|queen city journal
Season of change
BEFORE BECOMING A HOUSEHOLD NAME FOR UPTOWN COMMUTERS, FOUR-TERM MAYOR STAN BROOKSHIRE HELPED PROPEL RACE RELATIONS IN THE CITY. BY VIRGINIA BROWN
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motions often run high as cars zip around Interstate 277-N in uptown Charlotte, merging, letting people in, cutting others off. Tangled and imperfect, the road gets us where we need to go. When Stan Brookshire, for whom the northeast loop of the freeway is named, was mayor in the 1960s, the city was much the same: complicated, and not without heightened emotions — but poised to move forward. Stanford R. Brookshire was born on July 22, 1905 near Troutman, a small town just south of Statesville, about 35 miles north of Charlotte. He grew up with five brothers and two sisters and attended Duke University, where he studied history and was managing editor of the student newspaper. Following graduation, Brookshire moved to the Queen City with dreams of being a big-city newspaperman. The loud hum of The Charlotte Observer newsroom, though, coupled with a hearing defect, prevented his future in journalism. The next chapter would have to be more peaceful.
A RELUCTANT LEADER
When Brookshire got to Charlotte, ole Jim Crow had long dictated blacks’ access to restaurants, hotels and theaters throughout the South. In Brookshire’s new city, the atmosphere was no different. Blacks and whites were separated, even in death: Just north of uptown, a fence kept visitors to Pinewood Cemetery, where blacks were buried, away from Elmwood, which was reserved for whites. “It was a time of social change. … We either had to accept change and make change work for the betterment of our city and community, or else we had to fight it,” Brookshire said in an interview with Edward Perzel for the WSOC-TV Oral History Project, years before he passed away in 1990. Too young to serve in World War I, and too old for World War II, Brookshire had no intention of fighting. Following a brief stint in construction with his father, who
started out farming but later got into building, Brookshire went into business with his brother dealing industrial belts. He hadn’t planned to run for public office, but, after a year as president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce and at the urging of local business leaders, he ended up serving as mayor for four terms, from 1961-1969. None was particularly easy. In May 1963, three months before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt aloud on the national mall, he visited Charlotte to speak to students at the city’s black high schools. Around that time, local civil rights leader Reginald Hawkins had protested the city’s segregated establishments. Hawkins, a dentist who later ran for N.C. governor, believed the city’s progress toward desegregation wasn’t moving fast enough. Brookshire, who had already established the biracial Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee, needed to act. Instead of going the way of Southern cities before him, he and several other white and black business owners started simply: They shared a meal. The idea came from local cafeteria owner J. W. “Slug” Claiborne, a Charlotte restaurateur who operated several Slug’s restaurants and the Barclay Cafeterias. The idea was simple: Across town, every white member of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce would go to lunch with a black member on the same day. Brookshire walked into the Manger Motor Inn on 10th Street, a white establishment, with A.E. Spears, president of the black-owned Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and a professor from Johnson C. Smith University, and placed an order. Later that month, the chamber’s executive board unanimously voted to desegregate many of the city’s hotels, restaurants and movie theaters.
NATIONAL MODEL FOR DESEGREGATION
Though he was progressive for his time, Brookshire still clung to some old-fashioned values popular in his day consouthparkmagazine.com | 47
