Chapter 9: Two Cities

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 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 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 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 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.”

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 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 B. 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

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, 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. 11

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. 12

As the area grew, investment followed. The west side gained new 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. 13

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. Far too many – more than 4,700 in 2018-19 – had no fixed home at all.

Looking Ahead

While Black Charlotteans thus have much to celebrate, the work for justice and equality is far from done.

As civil rights lawyer James Ferguson II looked back on this long history of triumphs and setbacks, he offered a warning for a city that can too easily focus on good news while overlooking deep-rooted inequalities.

“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.” 14