Chapter 3: Accomplishment & Backlash

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.

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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

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

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 First Ward, Third Ward, Biddleville, Griertown, Cherry and Greenville.

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.