Pappy sure was happy that he was free. Mammy she shout for joy and say her prayers were answered.

-Fannie Moore, born in slavery on Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1849

Fannie Moore’s father, Stephen, was a blacksmith. Her mother, Rachael, worked in the fields by day and sewed by night. “Sometimes I never go to bed,” Moore explained. “Had to hold the light for her to see by. . . . I never see how my mammy stand such hard work.” Freedom came as a blessing.

Moore’s recollections, documented in 1937 as part of the Federal Writers’ Project “slave narrative” endeavor, offer a remarkable window into the experience of slavery and freedom in the Carolina Piedmont in the years surrounding the Civil War. She told of parents who stood up for their children, of cruel and kind enslavers, of hard work, dances, whippings, singing, prayer, and death. She recalled the arrival of Union troops, and of the Ku Klux Klan. This Juneteenth weekend, you might spend some time with her stories, including this account of her mother’s suffering and strength.

The old overseer he hate my mammy, cause she fight him for beating her children Why she get more whippings for that than anything else. She had twelve children . . . Every night she pray for the Lord to get her and her children out of the place. One day she plowing in the cotton field. All sudden like she let out a big yell. Then she started singing and ashouting and awhooping and ahollering. Then it seem she plow all the all the harder. When she come home, Marse Jim’s mammy say: “What all that going on in the field? You think we send you out there just to whoop and yell? No siree, we put you out there to work and you sure better work, else we get the overseer to cowhide your old black back.” My mammy just grin all over her black wrinkled face and say: “I’s saved. The Lord done tell me I’s saved. Now I know the Lord will show me the way, I ain’t going to grieve no more. No matter how much you all done beat me and my children the Lord will show me the way. And some day we never be slaves.” Old granny Moore grab the cowhide and slash mammy cross the back but mammy never yell. She just go back to the field a singing.

Moore’s full account is available here (Note: Writers’ Project interviewers generally recorded peoples’ words in conventional dialect spelling; I have chosen not to reproduce that in the quotes I use.)  

Moore’s experiences paralleled those of many Blacks enslaved in Mecklenburg County. Charles and Mary Moore, the couple who established Walnut Grove, were part of the same wave of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who settled Mecklenburg County. They spent time in neighboring Anson County before settling in South Carolina, and maintained close ties to the area. Moore grandson Thomas J. Moore married Mary Irwin, whose father, John, was one of Charlotte’s most prominent bankers and merchants, as well as the owner of plantations in Alabama and Mississippi.

Carey Freeman and Eliza Washington.

The Writers’ Project interview with the most direct bearing on Mecklenburg County took place in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eliza Washington, born in slavery in the late 1850s, told the story of her mother, Carey Freeman, who she noted “was born in North Carolina in Mecklenburg County.” 

Freeman’s story highlights a different aspect of life under slavery in North Carolina ­– the family separations that became especially common as North Carolina slaveholders sought to expand their fortunes by extending their operations to lands recently seized from Native Americans in Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.

Fannie Moore recalled the terror these new economic endeavors brought to enslaved communities. “It was a terrible sight to see the speculators come to the plantation. They would go through the fields and buy the slaves they wanted . . . When the speculator come all the slaves start ashaking. No one know who is agoing.”

Freeman was taken out of Mecklenburg County in the mid 1830s, when enslaver William McNeely moved his family to Tennessee. Eliza was born in Tennessee, and then “the white folks separated my mother and father when I was a little baby in their arms.” Carey and Eliza were taken from Tennessee to Arkansas by one of McNeely’s sons. Eliza’s father, enslaved by another man, was left behind. After the Civil War ended, Carey lived with Eliza and her family in Little Rock until she passed away in 1903.

Eliza’s full story is available here.

Juneteenth was indeed a day for celebration.

Juneteenth is upon us! If you’re interested in exploring what enslaved North Carolinians had to say about slavery, Emancipation and the Civil War, there are plenty of places to turn.

Moses Grandy, enslaved in Camden County, published his remarkable story, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America, in 1843.

Harriet Jacobs, enslaved in Edenton, fled her enslaver and hid in her grandmother’s attic for seven years before finding a path to freedom. She published her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in 1860.

William Henry Singleton, enslaved in New Bern, volunteered to serve as an aide to a Confederate soldier as soon as war broke out. He then escaped to Union lines and served with distinction in the Union army. His memoir, Recollections of My Slavery Days, was published in 1922.

Alan Parker, enslaved in Chowan County, published Recollections of Slavery Times in 1895. A group of Eastern Carolina University students, under the direction of historian David Cecelski, have created a website that admirably contextualizes Parker’s narrative.

I also recommend two prizewinning books by Dr. Cecelski, a North Carolina native who has devoted his career to documenting the experiences of African Americans in eastern North Carolina, and who blogs about his ongoing historical investigations at davidcecelski.com.

The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

If you’re interested specifically in slavery in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, you might start with two installments in the Black History of Charlotte series I’ve published in the Queen City Nerve.

Slavery and Revolution

Cotton Gin to Civil War

The primary source that comes closest to capturing the story of someone enslaved in Mecklenburg County is a WPA oral history interview conducted with Eliza Washington in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the late 1930s. Washington was the daughter of Carey Freeman, an enslaved woman who was born in Mecklenburg County in the early 1820s, and left in the mid-1830s, when enslaver William McNeely moved his family to Tennessee. Eliza was born in Tennessee, and mother and daughter were then taken from Tennessee to Arkansas by one of William McNeely’s sons. Carey’s husband, Eliza’s father, was left in Tennessee. Carey lived with Eliza until she passed away in 1903.

I’m working on a blog post about the interview, which I plan to post in a few days.

So much to learn. No time like the present.

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.

By Pamela Grundy and Tom Hanchett

Fifty years ago, on April 20, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education. The case authorized federal judges to require reluctant school districts to fully desegregate their schools, even if it meant busing students across town. It was the last major pro-desegregation ruling the Court would make, culminating a process that began with Sweatt v. Painter in 1950 and continued through Brown v. Board in 1954 and Green v. County School Board in 1968.

The ruling transformed Charlotte and the nation.

Persuaded by now-legendary civil rights attorney Julius Chambers, the Court unanimously upheld federal judge James McMillan’s order that Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) institute the nation’s first comprehensive busing plan, with the goal of fully desegregating every school in Mecklenburg County. Charlotte’s segregated housing patterns meant that desegregating schools would require massive cross-town busing. But the issue was results: “Substance, not semantics, must govern,” the Court wrote.

The ruling changed Charlotte forever.

Like their counterparts across the South, members of the then-all white CMS school board had met the Brown desegregation decision with fifteen years of foot-dragging and resistance.  

But with a judge’s order and a Supreme Court ruling in play, the community’s white leadership finally faced the facts. If they resisted the order, unrest and uncertainty would taint their ambitious city’s reputation as a good place to do business. The result: community members came together to create a busing plan that would make CMS the most desegregated major school system in the nation for the next quarter-century. This accomplishment became a cornerstone of Charlotte’s identity and a major source of civic pride.

It also helped the area boom. Mecklenburg County grew from just over 350,000 residents in 1970 to just under 700,000 in 2000. Going to school together created lasting bonds among generations of whites and Blacks, and African Americans rose to positions of prominence across the city. Two notable examples: Harvey Gantt was elected Charlotte’s first Black mayor in 1984, one of the first Black mayors in the nation to run a majority-white city. Anthony Foxx became mayor in 2009, and then rose to serve as U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President Barack Obama.

But the reconfiguring city did not reflect the desegregated schools. As farmland filled with shiny new subdivisions, their new residents were predominantly white. Black families stayed concentrated in the center city. Gaps between the two groups grew, and tensions over busing rose.

In 1997, a group of CMS parents joined a national movement to end busing for desegregation by filing a new lawsuit, Capacchione v. Board, that challenged the busing plan. Two years later, federal judge Robert Potter ordered CMS to stop using race in school assignment. Schools resegregated with remarkable rapidity. The shift shook the community, and raised hard questions about the depth of its commitment to desegregation and to racial equity.

Charlotte’s progressive self-image suffered another reality check in 2014, when a Harvard-Berkeley study led by scholar Raj Chetty ranked 50 metro areas across America in terms of social mobility. Booming Charlotte came in 50^th – in other words, dead last. 

Chetty’s team identified geographic separation – the spatial mis-match between economic opportunities and the people who need them – as a major barrier to mobility. They also pointed to the persistent legacies of segregated education. Nearly all the cities at the bottom of Chetty’s list were in Southern states, where separate and deliberately unequal schools had been public policy for more than half a century.

*   *   *

Today, as the nation looks back at Swann and contemplates its legacy, what can this history tell us?

We’ve been pondering that for quite a while. We first met in the fall of 1988, in a graduate seminar on urban history at UNC Chapel Hill. We both studied Charlotte and we both ended up here. Our families became deeply involved in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools: Tom’s daughter, Lydia, completed high school in 2010; and Pam’s son, Parker, graduated in 2019. Tom’s wife, Carol Sawyer, was elected to the CMS Board of Education in 2017.

As historians, and especially as white historians, we had – and still have – a lot to learn about race in American history. We’ve set down some of our thoughts about the relationship of race to development and education here in Charlotte in two books published by UNC Press. Tom’s Sorting Out the New South City (now in a new edition!) tells the race-inflected history of Charlotte’s urban development from 1875 to 1975. Pamela’s Color and Character examines West Charlotte High School, a beloved, historically Black school that in more than eight decades of educating Charlotte children has weathered multiple shifts in local, state and national education policy.

Tom Hanchett: Sorting out the New South City

When I wrote Sorting in the early 1990s, I hoped it might seem obsolete a quarter-century later. Unfortunately, its exploration of Charlotte’s residential segregation, by race and by income, seems more relevant today than it did then

In the book I identified the late 1890s as a “hinge in history,” a time when the economic stress of a major depression and a desire to wrest political power from the biracial coalition that ran North Carolina’s state government led elite white men to organize what they proudly dubbed a “White Supremacy Campaign.”

The campaign and its violent aftermath ­– which included the Wilmington Massacre, the first and still the only successful coup in American history – pushed African Americans out of politics. It also led to a sharp upsurge in urban segregation. From newly segregated mass transit to restrictive covenants that kept Blacks out of newly built suburbia, North Carolina cities such as Charlotte sorted out dramatically. 

Discovering the violence and its aftermath took me by surprise.

We as a society have now become much more aware of the ways that white supremacy has been woven throughout urban life across the country. In Charlotte, I was able to chart how a century of deed restrictions, red-lining, New Deal projects, zoning, urban renewal, highway construction, and other developments added layer upon layer of inequality. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law has recently brought that message to a national audience.

Many other voices have added corroborating evidence. Anthony Foxx grew up near West Charlotte High School in a Black neighborhood hemmed in by three major highways. As Secretary of Transportation, he made a point of highlighting the unequal burden that interstate highway construction, which was planned at a time when disfranchisement silenced most Black voices, placed on African American neighborhoods. Voices such as his have helped carry that approach over into the Biden administration.

As I look back at Swann from today’s vantage point, I now recognize that racial inequality is more deeply embedded in policies and in habits of thinking than I and many others had imagined. Swann attacked the most visible inequities in education policy. Both its successes and its unfinished business challenge us to keep up the work of building a society with “liberty and justice for all.”

Pamela Grundy – Color and Character

In studying segregation, desegregation and resegregation at West Charlotte High School I learned how profoundly the issues that Tom describes – spatial segregation, inequitable public policy, white supremacy – affected schools. I also learned how a school system’s progress can be undermined by developments outside school walls.

Historically Black West Charlotte High has an extraordinary story. Opened as Charlotte’s second Black high school in 1938, it was a a beacon of hope and achievement for Charlotte’s west side neighborhoods. Then, through a remarkable series of decisions and events, it became the proud flagship of Charlotte’s busing plan, beloved by both Black and white students and held up as a shining example of community accomplishment. 

When I started studying the school in the late 1990s, it still had that lofty reputation. But Charlotte’s desegregation program was under fire, and some anti-busing activists were attempting to rewrite history, to claim that busing of which the city was so proud had been a failure. I envisioned a book that told the inspiring story of a great segregated school that became a great integrated school, one that honored the past and that reminded readers of what it was possible to accomplish.

But there was much more to the story than that.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the destruction of Black communities by urban renewal and highway construction had upended families’ and students’ lives, breaking many of the community ties that had sustained them during segregation. Even as many in CMS strove mightily – and often successfully – to integrate Mecklenburg County schools, political and economic shifts meant that physical and financial gaps widened between whites and Blacks, between haves and have nots.

Shortly after I recorded my first interviews, these developments pressed to the fore. Busing ended, schools resegregated, and my story fell apart. The end of busing had especially profound effects on West Charlotte High. Neglect and disinvestment meant that the west side neighborhoods that surrounded the school faced profound challenges. The year after a new assignment system went into place, West Charlotte became the poorest, least integrated high school in the entire system. The dramatic shift and the concentration of poverty sent academic performance plummeting. So much for my inspiring story line.

Resegregation also raised hard questions. How should we assess a sweeping social change – along with the sacrifices that created it – if in the end it didn’t last? If it represented not a permanent shift, but rather a passing phase?

I did not know the answers to these questions. Neither did I know where to start looking. So I turned to other writing projects. I also worked to help improve our neighborhood elementary school, Shamrock Gardens Elementary, which had become a textbook example of the way that resegregation had burdened high-poverty, high-minority schools with limited resources, staff instability and low academic performance.  

Fifteen years later, when I returned to the West Charlotte project, some things had become clearer. First and most obvious, despite promises to pour resources into high-poverty schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s resegregated system was profoundly inequitable. Nationwide, discussions of the appalling opportunity gaps between predominantly white suburban school systems and predominantly Black urban school systems often focus on the mismatch in resources between the two systems. In Charlotte, we saw dramatic gaps open up within a single system.

This development reaffirmed one of Julius Chambers’ fundamental calculations.  He had not pursued desegregation with such zeal because he thought that Black children needed to sit next to white children to learn. He did it because he believed that school systems would only treat all schools equally if all schools contained children that mattered to those in power. In the late 1960s, when whites dominated almost every aspect of government and the economy in Charlotte, that meant white children.

 “I don’t think that those who are now in power would provide the facilities and services that would be necessary in order to accomplish equal educational programs,” Chambers told the U.S. Senate in the spring of 1971. “As I view it, the only way that we can obtain quality education for all children, black and white, is to accomplish racial mixing of students in the various schools.”

Half a century later, Charlotte’s resegregated schools have underscored the sad reality of that assessment – and of the persistence of the persisting and resurging injustices that Tom describes so well. What we have now is not the complete segregation of the past – a number of CMS schools, including several of those attended by Tom’s daughter and my son, mix different kinds of students. But the huge gaps in opportunity between the predominantly Black and brown schools in the inner-city and the predominantly white and Asian schools in the wealthiest suburbs in some ways seems even greater than it was in the era of Jim Crow.

* * *

So what does it all mean? As we historians often note, it’s far easier to look backward than forward, far easier to chart the accomplishments and failures of the past than to predict what strategies will work in the future. But a few things are clear. Dramatic change is possible. Progress cannot be taken for granted. Deep-seated cultural institutions such as white supremacy permeate our lives, and they die hard. We need to stay alert, to keep reading, and to push forward, always.

About the authors

Dr. Tom Hanchett is a community historian in Charlotte, consulting with community groups and with Levine Museum of the New South.  He first came to Charlotte in 1981, and recently retired from the position of Staff Historian at the Levine Museum of the New South. While there, he curated the permanent exhibition Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers (named best in the Southeast by the South East Museums Conference), and a string of national-award-winning exhibitions that included COURAGE: The Carolina Story that Changed America, which explored the Carolina roots of Brown v. Board, and received a 2005 National Award for Museum and Library Service, the federal government’s highest honor for community service provided by museums and libraries. Learn more about his work at historysouth.org.

Dr. Pamela Grundy has been a historian, writer and activist in Charlotte since 1992. In addition to studying desegregation, she helped reintegrate her neighborhood elementary school, Shamrock Gardens Elementary, which her son attended from 2006-2012. In 2009 she curated the Levine Museum exhibit Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor, which examined Charlotte’s changing demographics and which in 2010 was awarded the Excellence in Exhibition Award: Special Achievement in Community Engagement from the American Association of Museums. Her latest project is the ongoing Black History of Charlotte, published by the good folks at Charlotte’s Queen City Nerve.

Reading suggestions

Tim Tyson and David Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020).

Catherine Bishir, “Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past, 1885–1915,” Southern Cultures (inaugural issue, 1993).

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Karen Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright, 2017).

Schools

Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Davison Douglas, Reading, Writing, and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Frye Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, 3rd edition. (University of South Carolina Press, 2006).

Roslyn Mickelson, Stephen Smith and Amy Hawn Nelson, eds., Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte (Harvard Education Press, 2015).

All five parts of Black History of Charlotte are now online at Queen City Nerve. Many, many thanks to Ryan, Justin, and the rest of the QC Nerve team. They’re bold, creative, and great to work with. It’s been a lot of fun.

Thanks also to Shelia Bumgarner of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library, Branford Lunsford of the Inez Moore Parker Archives at Johnson C. Smith, and Dawn Schmitz of the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte for help with illustrations.

I wrote this history to be used. Not in the manner of recent appeals for a bleached-out “patriotic” history designed to justify the current, profoundly unjust status quo, but as a way to understand that status quo – the forces that created and sustain it and the twisting, often-unpredictable paths of change.

I also sought to highlight a few of the many Black Charlotteans who have challenged these inequities, through teaching, building communities, maintaining businesses, filing lawsuits, voting, marching in the streets, designing school desegregation plans and many other endeavors.

A single series can only scratch the surface of this vast, rich history. I urge everyone to seek out and to share more of those stories.

During the next few weeks, I’ll be working with QC Nerve to reshape the series and put it in a format that can be used by teachers, institutions, community groups, and anyone else who’s interested.

I’d love to get some advice on which formats would work best for people and what supplemental materials might make the series more useful. If you’ve got any ideas, please e-mail me at colorandcharacter@gmail.com.

Stay well and vote early.