21 minute read
Acknowledgements, Notes, Suggested Readings
This book is only possible because of the generosity of the many people who have shared their stories and expertise with me over the thirty years I’ve spent as a historian in Charlotte. Writing Black history as a white woman is a thorny challenge, and I have needed all the help that I could get.
My introduction to Black Charlotte history came through alumni of Second Ward and West Charlotte high schools, who introduced me to their schools’ rich past when I came to Charlotte to curate an exhibit on the history of area basketball for the Levine Museum of the New South. The lessons I learned went well beyond the histories of the schools themselves and sparked an enduring interest in the remarkable stories of Charlotte’s African American communities.
I owe a particular debt to Vermelle Ely, who has played such a central role in preserving and sharing the history of Second Ward High, and who has supported my work and that of others with such great warmth and generosity. As well as sharing stories and resources, Vermelle arranged for me to serve a term on the Second Ward High School National Alumni Association board, a transformative experience.
As I began work on a history of West Charlotte High School, West Charlotte alumni showed similar generosity. I learned from Rudy Torrence, Mae Clark Orr, Malachi Green, Deacon Jones, Harriet Love, Stan Frazier and many, many others. Members of the West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association, Inc., especially Ella Dennis and Tim Gibbs, were always ready to answer questions, share resources, and make connections.
The many mornings I spent at Sarah Stevenson’s Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club introduced me to a broad range of people and issues important to African American communities. I cherish my friendships with Sarah, with Barbara, James, Jay and Reneisha Ferguson, with Dorothy Counts-Scoggins, with Arthur Griffin, and with many other Charlotteans whose passion for history, education and justice have aided and inspired me through the years.
Tom Hanchett introduced me to Charlotte, back when we were graduate students at UNC Chapel Hill. Few can match Tom’s love for and understanding of Charlotte history, and it was a great day for the city when he returned to Charlotte as the Levine Museum historian back in 1999. Sheila Bumgarner has been an indispensable ally at the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, using her knowledge of the library’s archives to locate and share images and sources of all kinds. I remain in awe of the skill and patience with which J. Michael Moore unearths property and census records. Willie Griffin, a Charlotte native and part of a rising generation of historians whose work is transforming African American history, introduced me to the remarkable career of Trezzvant Anderson, and to the activist world in which he lived and worked. I look forward to learning more from Willie’s work, and from that of new generations of African American scholars.
I have drawn on a rich array of scholarship about North Carolina, especially the works in the Suggested Readings section. Fellow writers Jill Snider, Jerma Jackson, Pam Kelley, and Carol Polsgrave, as well as Tom Hanchett, read and critiqued the entire manuscript, sometimes multiple times. I’m fortunate to have Queen City Nerve’s Ryan Pitkin as an editor – one of the best I have ever worked with. Support and encouragement from Betsy Mack at the Charlotte Hornets Foundation has helped keep me moving forward.
I began this project in the summer of 2020, when the growing prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement sparked new interest in Black history, especially among young people. As there was no substantial summary of Black Charlotte history available, I decided to write one. I might not have been the ideal author, but I was privileged to have the time. Ryan and Justin LaFrancois at Queen City Nerve agreed to publish a series of Black history articles that summer, and we have expanded the project from there.
I was not paid for writing the pieces published in the Nerve and will receive no royalties from this publication. A digital version of the work is available at no charge at www.qcnerve.com/legacy.
This is, of course, only a brief overview of centuries of rich Black history here in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I hope this work will aid in present and future explorations by a broad range of historians, writers, teachers, artists and community members. There are so many stories to tell, so many things to learn.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION - Building Charlotte
1. North Carolina Whig, 6 October 1852, 2. For information about slave labor on railroads, see Keri T. Peterson, “The North Carolina Railroad, Industrial Slavery, and the Economic Development of North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., UNC Greensboro, 2017).
2. North Carolina Whig, 29 September 1852, 2.
3. North Carolina Whig, 3 November 1852, 2.
CHAPTER 1 - Slavery & Revolution
1. D.A. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, Vol. 1 (Charlotte: Observer Printing House, 103), 84.
2. J.B. Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County (Charlotte: Observer Printing House, 1902), 75.
3. Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worchester, Mass: Chas. W. Burbank & Co., 1895), 28-29. For more on Parker, see core.ecu.edu/newmanj/cecelskid/dcintro.htm.
4. Eliza Washington interview by S.S. Taylor, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 7 (Library of Congress, 1941), 53.
5. Ernest James Clark, Jr. “Aspects of the North Carolina Slave Code, 1715-1860.” The North Carolina Historical Review 39 (April 1962), 148-164. An 1817 law allowed for enslavers to be prosecuted for the death of an enslaved person, but such actions rarely occurred.
6. “Slaves and Free Persons of Color,” a compilation of North Carolina laws regarding slavery, docsouth.unc.edu/nc/slavesfree/slavesfree.html.
7. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 51.
8. Despite a lack of documentation, the “Meck Dec” became a part of local and state lore. May 20, 1775 was placed on the North Carolina state flag in 1861 and has remained there ever since. Queen City Nerve, 20 May 2020.
9. Ruth Bogin, “‘Liberty Further Extended’: A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (Jan. 1983), 85-105.
10. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, 86.
11. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte, 86.
12. Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times, 28-29.
13. Fannie Moore interview by Marjorie Jones, 21 September 1937, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Volume II, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2, (Library of Congress, 1941), 132. Members of the white Moore family, which owned the Walnut Grove plantation on the Tyger River in Spartanburg County, were staunch Presbyterians who lived in the Mecklenburg County area before moving on to South Carolina in the mid- 1700s. In the 1870s, descendants of the enslaved Moores founded Moore’s Sanctuary AME Zion Church in Charlotte. Thanks to J. Michael Moore for pointing out these connections.
CHAPTER 2 - Growth, War, Freedom
1. libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/158/rec/1. All the advertisements cited and pictured in this chapter come from the North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices project, housed at the University Libraries of UNC Greensboro, dlas.uncg.edu/notices. Notices can be searched using “Mecklenburg County” in the county list and the names of the individuals.
2. http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/156/rec/4
3. http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/1732/rec/5
4. Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County, 125.
5. Eliza Washington interview, 49-56.
6. Alexander, The History of Mecklenburg County, 331-32.
7. John Springs to A.B. Davidson, 8 December 1836. Davidson Family Papers #204, Subseries 1.1, Folder 1, “1827-1838,” scans 33-34, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill. Digitized versions of many the items in this collection can be viewed at findingaids.lib.unc.edu/00204/.
8. Herman J. Bryson, Gold Deposits in North Carolina, Bulletin 38 (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Conservation and Development, 1936), 9-10.
9. Jeff Forret, “Slave Labor in North Carolina’s Antebellum Gold Mines,” North Carolina Historical Review 76 (April 1999), 148.
10. Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America (London: C. Gilpin, 1843), 40.
11. “Inventory and valuation of the Property given off to Mary Davidson,” December 1936. Davidson Family Papers, #204, Subseries 1.1, Folder 1.
12. John Springs to A.B. Davidson, 8 December 1836.
13. Fannie Moore interview, 131. Walnut Grove was in Spartanburg County, S.C.
14. Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 15-16.
15. Like the abolition movement, the Underground Railroad was run by both Blacks and whites, but white leaders like Coffin generally received more notice.
16. “David Walker, 1785-1830,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979-1996), docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/bio.html.
17. North Carolina Whig, 29 September 1852, 2.
18. David S. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 58-54.
19. libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/6175/rec/6.
20. Western Democrat, 13 January 1863, 3.
21. Western Democrat, 16 June 1863, 3.
22. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom, 175.
CHAPTER 3 - Accomplishment & Backlash
1. Africo-American Presbyterian, 14 March 1907, 2.
2. Charlotte Chronicle, 19 June 1891, 2.
3. Africo-American Presbyterian, 14 March 1907, 2; R.A. Massey, “Daniel Jackson Sanders,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ncpedia.org/biography/sanders-daniel-jackson.
4. Patsy Mitchner interview by T. Pat Matthews in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Volume XI, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 (Library of Congress, 1941), 119-20.
5. Alex Lichtenstein, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: ‘The Negro Convict is a Slave,’” Journal of Southern History 59 (Feb., 1993), 109-110.
6. The best account of the growth of Charlotte’s post-Emancipation Black community is Janette Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850-1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
7. Catherine Bisher and Tom Hanchett, “William H. Houser,” in North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary, ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000611.
8. Star of Zion, 29 April 1897, 1.
9. Western Democrat, 28 May 1867, 2.
10. Weekly Standard, 29 May 1867, 4.
11. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 55.
12. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom, 206-07.
13. Thomas Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 83.
14. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 91.
15. Charlotte Observer, 5 November 1898, 5.
16. Charlotte Observer, 9 November 1898, 5
17. Charlotte Observer, 11 November 1898, 1.
18. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 224.
19. UNC Chapel Hill Library, “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina,” docsouth.unc. edu/commland/.
20. Charlotte News, 6 May 1902, 6; Charlotte Daily Observer, 11 June 1902, 1.
21. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 131.
22. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 226.
CHAPTER 4 - Creating Brooklyn
1. Charlotte Observer, 17 March 1917, 5.
2. Alison Stewart, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), 120-21.
3. Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 65 (October 1988), 387-444.
4. Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City, 142-43
5. Rose Leary Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies: A Memoir (Charlotte: Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, 1996), 5.
6. Vermelle Ely interview by Katheryn B. Wells, 25 March 2004, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte.
7. Connie Patton interview by Robert Bemis, 2 April 2007, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte.
8. Barbara C. Steele interview by Amy Hodgin, 1 April 2004, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte.
9. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 8-9.
10. Charlotte Observer, 26 September 1930, 8.
11. Charlotte Observer, 20 September 1936, 40.
12. North Carolina Department of Public Safety, “Lists of Persons Executed,” ncdps.gov/ adult-corrections/prisons/death-penalty/list-of-persons-executed.
13. Susan W. Thomas, “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935” (Ph.D. diss. UNC Greensboro, 2011), 12-20.
14. Charlotte Observer, 14 March 1935, 1, 7.
15. Thomas, “Chain Gangs,” 209-221.
16. Charlotte Observer, 23 January 1929, 1.
17. Charlotte Observer, 27 January 1929, 1.
18. Charlotte Observer, 11 February 1929, 1.
19. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 30 March 1929, 7.
20. Norfolk Journal and Guide, 30 March 1929, 7. Charlotte-based historian Willie Griffin has done detailed, deeply insightful on Trezzvant Anderson’s remarkable career, elevating the perspective of African Americans on this and other key events. See Willie James Griffin, “Courier of Crisis, Messenger of Hope: Trezzvant Anderson and the Black Freedom Struggle for Economic Justice,” (Ph.D. diss. UNC Chapel Hill, 2016).
21. Charlotte Observer, 27 April 1937, 1.
CHAPTER 5 - Civil Rights
1. Carolina Times, 22 July 1939, 8. For more about Anderson and his work in Charlotte and across the nation, see Griffin, “Courier of Crisis, Messenger of Hope.”
2. For postwar developments in Black Charlotte, see Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 27-28, 35-38. For Robert Williams, see Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
3. James Ross interview by Pamela Grundy and Tom Hanchett, 10 February 2000, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
4. Grundy, Color and Character, 26; Arthur Griffin interview by Pamela Grundy, 7 May 1999, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
5. Grundy, Color and Character, 38.
6. For redlining in Charlotte, see Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City, 229-32.
7. Grundy, Color and Character, 26-27.
8. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 48.
9. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 70.
10. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), 50. Although Baldwin recalls seeing the photograph of Counts in Paris, he had already returned to the U.S. when she first entered Harding.
11. Charlotte Observer, 5 September 1957, 1, 6.
12. Davison Douglas: Reading, Writing and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 71-75.
13. James Baldwin, “Letter from the South,” Partisan Review 26 (Winter 1959), 75.
14. Grundy, Color and Character, 44-45.
15. Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79-80.
16. Grundy, Color and Character, 46-48.
17. Charlotte Observer, 30 June 1995, 1-C.
18. Charlotte Observer, 5 September 1965, 19.
19. Grundy, Color and Character, 47-48.
20. Charlotte Observer, 11 December 1965, 1-C
21. Charlotte Observer, 13 December 1965, 8-B
22. Two of the pastors who signed the letter, Rev. Smith Turner of Grace AME Zion, and Rev. Ezra Moore of Brooklyn Presbyterian, pastored churches in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Presbyterian had held its final service just a month before the letter was written.
INTERLUDE - Women in the Charlotte Sit-ins
1. Parts of this narrative appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer, 9 February 2003, D-1.
CHAPTER 6 - Urban Renewal
1. Charlotte Observer, 19 January 1960, 1-A.
2. Charlotte Observer, 9 April 1960, 1-A.
3. Grundy, Color & Character, 64.
4. Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City, 144.
5. Charlotte Observer, 25 January 1950, 1-B.
6. Charlotte Observer, 21 December 1961, 1-B.
7. Steele interview by Hodgin.
8. Charlotte Observer, 11 January 1960, 1-B.
9. Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies, 182.
10. Thanks to J. Michael Moore for doing the research to document the house history.
11. Charlotte Observer, 20 January 1960, 1-B.
12. Steele interview by Hodgin.
13. Charlotte Observer, 26 August 19631-B.
14. Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City, 247-51.
15. Steele interview by Hodgin.
16. Grundy, Color & Character, 63
17. Charlotte Observer, 27 October 1965.
18. Charlotte Observer, April 18, 1965.
19. “Statistical Summary of Urban Renewal Program: October 1972” (Charlotte: Redevelopment Commission of the City of Charlotte, 1972).
20. Charlotte Observer, 1 November, 1965.
21. Grundy, Color & Character. For the concept of “Root Shock” see Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: New Village Press, 2016).
CHAPTER 7 - Seizing Freedom
1. Folder 4079, “Domestics United,” Subseries 4.5, Charlotte Area Fund. A number of digitized records related to Domestics United can be viewed at: finding-aids.lib.unc. edu/04710/#folder_4079.
2. Carrie Graves interview by Pamela Grundy, 9 November 2021, in Grundy’s possession.
3. New York Times, 18 July 1971, 1.
4. Charlotte Observer, 25 August 1968, 1-C.
5. Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
6. James E. Ferguson II interview by Rudolph Acree, Jr., 3 and 17 March 1992, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
7. T.J. Reddy interview by Bridgette Sanders, 28 June 2004, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte.
8. Sonya Ramsey, “Caring is Activism: Black Southern Womanist Teachers Theorizing and the Careers of Kathleen Crosby and Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, 1946-1986,” Educational Studies 48 (2012), 251-52; John Christopher Schutz, “’Going to Hell to Get the Devil:’ The ‘Charlotte Three’ Case and the Decline of Grassroots Activism in 1970s Charlotte, North Carolina (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 1999), 85-88; Charlotte Observer, 6 September 1968.
9. David Cecelski, “Jim Grant, in Memory,” davidcecelski.com/2021/12/06/jim-grant-inmemory/
10. Charlotte Observer, 10 August 1968, 1-C.
11. Reddy interview by Sanders.
12. Charlotte Observer, 31 October 1967, 8-A.
13. Evan Faulkenbury, “Reginald Hawkins, the 1968 North Carolina Democratic Primary, and the Future of Black Political Participation,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 5 (Fall/Winter 2019), 68-88. King had committed to campaign for Hawkins at the start of April but was diverted to Tennessee to support the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. He was shot in Memphis on April 4, the day he had originally been scheduled to arrive in Charlotte.
14. The Swann suit was initially dismissed, but Chambers reopened the case when the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County expanded the Court’s desegregation mandate.
15. Grundy, Color & Character, 55-56.
16. Grundy, Color & Character, 64.
17. Douglas, Reading, Writing and Race, 112.
18. Carolina Times, 14 June 1969, 1.
19. Charlotte Observer, 20 July 1945, 1-B; 21 September 1945, 1-B.
20. Charlotte Observer, 22 September 1970, 1-A.
21. Charlotte Observer, 26 January 1970, 9-A; For analysis of some of the challenges faced by Domestics United see Cathie Fogle, “Background Paper on Domestics United,” 19 April 1968. Folder 4079 “Domestics United” Subseries 4.5, Charlotte Area Fund.
22. For details of the trial see Rosen and Mosnier, Julius Chambers, 235-56.
23. Ben Chavis was acquitted in the Raleigh Two case but convicted in the Wilmington Ten case.
24. Ferguson interview by Acree.
CHAPTER 8 - Building Coalitions
1. Grundy, Color & Character, 76
2. Grundy, Color & Character, 76.
3. Galliard, Dream Long Deferred, 150-169. For developments at West Charlotte High School, see Grundy, Color and Character.
4. Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1.
5. Anthony Foxx interview by Pamela Grundy, 11 November 2012, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
6. Rosen and Mosnier, Julius Chambers, 193-223. See also Robert Samuel Smith, Race, Labor, and Civil Rights: Griggs versus Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008)
7. Omega Autry interview by Pamela Grundy, 25 May 2021, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte.
8. Among whites, 7 percent were below the poverty line in 1970 and 6 percent in 1980.
9. Gaillard, Dream Long Deferred, 173-77.
10. Smith, Boom for Whom, 40-42
11. Sonya Ramsey, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022).
12. Sarah Stevenson interview by Pamela Grundy, 7 April 2017, in Grundy’s possession.
13. Harvey Gantt interview by Pamela Grundy, 6 July 2021, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, UNC Charlotte.
14. Black Enterprise, June 1983, 182.
15. Grundy, Color & Character, 112.
16. Gantt interview by Grundy.
CHAPTER 9 - Two Cities
1. politico.com/story/2012/09/anthony-foxx-dnc-speech-transcript-080659.
2. Charlotte Observer, 26 January 2014, 22-A.
3. The Atlantic, 22 September 2016. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/charlotterace-history/501221/.
4. Limited job opportunities meant that few immigrants came to the South between the Civil War and the 1980s. Charlotte’s first significant 20th century stream of immigration started when a handful of Greek merchants settled in the city in the 1920s and built up a Greek community. Starting in the 1960s, a few Latin American immigrants arrived, especially from Cuba, along with some Germans connected to the textile industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, Charlotte became home to a significant group of refugees displaced by the end of the war in Vietnam. After that, as the economy grew, people arrived from all over the world. Working-class families from Latin America made up the largest group. See, for example, William Graves and Heather Smith, eds., Charlotte N.C.: The Global Evolution of a New South City (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2012).
5. In 2021, the median income for white families in Mecklenburg County was just over $91,000 and the white poverty rate in Charlotte was 6.7 percent.
6. Gantt interview by Grundy.
7. Grundy, Color & Character, 114-16; 143-49. For a detailed account of the interactions of drug dealing and history in Charlotte, see Pam Kelley, Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South (New York: The New Press, 2018).
8. Grundy, Color & Character, 121-23; 133-37.
9. Lower-income immigrant families, especially from Latin America, also became part of the “crescent and wedge” development, and faced many of the same consequences of economic isolation, but they tended to move into neighborhoods in the east and southwest, rather than into historically Black westside neighborhoods. For specific challenges faced by West Charlotte High School in the post-busing era, see Grundy, Color & Character, 140-179.
10. Grundy, Color & Character, 189-90.
11. Charlotte Observer, 22 March 2016, A-1.
12. Queen City Nerve, 18 December 2020.
13. National Low Income Housing Coalition, “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Housing” (March 2021), 25.
14. James and Barbara Ferguson interview by Pamela Grundy, 6 September 2016, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
SUGGESTED READINGS
David S. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Davison Douglas, Reading, Writing and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Frye Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 3d edition, 2006.
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Janette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850-1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Thomas Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998, 2020.
Pam Kelley, Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South. New York: The New Press, 2018.
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Rose Leary Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies: A Memoir. Charlotte: Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, 1996.
Sonya Ramsey, Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022.
Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
Jill Snider, Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Sarah Thuesen, Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.
