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A BLACK HISTORY OF CHARLOTTE PART 3 BY
A BLACK HISTORY OF CHARLOT TE: PART 3 Civil rights in the New South
BY PAMELA GRUNDY
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 1940 and 1960, growing from 31,000 to 56,000 Washington.” residents. This influx fueled an expansion of Black
Although Paul Younts was one of Charlotte’s owned businesses that included restaurants, banks, most prominent political powerbrokers, he soon insurance companies, beauty parlors, gas stations, found himself the target of a federal investigation dry cleaners, photography studios and more. into his election-related activities. Part of the Much of this growth took place around Beatties evidence used against him had been provided Ford Road. In the 1910s, as segregation hardened, by Black Charlotteans. In July of 1941, the Postal Charlotte developers had used restrictive covenants Service fired him. 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 office to demand better jobs for college WRITER AND ACTIVIST TREZZVANT ANDERSON, 1938 PHOTO: NATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE PERSONNEL RECORDS entrepreneurial — especially when 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
members to stay o 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 withdrew. She enrolled in an integrated private school in Pennsylvania, and national attention turned to the protracted stando 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.
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 nd a single Negro who agreed with this.”
Still, what the Counts family called “the situation with Dot,” referencing Dorothy’s nickname, 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 Feb. 1 of that year, four students from North Carolina A&T 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 starting sit-ins in Charlotte. More than 200 students showed up. They headed downtown the next day.
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 ve 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 nally ate.
In the years that followed, black activists pressed forward, and white leaders strategically retreated.
The Freedom Riders, including future congressman John Lewis, came to 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 all-white barbershop. He was arrested and 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.
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 re 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.
The mid-1960s saw a spate of federal action, most notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that gave local activists new tools to work with. In 1964 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent rising star Julius Chambers to open a Charlotte o ce dedicated to civil rights law. In the fall of 1965 Kelly Alexander’s brother, Fred, became Charlotte’s rst Black city council member
A BLACK LUNCH COUNTER IN CHARLOTTE DURING SEGREGATION. P H O T O BY JA M E S P E E L E R . C O U R T E SY O F T H E P E E L E R FA M I LY A N D I N E Z M O O R E PA R K E R A R C H I V E S AT J C S U .
since the 1890s.
Still, tensions simmered. In September of 1965, residents of the west side went before the city council to report two disturbing incidents: a cross burned on the Johnson C. Smith campus, and shots red into Reginald Hawkins’ home.
Then, early in the morning of Nov. 22, bombs exploded at four west-side houses: those of Hawkins, Fred Alexander, Kelly Alexander and Julius Chambers.
The blasts did extensive damage. Teenager Kelly Alexander, Jr., asleep in his front-facing bedroom, felt one of the bombs explode against his wall, and glass from the shattered windows shot across the room. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. City leaders, Black and white, immediately denounced the act, and a community fund drive quickly raised the money needed to repair the homes. The bombers were never identi ed.
Bombs were far from the only forces of destruction in mid-1960s Charlotte. Bulldozers funded by federal highway and “urban renewal” funds were systematically demolishing the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, and destabilizing communities across the city. As pressure for school desegregation grew, the newly consolidated Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education began to shutter historically Black schools that had sat at the heart of communities for decades. It would take longer for that story to be fully told.
Resources
Willie James Gri n, “News and Views of the Postal Service: Trezzvant W. Anderson and Black Labor Journalism in the New Deal Era,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History, 2018. Emily Ethridge, “How a Local Historian Uncovered Trezzvant Anderson, the Charlotte Civil Rights Hero You’ve Never Heard Of,” Charlotte Magazine, 11 August 2020 Thomas Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998, new edition 2020). Sarah Thuesen, Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Ron Stodghill, ed., Let There Be Light: Exploring How Charlotte’s Historic West End is Shaping a New South (Johnson C. Smith University, 2014). Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liverright Publishing Corporation, 2017)
Michael Gra , “Dorothy Counts Scoggins,” Charlotte Magazine, 20 November 2017.
Emiene Wright, “The Militant Dentist: Dr Reginald Hawkins,” Creative Loa ng, 6 February 2013.
Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
WOMEN OF THE CHARLOT TE SIT-INS Young ladies were at the heart of Charlotte civil rights demonstrations
BY PAMELA GRUNDY
On a crisp February morning in 1960, Hattie Ann Walker put on her new suit with the sailor collar, fixed her hair, and joined a group of fellow Johnson C. Smith University students for the fourmile walk to downtown Charlotte.
As the students approached the city center, they began to catch sight of the establishments that refused to treat them as equals — Kress’s five and dime, where they could buy hot dogs but not sit down to eat them; Belk’s department store, where the only restrooms they could use were in the basement; the palatial Carolina Theater, where they were not allowed at all.
Walker struggled to look cheerful, but inside she was trembling. “I knew that it was something I wanted to do, and I should do,” she explained. “But in spite of that, I was afraid. I was really afraid.”
Her group headed to Woolworth’s and sat down at the counter. As they waited, a photographer snapped the picture that would become the icon of the Charlotte sitins, capturing the students at the height of the civility that was their greatest weapon. Well-dressed, well-behaved and exuding quiet dignity, the students exposed the absurdities of segregation for everyone to see. At the center of the image, Hattie Walker looked calmly at the camera.
While men usually assumed the public roles of speaking and negotiating, women were at the heart of the sit-in demonstrations. Women marched and strategized, suffered blows and insults, defied the law and went to jail.
“You don’t hear our voices very much,” noted Edith Strickland DeLaine, who helped plan the Charlotte sit-ins. “But you cannot look at a picture and not see a female in it.”
With their courageous actions, these young women transformed Charlotte. They also transformed themselves. Sitting in her gracious living room in 2003, dressed in a trim suit and with every hair in place, Hattie Walker looked every bit the lady that she was when caught on film decades before. But she was not the same inside.
“I was afraid every time I marched. I really was,” she explained. “I was a person that was afraid of doing things. But that sit-in demonstration taught me a lesson. I figured if I could get through that, then I could weather the storm with other things. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Lessons from the Past
While the sit-ins sought a sharp break with an unjust past, the strategy drew heavily on the students’ own upbringing, and on the lessons Black colleges had taught for generations. Most students had been raised to be disciplined, religious and respectful.
They also shared a strong sense of self-worth and moral determination. All those qualities would serve them well as they faced the hostility their action would at times provoke.
The roles that women played reflected similar continuities. An effective sit-in required a balance between action and response. In the face of physical threats, men could serve as protectors. But violence from whites was not the main concern. A successful sit-in depended on students’ ability to remain calm, to offer a sharp contrast to the injustice of segregation and the violent outbursts that demonstrations could provoke. It was not an easy task.
Edith DeLaine believed the presence of women helped to tamp down emotion on both sides. “I think a lot more men would have been killed if women had not been present,” she stated. “Women sort of keep a calm. Even in a segregated society — a very mean segregated society — the women can cause calm.”
Women could also defuse potential confrontations. “In our Black families there’s a thing they call ‘the eye,’” DeLaine explained. “Parents can look at you — especially women. And when they give you the eye, you know that you need to change something in your behavior. Our eyes tell a story.
CHARLOTTE SIT-IN PARTICIPANTS, 1960. HAZEL WALKER, WEARING GLASSES, IS LOOKING AT THE CAMERA. C O U R T E SY O F T H E RO B I N S O N - S PA N G L E R CA RO L I N A RO O M , C H A R LO T T E M E C K L E N B U RG P U B L I C L I B R A RY.
And during the movement, I think we used it a lot.”
Lessons for the Future
For some young women, defying segregation also meant a step toward independence. Betty Houchins Lundy learned this lesson after she took part in one of the students’ most daring actions.
One day, the sit-in organizers learned that the owner of Ivey’s department store had declared that no African American would ever eat a meal in his lunchroom. They asked Lundy and fellow student Thomas Wright, both of whom had extremely light skin, to prove him wrong. With some trepidation, Lundy agreed. She and Wright headed for the Ivey’s lunchroom, were seated, and ate an uneventful meal.
When the two students joined their protesting companions outside the store, the indignant reaction their ruse provoked sparked enough furor to make the evening news, which Lundy’s parents watched in horror.
“My parents were against this because they were so used to their way of life,” Lundy explained. “They were used to one way of life, Blacks in one place and whites in one place. They saw this on television, and my father became very afraid. He told my mother to tell me to stay out of that white man’s store.”
Faced with their parents’ disapproval, some students downplayed their involvement. Others, however, argued back. Mary Anna Neal Bradley’s parents were among those who objected. But she felt she could stand firm because “they also brought us up to do the right thing. Although we were sheltered, we were brought up: ‘If you’re going to do something, do it right.’”
Victory
The sit-in campaign required months of patience and determination. Store owners and city officials stalled, dissembled, and offered excuse after excuse. But the young people’s resolve, backed by a broader Black boycott of the stores in question, finally forced owners to relent.
Those first meals were memorable. “When we could finally sit down to eat, we were given money by various organizations so we could go down to eat,” Hattie Walker remembered. “And that was so rewarding. I got a big Coca-Cola. In the cup — a fountain drink. And the only thing I’d had was Coke from a bottle. So I wanted the fountain drink. That was a special moment to get that Coke from that fountain.”
“I knew in my heart that this was something that I wanted to do,” she concluded. “And I knew that if we were able to accomplish the goal, that this was something that not only I would benefit from but my children and my grandchildren would also benefit. I just knew it was the right thing to do.”
Parts of this article appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer in 2003.
