Monthly Archives: May 2021

This evening, I spoke to the Charlotte City Council about a proclamation that declared May 20-24 “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Week.” The statement followed a long discussion of the city’s 2040 land use plan, near the end of which Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles pointed out that because of Charlotte’s profoundly problematic racial history – especially regarding the urban renewal of the 1960s – many residents were not inclined to trust vague council promises to act in their communities’ best interests. I believe the history of the Meck Dec offers a similar example of the gap between rhetoric and reality.

My remarks were grounded in two articles from the May 19 Queen City Nerve: Black History of Charlotte: Slavery and Revolution and Rethinking the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.

Good evening everyone. Two weeks ago, a city resolution proclaimed May 20-24 “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Week.”

Now it’s clear to all that the Declaration’s most famous words – “we do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people” – were not meant to apply to the many people of African descent enslaved in Mecklenburg County on May 20, 1775, the day the Declaration is said to have been signed.

Fast forward to May 20, 1867. Charlotte’s newly emancipated African Americans seized the spirit of the Declaration, choosing “Meck Dec Day” to officially form their first political organization, and lauding the date as “connected to liberty and the political equality of man.”

If Charlotte’s white leaders had welcomed them with open arms, we could have had the most marvelous May 20 celebration this year, one that celebrated the 1775 event and the 1867 event and the steady expansion of freedom.

But of course, that didn’t happen.

Fast forward again to 1963. Almost 100 years after the Civil War ended it still made sense for activist Reginald Hawkins to choose May 20 for a civil rights march, and to use the contradictions between the Declaration’s rhetoric of freedom and the persisting oppression of African Americans to underscore his message of ongoing struggle: “There is no freedom as long as all of us are not free.”

Given current efforts to address the full realities of this nation’s history, a history that has had a profound effect on the situation we face today, if the city is to declare a Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Week next year, it should commemorate not simply events in 1775, but also the long struggle waged by Mecklenburg County’s African Americans, along with others, to also become a “free and independent people.”

Thank you.

Inspired by Kehinde Wiley’s reimagining of the J.E.B. Stuart statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, the Queen City Nerve commissioned Charlotte native and 2019 Northwest School of the Arts graduate Nadia Chauhan, a rising junior in social work at Appalachian State, to reimagine the “Spirit of Mecklenburg” Captain Jack statue as part of its Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence coverage.

Here’s what she did.

Here’s what she has to say about it.

I love the idea of reclaiming history through illustration. I was inspired by Charlotte’s Black Lives Matter mural and how unique it was. I was hoping to hint at that mural as well as reinterpret the Captain Jack statue as a way to empower young black girls. As a person, hearing about the unjust killing of black men is absolutely heart-wrenching. As a black woman, it is terrifying and draining to witness the constant terror that consumes America. Hearing about police brutality in Charlotte specifically is even more concerning and that is why I felt it was important to participate in the conversation about activism in the city.

I want to shoutout my absolutely incredible art teachers at Northwest School of the Arts: Jamie Berry, Brian Wilson, Joshua Cornwell, and Tamara Conrad. They have inspired me to continue making art and use it to help others. 

Here she is.

Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War” statue in Richmond, photographed by Peter Wong. You can learn more about Wiley’s “Rumors of War” series here.

“Spirit of Mecklenburg” statue of Captain James Jack in Charlotte, photographed by Ryan Pitkin.

Op-ed that appeared in the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham Sun on May 20, 2021.

At noon Thursday, May 20, a group of North Carolinians will converge on downtown Charlotte for the 200-year-old ritual of celebrating the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Planned festivities include cannon fire, cries of “Huzzah” and the muskets, tri-corner hats and brass-buttoned jackets favored by Revolutionary War re-enactors.

As with many such celebrations, beneath the pomp and circumstance lie uncomfortable historical truths – truths that we must all engage as we seek to build a better state and nation. Unfortunately, recent events show that not everyone in North Carolina is ready to do this.

Tradition holds that on May 20, 1775, a group of Mecklenburg County leaders produced the American colonies’ first official declaration of separation from Great Britain, pronouncing themselves “a free and independent people.”

Despite some doubts about the authenticity of the “Meck Dec,” it has been part of North Carolina identity since its story gained statewide notice in the early nineteenth century. May 20, 1775 has been on the North Carolina flag since 1861, and on the state seal since 1893. Since 2015 it has adorned an official state license plate that proclaims North Carolina “First in Freedom.”

What generally goes unmentioned is that many of the men associated with this call for freedom were at the same time personally depriving other human beings of that right – namely the men and women whom they had enslaved.

Just as the Declaration of Independence did not free any of the several hundred thousand residents of African descent enslaved in the American colonies in 1776, the Meck Dec sparked no local move toward freedom. In 1790, the first U.S. census reported 14 percent of Mecklenburg County residents as enslaved. Sixty years later, that ratio had grown to 40 percent.

Slavery’s proponents justified this omission by arguing that Africans were a lesser race, not worthy of the same rights bestowed on Europeans. This contradiction is as much a part of North Carolina history as the sentiments expressed in the Meck Dec. Even if the Declaration is in fact authentic, the validity of the slogan “First in Freedom” depends entirely on whose freedom counts.

Massachussetts abolished slavery in 1783. It took a war to end it in North Carolina.

North Carolina legislators took other steps to curb the liberty of Black residents both before and after the Civil War. Legislators eliminated voting rights for free Black residents in 1835, disenfranchised Black voters in 1900 and maintained a separate-and-unequal Jim Crow system for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. More recently, a voter identification law passed in 2013 was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal court, which determined it would “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Similar stories could be told about women’s rights – North Carolina legislators did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, until 1971 – and about LGBTQ+ rights and others.

In their long fight for freedom, North Carolina’s Black residents have used the Meck Dec where they could. In 1867, Charlotte’s newly emancipated African Americans chose May 20 to announce their entry into politics, describing the day as “hallowed by its associations, and connected to liberty and the political equality of man.” In 1963, activist Reginald Hawkins scheduled a key civil rights march for May 20, invoking the Declaration’s call for freedom and asserting that “There is no freedom as long as all of us are not free.”

This May, the North Carolina House passed a bill that suggests that the main effect of bringing up less-than-inspiring aspects of North Carolina history is to make certain people feel ashamed, guilty, or personally responsible for the shortcomings of the past. In a recent letter to the U.S. Secretary of Education, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decried “activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps.”

Not at all. Our times require an examination of our past that underscores the effort that has been required to extend the benefits of freedom to all people, the sources of resistance to that expansion, and all that remains to be done to fulfill the Declaration’s ideals. Rather than division or chagrin, such an examination can produce collective determination to do better. Slavery and its long-term consequences are not just a sideshow to the American project, they are a central component. This May 20 let us resolve to free our minds, and take up this essential work.

“There is no freedom unless all of us are free.”

– Reginald Hawkins, May 20, 1963.

A week ago, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to express “grave concern” about the department’s approach to U.S. History, which he claimed was promoting “activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps.”

He singled out the 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, which emphasizes the significance of racial slavery in shaping American economy, society, and culture.

Such efforts, McConnell lamented, “increasingly subject Americans to a drumbeat of revisionism and negativity about our nation’s history and identity.” As a result, he warned, “American pride has plummeted to its lowest level in 20 years.”

Poppycock.

It is far past time for our nation to genuinely reckon with our deeply flawed racial history. Efforts to hide historic realities beneath “patriotic” platitudes obscure hard truths about both past and present and keep us from shaping a truer, more grounded national sense of pride and struggle.

Last summer, as Black activists across the country rallied against the systemic racism that plagues our nation, I worked with the good people at Queen City Nerve to publish “Black History of Charlotte,” a five-part series that details some of the challenges and accomplishments of Charlotte’s African American residents from the close of the Civil War into the present. 

The next issue of the Nerve, on May 19, will extend the series with the first of a two-part “prequel” that examines Black Charlotte history from the 1740s through the Civil War.

The timing matters. May 20 is “Meck Dec Day,” which commemorates the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Sparse historical records have prompted fierce debates over whether the Declaration, said to have been signed in 1775, is reality or myth. But despite this controversy, the Meck Dec has formed a prominent component of identity in Charlotte and North Carolina for more than a hundred and fifty years. Its date has been on the North Carolina state flag since the Civil War, and it inspired the “First in Freedom” slogan that graces some North Carolina license plates. It thus offers an ideal focus for historical reassessment.

Promoters of the Meck Dec generally focus on the signers’ independent spirit, distrust of authority and “firm belief that all men were equal.” Chronicler J.B. Alexander set this tone in 1902, writing that Mecklenburg County “was populated with a race of people” who “had been taught that liberty and independence were necessary to achieve the highest aims in life.”

What Alexander failed to mention – and what most accounts of the Meck Dec either leave out or gloss over – is that many of the signers were actively engaged in denying liberty and independence to other human beings – the men and women of African descent whom they had enslaved. Men such as John Davidson, Thomas Polk and Hezekiah Alexander built fortunes by exploiting enslaved labor. They justified this practice with the claim that Africans and their descendants were a “lesser” race of people than the white Europeans who enslaved them. The legacy of those actions and ideas remain with us today.

The irony of claiming liberty for oneself while denying it to others has not been lost on Charlotte’s Black activists. Starting after the Civil War, and continuing into the civil rights era, African Americans working for freedom, justice and equality have periodically chosen Meck Dec Day as a forum for their own claims to equal rights of citizenship. “There is no freedom unless all of us are free,” longtime activist Reginald Hawkins proclaimed on May 20, 1963, after leading Johnson C. Smith students on a march from campus to the center city to protest segregation in public accommodations. Our May 19 publication will tell some of these stories.

As pandemic restrictions ease, Charlotteans are planning Meck Dec events for 2021, among them a City Council proclamation that designates May 20-24 “Meck Dec Week,” a noontime reenactment complete with horses and cannon, and a “Captain James Jack” bike ride tied to the story that Captain Jack (he of the statue) carried the Declaration to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

It’s hard to envision how one might incorporate the contradictions between the rhetoric of freedom and the harsh realities of slavery into these events. Mitch McConnell would likely call such an effort “divisive nonsense.” He would be wrong. This is the work of our time. The mindset that allowed so many of our county’s Revolutionary Era residents to envision freedom for some and not for others affects us to this day. The inclination to gloss over this dark side of our history obscures our understanding of our present-day circumstances. There is no freedom unless all of us are free. We have to open our eyes.

April 20, 1971

April 20, 2021

Two historic days, 50 years apart.

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg that communities had a Constitutional duty to desegregate their public schools, even if it required busing students across town.

In 2021 a jury in Minneapolis convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd.

In the weeks since the anniversary and the conviction, news has come at disorienting speed: MaKhia Bryant, Anthony Alvarez,  Andrew Brown, Jr., Mario Gonzalez, on and on and on.

Amid this whirl of events, I want to take a moment to reflect on Swann and Chauvin, and the way they speak to the role of law in the long American struggle for freedom and justice. Laws, rulings, acquittals, and convictions provide powerful tools and symbols. They do not produce change on their own. That work requires courageous individuals and communities.

In the mid-twentieth century, challenging school segregation required Black families to place their names on lawsuits and suffer the consequences. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, for example, the courageous plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliot lost jobs, were denied loans, were attacked in their homes at night and charged with crimes when they fought back. Several were forced to leave the community; some never recovered from their losses.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown that segregated schools must be eliminated, southern school boards forced African American families to put themselves on the line once again. Many states, including North Carolina, enacted “freedom of choice” plans that required Black families to request transfers to historically white schools, and thus expose themselves to intimidation and harassment.

In 1957, Black families in Charlotte requested transfers for 40 students. The Charlotte school board approved five: Dorothy Counts, William Hamlin, Delores Huntley, Gus and Girvaud Roberts.

Over that summer, William Hamlin’s family received so many threats that Hamlin’s father sent the children to stay with relatives in Virginia, then moved across town. That fall, he enrolled William in a historically Black school.

In September, when Dorothy Counts arrived at Harding High, she was met with an angry white mob, which neither law enforcement nor school administrators did much to contain. Photographs of her ordeal circulated around the world. After several days of nonstop harassment, she withdrew.

Black Charlotte families continued to request transfers and the school board continued to deny them. In the fall of 1964, a full decade after Brown, only 722 of Charlotte’s 20,000 Black students attended predominantly white schools.

In January of 1965, attorney Julius Chambers filed the Swann case to press for greater change. A few months later, bombs exploded at the homes of Chambers and two of the activist families who had signed on to the case.

The plaintiffs persisted. In 1969, Chambers convinced federal judge James McMillan to order the full desegregation of Charlotte Mecklenburg schools, a decision that required an unprecedented level of cross-town busing. In 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld McMillan’s decision.

Even then, however, the outcome depended on Charlotte residents themselves. Not until three years after the Supreme Court decision, when a diverse group of residents crafted a busing plan that included the entire community, did the situation stabilize. Then, thanks to years of dedicated efforts on the part of students, parents, staff and community, Charlotte Mecklenburg became the most desegregated major school system in the nation for nearly a quarter century. The achievement boosted Charlotte’s image as a progressive southern city and sparked enormous civic pride.

But, 50 years on, the long-term fate of Swann also serves as a warning. As Charlotte grew, and as national politics took a conservative turn, the city developed in ways that widened physical divides between older, predominantly African American city neighborhoods and new, predominantly white suburbs built farther and farther from the center of town. Support for desegregation ebbed, and as the twenty-first century began, a new lawsuit forced the school system to dismantle its busing program. Housing patterns, along with an anxious scramble by parents of means to enroll their children in low-poverty, high-performing schools, led to rapid resegregation. Today, Charlotte Mecklenburg is one of the most segregated school systems in North Carolina.

Some of these themes are already emerging in the Chauvin case. Most notably, it took action from people on the ground – especially the recording made by 18-year-old Darnella Frazier – to reveal the truth about George Floyd’s murder, and to pressure authorities to pursue a prosecution.

The conviction that emerged from those courageous efforts provides a measure of justice, and an important symbol. But as the deaths of MaKhia Bryant, Andrew Brown, Jr. and so many others have made clear, it will take ongoing efforts in multiple arenas to turn that symbol into reality. We all need to roll up our sleeves.