch9n9; map showing in 2019, 123 Cross-burning, on campus of Johnson C. Smith University, 72 Dalebrook neighborhood, development of, 67 Daniels, Josephus, as leader in White Supremacy Campaign, 42 Dannely, Charlie, election of to Charlotte City Council, 113 Davidson, A. B., slaveholder in Lincoln Co., N.C., 23, 27 Davidson College, enslaved labor in the building of, 23 Davis, Bob, Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club co-founder, 114 Davis, Jefferson, in Charlotte, 32 Davis, Ossie, 136 Dee, Ruby, 136 DeLaine, B. B., as Charlotte sit-ins organizer, 70 DeLaine, Edith Strickland, on women in Charlotte sit-ins, 76-77 Democratic Party, 41; White Supremacy Campaign of, 4243; advocacy of civil rights by, 101 Desegregation: Brown v. Board and, 67-69; busing and, 109-11, 116, 124; of Charlotte hotels and restaurants, 70-71; of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 67-68, 1023, 109-11; of Mecklenburg County Parent Teacher Association, 109, 114; Pearsall Plan and, 68; of U.S. armed forces, 63; of YWCA national leadership, 54 Dick: enslaved N.C. Railroad brakeman, 31; enslaved Navy Yard worker, 31; escape of from railroad, 31 Dilworth neighborhood, 81; urban renewal in, 89 Disfranchisement, 44 Dixon (Dickson) Plantation, account book of, 27 Domestics United: Charlotte Observer comments on funding problems of, 104; comments of Carrie Platt Graves on, 95; flyer for, 93, 94 (illustration); Charlotte Area Fund funding of, 94; goals of, 93, 95; members of, 95; National Committee on Household Employment of, 95-96; resistance to by employers, 104; survey of workers by, 95; Wilhelmina Adams as local leader of, 95-96; Wilhelmina Adams as national leader in, 95
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Domestic workers, working conditions of, 95. See also Domestics United Doster, Joe, on white landlords’ rental practices in Brooklyn, 85 Double V Campaign, 63 Druid Hills neighborhood, 81 Dunlap, Janelle, “Manifest Future” mural by, 125 Earle Village, building of, 88 Eastover neighborhood (white), busing of students from to West Charlotte High School, 110 East Side Council on Civic Affairs, founding of, 63 Election of 1898 (state), White Supremacy Campaign and, 42-43 Ellick, Jeff, visit to by son in Chowan Co., N.C., during enslavement, 15 Ely, Vermelle: on parade of United House of Prayer for All People, 54; effort of to create recreation center in Second Ward High gymnasium, 125; as founder of Second Ward High alumni association, 114; photo of, as Queen City Classic queen, 65 ; thanks to, 139 Elmwood Cemetery: Confederate monument placed in, 45; contemporary photo of, 45 Emancipation Proclamation, response of whites in Charlotte to, 32; Western Democrat on, 32 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), complaint to against N.C. Dept. of Social Services, 112 Erwin, Andrew, 25 Excelsior Club, 65 Fairview Elementary School, 81; closing of, 102 Fairview neighborhood, 81 Fanny, given as wedding gift to A. B. Davidson, 27 Faubus, Oral, integration of Central High School, Little Rock, Ark., and, 69 Ferguson, James II: defense of Charlotte Three, Raleigh Two, and Wilmington Ten by, 105; on future of civil rights, 129; as law partner of Julius Chambers, 96, 105; on experience working in Chambers’ law firm, 97; on U.S. legal system, 105 First Baptist Church (white), comments on move of to Brooklyn by Rev. Coleman Kerry, Jr., 88 First Presbyterian Church, building of, 39 First United Presbyterian Church, merger to form, 90 First Ward (Charlotte, N.C.): African Americans in, 46, 51; Earle Village in, 88; survival of buildings in, 90; urban renewal in, 89 Fourth Ward (Charlotte, N.C.), African Americans in, 51 Foxx, Anthony: appointment of as U.S. Secy. of Transportation, 120; background of, 119-120; on educational opportunity in Charlotte, 111; as mayor of Charlotte, 120; photo of, 120; remarks of at Democratic National Convention, 119 Foxx, James: as principal of Reid High School (Gaston Co., N.C.), 111; as teacher in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 111 Foxx, Mary, 111 Fowler, Clive: import of sentence of, 58-59; murder trial of, 58-59 Frazier, Stan, on campaign to stop West Charlotte High School’s closure, 108 Free Blacks: as soldiers, 17; fear of influence of on enslaved population, 30; use of free papers of by runaways, 22, 30; population of in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., in 1850, 25; use of hiring out by as route to purchasing freedom, 25-26; voting rights of stripped in 1835, 30 Freedmen: labor of, 38; reuniting of families of, 37-38 Freedmen’s Bureau, 38-39 Freedom Riders, 70 Freeman, Carey: childhood memories of, 16; forced
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migration of, 28; on slaveholders’ responses to Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 30 Friendship Baptist Church, 39; move of, 88-89 Friday Evening Social Club (Myers Street School), photo of, 51 Fritz, Angela Wood, on school closings, 103 Fusion government, Populist Party and, 41; policies of, 41-42 Gantt, Harvey: background of, 116; on Charlotte progressivism, 116; on “crescent and wedge” pattern, 123; Gantt art museum and, 120, 125; mayoral campaign of, 116, 122; photo of, at mayoral inauguration, 117; on race, public policy, and public housing, 122-23; on Willie Stratford, 115 Gary, Kays, on urban renewal and highway construction in Brooklyn, 86-87 Gentrification, 126-29 Gibbs, Tim: on importance of knowing history, 119, 125; as West Charlotte High School alumni association member, 125 Gillespie, Harrison, lynching of in Salisbury, N.C., 45 Gillespie, James, lynching of in Salisbury, N.C., 45 Gold: discovery of, 22; mining of, 23-25 Good Roads Movement. See convict labor Good Samaritan Hospital, 39, 81 Grace AME Zion Church, 90 , 131, 133; 145ch5n22 Grandy, Moses: as boat pilot, 25; on feelings upon purchasing freedom, 25; on separation of from wife during enslavement, 28 Grant, Jim: activism and background of, 100; comments on, 100; trial and conviction of, 104; commutation of sentence of, 105. See also Charlotte Three Graves, Carrie Platt: on candidacy for Charlotte City Council, 102; civil rights activism of, 93-94; photo of, 101; on Wilhelmina Adams, 95; on young activists, 100 Great Wagon Road, 13 Great Migration, 46, 50-51 Greenville neighborhood: 46, 51, 66, 81; affordable housing lawsuit by, 90; urban renewal in, 87, 89 Greenwood, Janette, 135 Grier, John, slaveholder in Mecklenburg Co., N.C. (ad), 22 Grier Heights neighborhood (formerly Griertown), 46, 51, 63; resistance to bus segregation in, 64 Griertown. See Grier Heights Grigsby, J. E., in photo at Queen City Classic, 65 Haitian Revolution, 18 Hanchett, Tom, 136 Harding High School, desegregation of, 68-69. See also Counts, Dorothy “Dot” Harper, Mary, 114 Harvey B. Gantt Museum of African American Art + Culture: 120, 125, 133; history projects of, 141; “Past Present and Future” mural in, 133; photo from collection of, 128 Hawkins, Reginald: as Black Solidarity Committee member, 99; call for public housing by, 87; civil rights activism of, 63, 70; gubernatorial primary campaign of, 101-2, 146ch7n13; home of bombed, 72; photo of, in damaged home, 73; photo of, with Martin Luther King, Jr., 71; shots fired into home of, 72; as Johnson C. Smith University student council president, 63 Haynes, Lemuel, as free black soldier in American Revolution; 17; on liberty and bondage, 13, 17 Henderson, Elo, Reverend: as Black Solidarity Committee co-founder, 98; as organizer of open letter sent by Black ministers to Charlotte civic leaders, 72 Hickory Grove neighborhood (white), 110 Historic West End Partners, 127 Home Owner’s Loan Association, Residential Security
Maps of, 66-67 Hopkins, Madge, on inspiration gained at West Charlotte High School, 66 Housing: absentee landlords and high cost of, 85, 90; public, 87-88, 114, 123; Earle Village and, 88; “blockbusting” and, 88; media comments on in Brooklyn, 85; FHA and, 67; gentrification and, 12526; lack of affordable, 88, 90, 128-29; obstacles to ownership of by African Americans, 67; redlining and, 67, 85; restrictive covenants and, 66; “scattered site” strategy and public, 114, 123; substandard, 84-85; urban renewal and, 84, 87-88. See also Urban renewal Houser, William: brick factory of, 39; brick factory of burned, 45; as builder of Friendship Baptist Church, 88; relocation of to Arkansas, 46 Houston, Henry, in photo, 54 Huntley, Delois, integration of Alexander Graham Junior High School by, 68 Independence Expressway. See I-277 I-77 (Interstate 77), and urban renewal, 82, 87 I-277 (Interstate 277), and urban renewal, 87 Isabella Wyche Elementary School, 81; closing of, 102 Jackson, Abel: comments on Black history by, 132-33; “Historic Brooklyn” mural by, 125; “Past, Present and Future” mural by, 133; photo of, 133 Jackson, Jessie, photo of, 113 Jacobs, Harriet, escape of, 16; on rape of enslaved women, 16 J. H. Gunn High School, 71 Jim Crow. See Segregation Joe, escape of, from Mecklenburg Co., N.C. (ad), 22 Joe, murder of by slave patrol, 19 Johnson C. Smith University: B. B. DeLaine and Charles Jones as student activists at, 70; cross-burning at, 72; Darius and Vera Swann as graduates of, 68; expansion of, 65; highway construction near, 87; H. L. McCrorey as president of, 54; Inez Moore Parker Archives of, 125; participation of students at in Charlotte sitins, 70, 75-79, 81-82; Reginald Hawkins president of Student Council at, 63, Samuel Banks Pride and, 49; as successor to Biddle University, 35; support of by Mayor Vi Lyles, 128; T. J. Reddy as student activist at, 98 Johnson, Tom, lynching of in Cabarrus Co., N.C., 42 Jones, Charles, Charlotte sit-ins organizer, 70 Jones, Harry, Mecklenburg County Manager, 120 Jordan, Michael, Charlotte NBA team owner, 120 Kerry, Coleman, Jr., Reverend: opposition of to school closings, 103; on move of First Baptist Church (white) to Brooklyn, 88; on reason for move of Friendship Baptist Church, 89 King, Martin Luther, Jr., Reverend: speech of to African American graduates in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 71; Isaiah Tidwell on King’s speech, 71; “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and, 71; in photo, 71 Kirkpatrick, Thomas LeRoy, defense of Clive Fowler by, 58 Kiser, Joe, lynching of in Cabarrus Co., N.C., 42 Kress Five and Dime, segregation by, 75 Ku Klux Klan, 41 Labor relations in Charlotte: complaint to EEOC against N.C. Dept. of Social Services and, 112; labor unions and, 63, 93-96, 103-4; 112; lawsuits and, 112; strikes and, 63, 96, 103-4; teachers and, 63; U.S. Postal Service and, 62-63. See also American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; Domestics United; Laundry Workers Union of America Laundry Workers Union of America, organization of and strike by in Charlotte, 63 Lazy-B horse ranch, protest of segregation at, 100; fire at,
104 Leake, George, Reverend, as Black Solidarity Committee member, 99; on school closings, 103 Legal Defense Fund. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Lee, Jermaine Nakia: on Black Pride, 127; on opportunity in Charlotte, 129 Leeper, Ron, election of to Charlotte City Council, 113 Levine Museum of the New South, 125 Lewis, John, as Freedom Rider in Charlotte, 70 LGBTQ+, 125-26 Lincoln Heights neighborhood, 81 Little Rock AME Zion Church, 90 Lomax, Thomas, Bishop, 85 “Lost Cause” movement, 44-45 Love, Rose Leary: on Brooklyn, 53; on urban renewal in Brooklyn, 85 Lundy, Betty Houchins: in Ivey’s Department Store protest, 77-78; parents’ disapproval of activism of, 78 Lyles, Vi, mayoral initiatives of, 128 Lynch, Mary, social welfare work of, 39 Lynch, Phyllis, as Citizens Advisory Group member, 109 Lynching: claims of threats to white women and, 42; victims of in Cabarrus Co., N.C., 42; victims of in Salisbury, N.C., 45 Maxwell-Roddey, Bertha: as Afro-American Cultural Center co-founder, 114; photo of, with T. J. Reddy, 115; as UNC Charlotte Black Studies program founder, 114; as Volunteer Teacher Corps founder, 98 McAllister, Latrelle Peeler, on proposed closure of West Charlotte High School, 108 McColl, Hugh, on effect of school desegregation on growth of Charlotte, 111 McCray, Mary: as chair of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 120; photo of, 121 McCrorey Heights neighborhood, 67; bombing in, 72 McCrorey, H. L., Johnson C. Smith president, 54; photo of, 59 McCrorey, Mary: as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education candidate, 59; role of in integrating national YWCA, 54; as founder of Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch in Charlotte, 54; photo of, 59 McCrorey YMCA, 133 McDonald, John, on opportunities for African American entrepreneurs, 107, 115 McMillan, James, Judge, 102, 107, 109-10 McWillie, William, as slaveholder in Camden, N.C. (ad), 22 Mecklenburg County, N.C.: African Americans as percentage of population of in 2021, 122; at-large voting system in, 112-13; Catawba Indians in, 14; first enslaved people brought to, 13; employment classifications of African Americans in, 1970-1980, 112; gold mining in, 23-25; growth of population of, 1980-2020, 122; life of enslaved persons in, 15-16, 22, 25; percentage of population enslaved in (1800), 19, (1850), 23; settlement of, 13-14 Mecklenburg County Commission, election of Bob Walton to, 113; reform of election model of, 113 Mecklenburg County Courthouse, enslaved labor in the building of, 23 Mecklenburg Declaration (Meck Dec), 17, 142n8; racist booklet about (1916), 134; African American references to, 40-41 Mecklenburg Investment Company Building, 46, 90, 131, 133; “Historic Brooklyn” mural on, 125 Mecklenburg Resolves, 16 Mecklenburg Road Law, 38-9 Midwood neighborhood, 81
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Mines and mining, 22; enslaved labor in, 23-26; and runaways, 25 Mint. See U.S. Mint Mint Museum of Art, 125 Mitchner, Patsy: as freedwoman in Charlotte, 38; separation of family of during enslavement, 38 Moore family (African American) of Mecklenburg County, N.C., 132ch1n13 Moore family (white) of Mecklenburg County, N.C., 142ch1n13 Moore, Fannie: on slave patrol’s murder of uncle, 19; on slave traders, 28 Moore’s Sanctuary AME Zion Church, 142ch1n13 Morrison, Cameron, in White Supremacy Campaign, 43 Mt. Zion Church (Cornelius, N.C.), Confederate monument in, 45 Myers Street School, 46; founding of, 49-50; funding requests for, 56; photo of teachers in Friday Evening Social Club at, 51; principals and teachers at, 49-51 Myers Park neighborhood (white), busing of students from to West Charlotte High School, 110 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nakima, Georgia, “Manifest Future” mural by, 125 Nancy, escape of from Camden, N.C. (ad), 22 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): Clive Fowler defense and, 58; Kelly Alexander revitalization of in Charlotte, 63; opening of office in Charlotte by Legal Defense Fund of, 72; protest of against Charlotte postmaster’s refusal to promote African Americans, 62; Robert Williams as president of Union County, N.C., chapter of, 64; “Votes for Freedom” campaign of, 63-64 Jackson, Jessie, photo of, in Charlotte, 113 National Association of Postal Employees, protest by, 62 National Rifle Association, African American founder of chapter of in Union Co., N.C., 64 Native Americans: in Mecklenburg Co., N.C.; forced movement of, 27; map showing colonial settlements and Native American territories in Va., N.C., and S.C., 14; white supremacy and, 42 Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 30 Navy Yard (Confederate), 31 Negro Citizens League, 55; request for African American school board by, 56-57 New South, 37 News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C), as propaganda agent in White Supremacy Campaign, 42-43; white supremacist cartoon in, 43 Nicodemus, escape of from Capps Gold Mine, 22 North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, 59 North Carolina Railroad, use of enslaved labor by, 31 Northwest Expressway (Brookshire Freeway), and urban renewal, 82, 87 Northwest Junior High School, 67 Northwood Estates neighborhood, development of, 67 Oaklawn Park neighborhood, development of, 67; historic district status of, 128 Organic Funk, 126 Orr, Mae Clark, West Charlotte High School alumni association co-founder, 114, 136 Paddyrollers. See Slave patrols Parent Teacher Association, 109, 114 Parker, Alan, on daily life during enslavement in Chowan Co., N.C., 15; on slave patrols in Chowan Co., 18-19 Parker, Freddie, commutation of sentence of, 105; trial and conviction of, 104. See also Charlotte Three Patton, Connie, on life in Brooklyn, 55
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Pearsall Plan, 68 Peeler, James, photographer, 108; death of, 136-37; negatives at Johnson C. Smith, 137; photo of, 136 Peggy, given as wedding gift to A. B. Davidson, 27 Perkins, Joseph, staging of “shoe-in” by, 70 Perry, Miles, photo of, 126 Pethel, Elizabeth, as free black child in Charlotte, 25 Pethel, James, as free black child in Charlotte, 25 Pethel, Mary, as free black woman in Charlotte, 25 Phyllis Wheatley branch (YWCA). See Young Women’s Christian Association Piedmont Junior High School, integration of, 68 Piedmont region: description of, 14; early white settlers in, 14; slave economy in, 13-15 Police: in quelling of protests at UNC Charlotte, 100; harassment of African Americans by, 57; jailing and beating of Rosalee White by, 58; protests against shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by, 121-22; raids on private homes of African Americans by, 58-59; white detective shot during raid by, 58 Political representation: difficulties of African American candidates in at-large voting system, 101, 112; difficulties of working-class whites in at-large voting system, 112; referendum (1977) to reform city council election model, 113 Polk, James: as Black Solidarity Committee co-founder, 98; as Charlotte Bureau on Employment, Training, and Placement head, 98; as East Side Council on Civic Affairs leader, 63 Populist Party: white farmers and, 41; Fusion government and, 41 Postell, Jim, Citizens Advisory Group member, 109 Poverty (Charlotte, N.C.): among whites, 147ch8n8, 148ch9n5; Charlotte Area Fund and, 94; “crescent and wedge” pattern and, 123, 148ch9n9; cutbacks to antipoverty programs and rise in, 123; effect of on school performance, 128; Harvard study on economic advancement and, 120-21; homelessness and, 128; percentage of African American residents living below line of, 2018, 122; rate of among African Americans, 1970-1980, 112, 116; War on Poverty and, 94 Pride Festival, 126 Pride, Jessie, 49-50, in photo, Friday Evening Social Club, 51 Pride, Samuel Banks: background of, 49; as Coleman Cotton Co. board member, 49; at Myers Street School, 49-50; photo of, 50; in photo, board of Afro-American Mutual Insurance Co., 54 Prince Hall Masons, 54 Prison camp (Mecklenburg Co., N.C.), 57 PTA. See Parent Teacher Association Pritchard, H. M., speech of to Union League of America, 40-41 Public housing. See Housing Queen City Classic, description of and comments on, 65; photo of, 65 Raleigh Two, 105, 147ch7n23. See also James Ferguson II Randolph, Elizabeth, 136 Rawls, Rev. Toniya, 125-26 Ray, Maggie, as Citizens Advisory Group member, 109 Reddy, T. J.: activism of as Johnson C. Smith University student, 98; activism of as UNC Charlotte student, 100; commutation of sentence of, 105; description of Biddleville by, 98; photo of, with Bertha MaxwellRoddey, 115; trial and conviction of, 104. See also Charlotte Three Redfern, Alexander, as absentee landlord in Brooklyn, 85 Redlining: Black-white wealth gap and, 67; effects of, 85;
FHA and, 67; use of Residential Security Maps in, 67 Reconstruction: African American political participation in Charlotte during, 40-41; end of, 41 Reid High School (Gaston Co., N.C.), 111 Reid, Thomas, free black brick mason in Charlotte, 25 Republican Party: black participation in, 40-41; white farmers and, 41; Fusion government and, 41-42 Resegregation of schools, 124 Rhue, Monika, 125 Richardson, Jim: as Black Solidarity Committee member, 98; as Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club co-founder, 114; YMCA building named for, 127 Richmond, John T.: passing of federal civil service test by, 61; restriction of to janitorial job at Charlotte Post Office, 61; WWII enlistment of, 63 Robbin, escape of from Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 21; Underground Railroad and, 28 Roberts, Girvaud, integration of Piedmont Junior High School by, 68 Roberts, Gus, integration of Central High School by, 68 Robinson, Tommie, muralist for Second Ward High School gymnasium building, 125 Romare Bearden Park, 125 Rosenwald Schools, in Charlotte, 51 Ross, John, on resistance to bus segregation in Grier Heights, 64 Rozier, Elmer: on substandard housing and urban renewal, 84; photo of, 84 Rudisill, Jonas, carpentry establishment of in Charlotte, 25 Russell, Daniel, election of as governor, 41 Ryckman, Pat, 136 Sanders, Daniel Jackson, as president of Biddle University, 35-36; as publisher of Africo-American Presbyterian, 36 Sanitation workers in Charlotte: 1968 strike by, 96, 103; 1970 strike by, 103-4; comments by Mayor John Belk on, 103-4; failure of strikes by after 1968, 103 Schenck, John: as free black carpenter in Charlotte, 25-26; purchase of own freedom by, 26; as saloon owner and political leader, 39; role of in framing North Carolina state constitution, 41; work of on Freedman’s Bureau building, 39 Schenck, Pauline, purchase of freedom of, 26 School closings, 102; protests by and comments on by African Americans, 103 Scott, Keith Lamont, police shooting of and protests over, 121-22 Second Ward (Charlotte, N.C.). See Brooklyn neighborhood Second Ward High School: closing of, 102, 109; conversion of gymnasium building at into recreation center, 125; founding of alumni association of, 114; graduation speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., for, 71; opening of, 51; photo of building, 52; photo of demolition; 132-33; photo of Principal J. E. Grigsby at Queen City Classic, 65 Segregation: “Jim Crow” and emergence of, 44; in Charlotte neighborhoods, 51-52, 66-67, 82 (map), 123; in Charlotte hotels and restaurants, 70-71; resistance to, 64, 70, 75-79, 81, 100 Seventh Street Presbyterian, merger to form, 90 Seversville neighborhood (white), 81, 127; blockbusting and, 88 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 32 Sina, escape of, from Mecklenburg Co., N.C. (ad), 22 Siobhan, Sloane, “Manifest Future” mural by, 125 Sit-ins: in Greensboro, N.C., 70; Johnson C. Smith University students as organizers of in Charlotte, 70, 75-79, 81-82; students’ route to, 81-82 (map); photos of, in Charlotte, 76, 78; “shoe-in” inspired by, 70; strategy employed in, 77; success of, 70, 78; women’s role in, 75-79
Shropshire, Woodrow Wilson, treatment of in prison camp, 57 Slave codes, in N.C., 17 Slave economy: in Charleston, S.C., 13, 15; in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 19, 22-25; in North Carolina, 13-14, 28; forced movement of Native Americans and, 27-28; in Virginia, 13 Slaveholders: acquisition of enslaved persons by, 1415, 23, 27; as fathers of mixed-race children, 26; in Camden, N.C., 22; in Charlotte, N.C., 21-22; in Lincoln (later Gaston) Co., N.C., 27; in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 22; as perpetrators of sexual violence, 16; in York Co., S.C., 23 Slave market (Charleston, S.C.), illustration of, 15 Slave passes, 18 Slave patrols (paddyrollers): in Charlotte, 19; in Chowan Co., N.C., 18; in South Carolina, 19 Slave rebellions, slaveholder responses to, 17-19, 30; comments on by enslaved woman, 30 Slaves: as artisans and mechanics, 22-23, 25; daily life of, in Chowan Co., N.C., 15; daily life of, in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 15-16; descriptions of in runaway slave ads, 21-22; escape of, 16-17, 21-22, 25, 28, 30, 32; feelings of toward slave traders, 28; as gold mine workers, 2126; illustration of adult workers, 24; illustration of child worker, 26; hiring of, 23-25; illustration of liberation by Union Army, 32; legal status of, 16; liberation by Union Army of, 31; loyalty among, 23; purchasing of freedom by, 25; as Navy Yard workers, 31; as railroad workers, 9-11, 23; resistance to slave patrols by, 1819; as soldiers in American Revolution, 17; as soldiers in Civil War, 30, 32; separation of families of, 27-28, 31, 38; women’s labor as, 23; sexual violence against, 16; songs of, Arkansas, 28; religious practices of in Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 16; uprisings by, 17-18, 30; use of hiring out as route to freedom by, 25; whipping of, 16, 142ch1n5; white attitudes toward, 17 Smith, Rosa, 135 Smith, W. C.: in “Historic Brooklyn” mural, 125, 131-32; publisher of Charlotte Messenger, 135-36 Smith, W. W.: as builder of Afro-American Insurance Co. office, 53; as builder of Mecklenburg Investment Co. building, 46 Spangler, C. D. and Meredith, and school busing, 110 Spears, A. E.: as Charlotte City Council candidate, 59, N.C. Mutual Insurance Co. and, 59 Spears, Rufus, 133 Springs, John, slaveholder in York Co., S.C., 23 Star of Zion, 39; on destiny of the Negro, 39-40 Steele, Barbara Crawford: on life in Brooklyn, 55; on urban renewal in Brooklyn, 81, 87-88; on mother’s renovation of Brooklyn home, 85 Steele Creek community, 127 Steele, Jamil, “Biddleville” mural by, 125 Stein Adam, as law partner of Julius Chambers, 96, 105, 109 Sterling High School, 71 Stevenson, Sarah: election of to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 113; photo of, with Pamela Grundy, 142; as Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club cofounder, 114 Stoneman’s Raiders, 32 Stono Rebellion, 17 Stratford, Willie: as Black Solidarity Committee member, 98; Harvey Gantt on, 115; YMCA work of, 115; YMCA building named for, 127 Swann, Darius and Vera: as missionaries, 68, 102; as plaintiffs in Swann v. Board, 102
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Swann v. Board of Education: initial dismissal of, 146ch7n14; resistance by whites to ruling in, 102; school closings after, 102-3; response of African Americans to school closings after, 102-3 Tate, Thaddeus: barber shop of, 39; as Afro-American Mutual Insurance Co. head, 53; in photo, board of AfroAmerican Mutual Insurance Co., 54; mansion of, 39; in “Historic Brooklyn” mural, 125, 132-33 Third Ward (Charlotte, N.C.): African Americans in, 46, 51; Good Samaritan Hospital in, 39, 81; Isabella Wyche Elementary School in, 81; urban renewal in, 89 Tidwell, Isaiah, on Martin Luther King, Jr. graduation speech, 71 Tom, escape of from Mecklenburg Co., N.C., 22 Torrence-Lytle High School, 71 Torrence, Rudolph: on West Charlotte and Second Ward rivalry, 65; as West Charlotte High School alumni association member, 114, 136 Tompkins, V. A., on purchase of slaves, 14-15 Truman, Harry S., desegregation of U.S. armed forces by, 63 Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club, 114 Underground Railroad, 28-29; photo of mural depicting, 127 Union League of America, 40-41 United House of Prayer for All People, 53-54 Unity Fellowship Church, 125 Urban renewal: African American residents on, 81, 83, 85, 133; “blockbusting” and, 88; buildings surviving, 90, 133; Charlotte City Council and, 82; Charlotte Redevelopment Commission and, 84-87; effects on African American businesses of, 90; effects on African American neighborhoods of, 72-73, 82-83, 85-90, 123; effects on white working-class neighborhoods of, 88-89; Elmer Rozier and, 84; highway construction and, 82-83, 87; Housing Act of 1949 and, 83; map of in Charlotte (1972), 86; Mayor Stan Brookshire and, 72-73, 84-85; photo of Mayor Stan Brookshire and Elmer Rozier during, 84; press commentary on, 86-87; “slum razing” project in Brooklyn and, 82-84; white city officials on, 72-73, 83-84 U.S. Mint (Charlotte, N.C.), use of enslaved labor in the building of, 23 U.S. Postal Service, discrimination at, 61-62; firing of Charlotte postmaster by, 63 University of North Carolina, Charlotte: activism of student Ben Chavis at, 98-100; activism of Black Student Union at, 98-100; activism of student T. J. Reddy at, 100; founding of Black Studies program at, 114; photo of Black Student Union protest at, 99; police presence to quell activism at, 100; support of donor Bonnie Cone for African American activists at, 109 University Park neighborhood, 81; development of, 67 Vance, Zebulon, 41 Villa Heights neighborhood, gentrification of, 127 VISTA. See Volunteers in Service to America Volunteers in Service to America: activism of employees of in Charlotte, 98, 100; activism of employees in Hyde Co., N.C., Fayetteville, N.C., and Charleston, S.C., 100 Volunteer Teacher Corps, 98 Voting rights: post-Civil War activism for, 21, 41; 1835 N.C. state constitution and, 30; 1868 N.C. state constitution and, 41; 1900 amendment to N.C. state constitution to limit, 44; impact of federal policy on, 63; photo of Jesse Jackson registering Charlotte voters, 113; voter registration campaigns in Charlotte and, 59, 63-64, 113; Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, 72 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 72 Waddell, Alfred Moore, as leader of Wilmington Massacre,
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43 Walker, David A., as free black abolitionist, 29; Walker’s Appeal of, 29 Walker, Hattie Ann: as Johnson C. Smith University student, 75; on experience as sit-in participant, 75-76, 79; in photo at Woolworth’s sit-in in Charlotte, 76 Walton, Bob, as Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club cofounder, 114; election of to Mecklenburg County Commission, 113 War on Drugs, 124 Washington, Eliza: as daughter of Carey Freeman, 16; forced migration of mother of, 28; account by mother of describing slaveholder’s response to Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 30; Works Progress Administration interview with, 137 Washington, George, on Charlotte in 1791, 10 Washington Heights neighborhood, 51, 66 Weddington, J. H., on Fusion government, 42 West Charlotte High School: busing and, 110; campaign to save from closure, 107-9; construction of new building for in University Park, 67; comments on inspiration gained at, 66; comments on rivalry of with Second Ward High School, 65; founding of alumni association of, 114; magnet school plan for, 108-9; Martin Luther King, Jr., graduation speech for, 71; opening of (on Beatties Ford Road), 65; photo of march to save from closure, 108; photo of principal C. L. Blake at Queen City Classic, 65; photo of students, 110; in Queen City Classic, 65; School Supt. Rolland Jones and, 109 Western Democrat (Charlotte, N.C.), on Emancipation Proclamation, 32; on runaways, 32 WGIV radio, Excelsior Club broadcasts on, 65; as first blackoriented radio station in Charlotte, 65 White Citizens’ Council, resistance of to integration of Harding High School, 68-69 White, George, on African American migration, 46 White, Rosalee, beating of by police, 58; as witness in Clive Fowler trial, 58 White Supremacy Campaign of 1898, 42-44 White, Thomas, protest at Ivey’s by, 77-78 Wilbert, separation of from mother during enslavement, 27 Williams, Clarence, photo of, 126 Williams Hotel, conversion of into Second Street YMCA, 54 Williams, J. T., in “Historic Brooklyn” mural, 125, 131-132 Williams, Robert, civil rights activities of in Union Co., N.C., 64 Wilmington Massacre, 43-44 Wilmore neighborhood, 81 Wilmington Ten, 105 Works Progress Administration interviews, 137 Woolworth’s Department Store (Charlotte, N.C.), photo of sit-in at, 76 Wright, Thomas, in Ivey’s Department Store protest, 77-78 Wyche, Isabella, succeeded at Myers Street School by Samuel Banks Pride, 50 York Road High School, 71 YMCA. See Young Men’s Christian Association YWCA. See Young Women’s Christian Association Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA): building named for Jim Richardson and Willie Stratford by, 128; founding of Second Street YMCA, 54; McCrorey YMCA building of, 90 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA): desegregation of national leadership of, 54; Mary McCrorey and, 54; Phyllis Wheatley branch of, 54, 86 Younts, Paul, discrimination by at U.S. Postal Service, 61; investigation and firing of, 63
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Our history is so important. To know where you’re going, you need to know from whence you came. - Tim Gibbs West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association
The stories told by many generations of Charlotte’s African American residents mingle strength and hardship, accomplishment and setback, joy and pain. Through slavery, through war, through Jim Crow segregation and into the 21st century Black residents from all walks of life have played essential roles in making Charlotte the city it is today. Everyone needs to know this history.
CHARLOTTE’S ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER
