Chapter 5: Civil Rights

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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

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 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 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