CREATING BROOKLYN
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
