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Chapter 7: Seizing Freedom
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
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
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 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.
“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
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, 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
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.”
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 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
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 “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.
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
