NEWS & OPINION FEATURE
A BLACK HISTORY OF CHARLOTTE: PART 3
Civil rights in the New South BY PAMELA GRUNDY
Pg. 10 AUG 26 - SEP 8, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM
The following is the third in a five-part history of Black culture in Charlotte. Visit qcnerve.com for Parts 1 and 2, and stay tuned for the continuation of the series in upcoming issues. In the spring of 1939, 32-year-old John T. Richmond sat down to take a federal civil service exam. 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 Carolina Times. “Hundreds Sign Petition.” 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 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 powerbrokers, 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.
1940 and 1960, growing from 31,000 to 56,000 residents. This influx fueled an expansion of Blackowned businesses that included restaurants, banks, insurance companies, beauty parlors, gas stations, dry cleaners, photography studios and more. Much of this growth took place around Beatties Ford Road. In the 1910s, as segregation hardened, Charlotte developers had used restrictive covenants and unwritten agreements to designate the west side as the Black side of town. By the 1930s, as The Double V Campaign and the Postwar downtown Black neighborhoods grew crowded, Boom growing numbers of families headed to west-side Five months later, the U.S. entered World War communities such as Biddleville, Greenville and II. African Americans, among them Richmond and Washington Heights. Anderson, signed up in droves and performed In the 1950s, in another example of federal with distinction. Black leaders described their influence, growth on the west side got a boost from participation as part of a “Double V” Campaign, the Federal Housing Administration, the engine behind linking victory over the nation’s postwar fascism abroad suburban boom. with victory over The FHA channeled racism at home. most of its resources They won a major into all-white home-front victory developments. in 1948, when Its refusal to President Harry back investments Truman issued an in historically executive order to Black or integrated desegregate the neighborhoods, a armed forces. policy that became C h a r l o t t e ’s known as redlining, Black activists kept would have farpushing — through reaching, destructive the war and beyond. effects in older parts Trezzvant Anderson of town. and Johnson C. But it provided Smith Student some support for Council President building new Black Reginald Hawkins neighborhoods. organized student E v e r protests at the post entrepreneurial — WRITER AND ACTIVIST TREZZVANT ANDERSON, 1938 office to demand especially when PHOTO: NATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE PERSONNEL RECORDS better jobs for college money could graduates. Charlotte’s be made without Black teachers joined colleagues across the state to challenging the racial status quo — Charlotte successfully lobby for equal pay with whites. developers, both Black and white, seized on these Kelly Alexander revitalized Charlotte’s NAACP and opportunities. The west side began to fill with neat launched projects that included a “Votes for Freedom” brick homes in developments such as University Park, campaign that registered more than 5,000 new Black Oaklawn Park, Dalebrook and Northwood Estates. voters. In the fall of 1954, west-side residents marveled This energy was fed by a booming economy at the modern, million-dollar campus of the new that helped African Americans build up their West Charlotte Senior High School, built at the heart communities. Charlotte’s Black residents, who of University Park. The original West Charlotte, which represented just under a third of the city’s total had opened on Beatties Ford Road in 1938, became population, nearly doubled their numbers between 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 of Education 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 their usual “moderate” path. Four days after the ruling, the keynote speaker at a gathering of the state’s ruling Democrats announced that “as good citizens we have no other course except to obey the law laid down by the United States Supreme Court.” After this display 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, forestalled both school integration and 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. Not until September 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 Counts at Harding High. Delois Huntley 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 them in a newspaper in India. They made a profound impression on writer James Baldwin, just back from Paris and planning a reporting trip South. He would make Charlotte his first stop. Counts and her family were shaken – “I expected something,” Counts told a reporter. “But, really, I didn’t expect it to be like that.” Charlotte police warned Citizens’ Council
