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.

So marvelous to see Kamala Harris make history last night, and to hear her invoke so many of the remarkable women whose achievements have empowered and inspired her. History matters.

In that spirit, and in honor of the teachers who started a most challenging school year this week, I offer this excerpt from Chapter 1 of Color and Character, which sets the stage for the accomplishments of West Charlotte’s staff and students during Jim Crow segregation.  

The dictates of white supremacy meant that West Charlotte opened with far fewer resources than Charlotte’s white high schools. The school had been built without a lunchroom, auditorium or gymnasium. It had a handful of social studies maps, a few biology supplies, and some library books, but no radio, no projector, and no lab equipment for chemistry, physics, general science or home economics. The situation was no longer quite as bad as it had been in the 1910s, when North Carolina spent nearly twice as much on white students as on black students, or in the 1920s, when the state spent ten times as much on white school buildings as on black, but the difference remained significant.

What West Charlotte did have was teachers. The growth of high school and college opportunities in the 1920s had expanded North Carolina’s pool of young, well-educated African Americans, and teaching was one of the few professions to which they could aspire. Longtime English teacher Elizabeth Randolph, a Shaw University graduate who came to West Charlotte in 1944, had wanted to be a teacher since she was a little girl. But, she explained, she also had little choice. “I can’t think of anything else I could have done,” she noted. “If you didn’t get a job teaching, you went to the post office or you did something that was menial.” As principal of an urban high school, Clinton Blake could lure prospective teachers with the amenities of city life, as well as a city-funded supplement to the state salary. He had no shortage of talented individuals to choose from.

Many West Charlotte teachers brought experience with wider worlds. Math teacher and athletic coach Jack Martin had attended Johnson C. Smith for both high school and college, because his hometown of Chester, South Carolina had no high school for blacks. After captaining the Johnson C. Smith football team, he had headed to New York University for a masters in physical education before returning to Charlotte to teach. Industrial arts teacher Pop Miller, who grew up in Salisbury, had been drafted by the Army days after he graduated from North Carolina A & T, and served as part of the “Red Ball Express” that supplied American troops as they fought their way across France and into Germany. He brought home a wealth of mechanical and logistical knowledge, as well as four Bronze Stars. Durham native Johnny Holloway, who became West Charlotte’s music director in 1950, had done his wartime service in the 337^th Army Band, pursued graduate work in music at Ohio State, and spent summers in New York City playing his tenor saxophone with the nation’s jazz greats.

These teachers had a demanding job. Preparing young people for a world that would be both competitive and discriminatory required a multifaceted approach, one that started with teaching students to think for themselves. The North Carolina Teachers Record, the journal of North Carolina’s black teachers’ organization, stated the case bluntly in 1936: “The successful teacher is not the one who feeds his pupils on facts, but the one who inspires them to test every fact, however ancient or moss-covered it may be. There is no evidence that North Carolina is in need of an additional supply of rubber stamps.” The endeavor also involved building students’ confidence. “We were really taught.” recalled Sarah Moore Coleman, who went on to a long career in social service, school administration and political organizing. “They taught us to have so much dignity and self-assurance. And not to be afraid.”

Nurturing this kind of independent fortitude required a multiplicity of efforts. Teachers tolerated little nonsense. Saundra Davis’s favorite teacher was Lilliesteen Moore, the poised cosmetology teacher who had strict standards for both learning and ladylike behavior. Davis laughed as she recalled the year that two members of the football team signed up for cosmetology. “You know most people think when you say cosmetology, they think you come in and just learn to do hair a little,” she said. “But you’ve got to learn everything about the body. You’ve got to know what to do for burns and everything else. She just stayed on them all the time. They thought it was a play thing, but she made them learn.”

Staff members also sponsored a wide range of activities that fed body and soul as well as mind. Sarah Coleman particularly loved the ballroom dancing classes taught by English teacher Samuel Moore. “We used to dance to music like the Viennese Waltz,” she recalled. “And they used to swing us up in the air. It was just so beautiful. I never will forget it.” Pop Miller was renowned for his devotion to school rules, enforced by liberal use of his ever-present wooden paddle. But he also believed that high school should be a joyful time.” My high school days were the happiest days of my life,” he explained. “I didn’t have a care in the world. And I always wanted the same thing for all of the students. That’s the time when you start looking at girls. You start dancing and doing the things that you enjoy out of life. And I think you prepare for life, and I think every youngster should have that experience.”

Thanks again to Queen City Nerve for making space for history – the second installment of my five-part series on Black Charlotte history.

This piece started with the kind of research that historians love best. Some years ago, when I was studying West Charlotte High, I read First Class by Alison Stewart, a terrific history of D.C.’s renowned Dunbar High.

The book included an intriguing snippet about Samuel Pride, who was Stewart’s great-grandfather: “Professor Pride was also known to stay up all night on the family porch because some local KKK members let it be known that they did not appreciate the fact that he and some like-minded individuals helped establish a high school for colored children in Charlotte.”

I mentioned the incident in a footnote in Color & Character, and left it at that (when historians find something interesting that we don’t have time to pursue, we’ll often drop it in a footnote, like a bread crumb, and hope some other researcher will pick up the trail). But when I started this series, I wanted to know more.

I reached out to Stewart, who’s now a radio show host in New York, and learned a good bit more about the family. Stewart had heard the story of Pride guarding the family home from her grandmother, who was about 10 years old when the threats started coming.

Then, with the help from good friend and researcher extraordinaire Jill Snider (whose recently published book on North Carolina Black inventor Lucean Headen should be required reading for anyone interested in African American history) I started to put some more pieces together.

As soon as I started digging, it became clear that Samuel Pride was one of those remarkable Black Charlotteans whose accomplishments are far less well-known than they should be. Born in slavery in South Carolina, he came to Charlotte after the Civil War and quickly made his mark.

Once I started looking for Pride, it seemed that he was everywhere: teaching mathematics at Biddle University, heading up a regional Presbyterian Sunday School organization, participating in heated debates at meetings of Charlotte’s Republican Party. At the time of the threats, he was principal of the Myers Street School, Charlotte’s first public school for African Americans.

Rose Leary Love mentioned Pride in her lovely Brooklyn memoir Plum Thickets & Field Daisies: “He is the principal I remember best, and when I think of Mr. Pride, I have vivid impressions of his straight, shiny black hair that seemed to gleam like patent leather to me.”

The best find, though, was a letter in the Charlotte Observer in the fall of 1923, just as Second Ward High School was getting ready to open. Samuel Pride did not live to see his dream realized – he passed away in 1917 from a lung ailment. But his friends did not forget him or his efforts.

Shelia Bumgarner of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library also sent me a copy of the remarkable picture published at the top. It’s a recent library acquisition – it was found in someone’s trash! – and it shows the board of the Charlotte-based Afro-American Mutual Insurance Company.

As Tom Hanchett notes in his recently reissued Sorting Out the New South City, in the 1910s the company advertised itself with the promise that “an Afro-American policy, by an Afro-American agent, made by Afro-American clerks, on an Afro-American husband, an Afro-American wife, or an Afro-American child, makes an Afro-American home independent in the hours of sickness or death.”

In the picture, barber and businessman Thad Tate is standing – looking so very elegant. At center, staring straight into the camera, is Henry Houston, who founded the Charlotte Post. I’m pretty sure the man at the far left, pen in hand, is Samuel Pride.

There is so much left to learn.

Shout out to the Queen City Nerve for making space for history. This Wednesday (July 29) they published the first installment of a series I’m writing about African Americans in Charlotte history.

That first part covers the remarkable lives that African Americans shaped in post-Civil War Charlotte, and the way the White Supremacy Campaign of 1898 obliterated much of that progress.

Future installments will detail the communities that Black Charlotteans created during segregation, the civil rights movement, urban renewal, school desegregation/resegregation and some of the post-civil rights developments that have shaped the challenges we in Charlotte face today.

As well as charting the long history of Black striving, in both good times and bad, I try to show how barriers and opportunities have shifted over time. I hope that learning about the ways that activists of different eras wrestled with the specific challenges they faced will be of use to present-day efforts to make Charlotte a better, fairer place.

For that reason, this is also a story about the powerful white business leaders that have run the city since before the Civil War. Championing a vision of progress, prosperity and order, these leaders have worked tirelessly to build Charlotte into a larger, wealthier, more respected city – all while keeping the “better class” of residents in charge.

In general, this strategy has involved a moderate approach to race. When racial advancement was seen to help the city as a whole – when it gave African American workers reasons to come to or stay in Charlotte, when it kept the federal government out of city affairs, when it boosted the city’s national image – white leaders encouraged some degree of change.

But when African Americans stood in the way of “progress” – when they challenged the hold of business interests over the state legislature, when they lived on prime center-city land that civic leaders wanted to use for more “productive” purposes – those leaders swept them aside.  

This multifaceted story raises the challenge that anyone who writes about Black history has to face: how to balance the hard work and achievements of Black men and women with the oppression they have confronted throughout this nation’s history.

Focusing on achievement can obscure historical wrongs. Focusing on oppression can turn people into faceless victims. It’s essential to understand both. I try to walk that line – sometimes more successfully than others.

My History

I write this as a white cis woman born just over 58 years ago in Houston, Texas. I came to African American history in graduate school. It was an exciting time – the late 1980s – and an exciting place – U.N.C. Chapel Hill. Black history was coming into its own, with new subjects, new sources, new interpretations. There was so much to learn.

I was also surrounded by remarkable scholars, including a fellow Ph.D. candidate named Tom Hanchett. Most of us were white. Academia is a privileged arena, and while Black scholars are growing in numbers and influence, they’re aren’t nearly enough of them. So the rest of us do what we can. You’ll find many of my friends’ books, often published by U.N.C. Press, in the reading suggestions below.

It is, of course, a challenge to write about a history you haven’t lived through. During nearly 30 years of working as a writer, teacher and museum curator here in Charlotte, I’ve done my best to listen.

This journey started with the generosity of Vermelle Ely and her colleagues at the Second Ward High School National Alumni Foundation, and with Rudy Torrence and many other members of the West Charlotte High School National Alumni Association. I try to do right by the stories they and so many others have entrusted to me. Any failings are my own.

I got the idea for this series back in June, when Betsy Mack from the Charlotte Hornets asked me to help bring head coach James Borrego up to speed on Charlotte’s racial history.

Those conversations led me to realize that while many people want to know this history, its pieces are scattered across books, articles, websites, livestreams and countless other places. It’s hard to find an overview that puts them in a clear chronology and brings them into conversation with each other.

Many of us are trying to figure out what roles we can play in the ongoing efforts to remake this upended world where we now live. Maybe, I thought, putting these stories together could be one of mine.

Reading for Race in Charlotte/North Carolina History

(in roughly chronological order)

Janette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850-1910 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

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).

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996, new edition 2019).

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

Fannie Flono, Thriving in the Shadows: The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (Novello Festival Press, 2007).

Jill Snider, Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (University of Florida Press 2003, new edition 2019).

Rose Leary Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies: A Memoir (Novello Festival Press, 1996).

Vann R. Newkirk, “The Development of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Metropolitan Charlotte, North Carolina 1919-1965 (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 2002).

Willie James Griffin: “Courier of Crisis, Messenger of Hope: Trezzvant W. Anderson and the Black Freedom Struggle for Economic Justice” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2016).

Sarah Thuesen, Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

Pamela Grundy, Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1980, 1981).

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).

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

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

Pam Kelley, Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South, (The New Press, 2018).

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

Greg Jarrell, A Riff of Love: Notes on Community and Belonging (Cascade Books, 2018).

By Merisha D. Leak

In response to a Charlotte Observer editorial of March 6, 2019

The other day, you published an article titled “Ardrey Kell player reminds us why we can’t just ‘move on’ from race.

Like all other instances where an offender delivers an offense, a bright spotlight has been shone on this player and his use of a racial slur as if we are to learn from it. Oftentimes, as in this situation, the recipient of the offense is overshadowed and hardly mentioned.

In this case, I’d like to suggest a renaming of the article to “West Charlotte basketball team reminds us why we can’t just ‘move on’ from race” and offer this commentary instead.

The West Charlotte players reminded us that day in and day out, young black men are subjected to ridicule and harsh offense by those who see them as ‘inferior’ or ‘invisible.’ Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that they constantly perform admirable actions, yet get overshadowed by individuals who ‘are good kids’ and just ‘made a mistake.’ Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that time and time again, they are blamed for the actions of others and automatically assumed guilty because of the color of their skin. Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that in more ways than one, this school district and city has failed them at times. Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that their hard work can be discredited because of baseless stereotypes and prejudices thrown their way. Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that there are some people in this city who will only see them as ‘black boys’ and nothing more. Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that those who don’t look like them can be easily forgiven and receive second chances while they are sometimes not even given a second thought. Yet, they stand tall and move on.

They reminded us that this district is ridiculed with inequities that persist because of boundary lines and politics. Yet, they stand tall and move on.

These young men have shown courage and bravery that has rarely been mentioned because those words are not usually associated with young men who look like them.

They remind us why we can’t ‘move on’ from race. It is not because of racial slurs that are thrown around with little regard, followed by obligatory apologies and iterations that ‘those words do not represent who we are’ or ‘those words are not in line with our values’ because the reality is, they are in some sense or another.

Until we all become more comfortable and engage in dialogue with others who don’t look like us, there will always be a division amongst the color lines. An ‘us vs. them.’ An ‘inferior’ vs. ‘superior’ mentality.

Instead of apologies, talk to these young men and others. Bridge the gap and break the stereotypes.

But please, recognize these and other young men of color who are definitely not the ‘underdogs’ in this scenario. They are champions – young kings – and we could all stand to learn a thing or two from them.

Merisha D. Leak, from Lexington, N.C., works at West Charlotte and is currently in her eighth year of teaching. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from U.N.C. Charlotte, and a master’s degree in Education Leadership from the University of Roehampton in London. She works to promote equity in schools by providing access to opportunities for young people regardless of where they come from.

By Pamela Grundy

Charlotte Observer, 6 March 2019

 “West Charlotte loses home court advantage,” the Observer headline read. “Is it about race or too few seats?

The headline addressed controversy over the state high school association’s decision to move a basketball playoff game from West Charlotte’s gynmasium to the larger one at Vance High, depriving West Charlotte’s team of the home-court advantage it had earned with its regular-season record.

But the question – and too much of the discussion – missed the mark. It is precisely because West Charlotte is a high-poverty, predominantly African American school that its gym was considered too small to host a playoff game against Ardrey Kell, a high-wealth, predominantly white, much larger school.

This situation once again underscores the burdens that this community places on its most disadvantaged young people. It also speaks to history.

In the 1970s, Charlotte made a major effort to address the racial inequality caused by centuries of white supremacy, instituting an extensive busing system that made Charlotte-Mecklenburg the most desegregated school system in the nation. While busing held its own inequities, it made educational opportunities more equal than they had ever been, and won the city national acclaim.

That effort, however, did not extend to the crucial realm of housing. Even as West Charlotte High became a national model of successful integration, the historically black neighborhoods around the school were fragmented by urban renewal and highway construction. Funds for new developments and civic improvements were focused almost exclusively on the rapidly growing suburbs – places where an longstanding legacy of housing and loan discrimination made it difficult for most African American families to purchase homes.

When a new lawsuit ended busing, schools diverged as well.   

In 2008, shortly after busing ended, West Charlotte had 1,980 students. Newly built Ardrey Kell had 1,852. That parity did not exist for long. The area around Ardrey Kell built up – in part because the families who could afford to buy new, often-pricy homes wanted to send their children to the thriving, well-off school. West Charlotte, whose aging neighborhoods housed a poorer and more transient population, and whose students thus faced far greater challenges, struggled to keep families.

By 2016, Ardrey Kell enrolled 2,996 students. West Charlotte had 1,478.

These differences in enrollment were compounded by the community resources on which each school could draw – differences clearly on display at sports events. When West Charlotte visited Ardrey Kell for football games, one West Charlotte parent explained, “it was astonishing to see what they had. Just the basic stuff, the condition of the field, the condition of the parking lot. The concessions. It was a clear distinction. So when we talk about separate but equal, not at all.”

This year, West Charlotte’s basketball team overcame disparities in budget and facilities to compile a record that earned them a coveted home court advantage. Then – essentially because the school was black, poor and thus small – it was taken away.  

West Charlotte High’s supporters don’t just sit around and cry about such inequalities.

After the game was moved, they urged people to show up at Vance in droves – and to look past the ugly racial slur that got one of Ardrey Kell’s stars suspended from the contest. The Lions rose to the occasion, and triumphed, 69-53, in front of a large and cheering crowd. Still, the situation created yet another layer of effort for teachers and students who already face tough obstacles. “At what point do we stop expecting our children of color to be “motivated” by ignorant hate? another mother commented. “I’m tired.”

These disparities, of course, are not limited to sports. They exist in every area of school life, from course offerings to arts programs to the experience and stability of teaching staffs. Students at West Charlotte, and at our city’s other high-poverty high schools are asked to do more with less – even though most of them have less to start with.

After the Ardrey Kell player was suspended, his family offered an apology, which read in part: “We do not believe his words represent who he is as a person, his overall character and his heart towards others.” But anything anyone says represents something about them and the world they live in.

Similarly, we who benefit from Charlotte’s prosperity may not believe that the inequalities we tolerate represent who we are as a community, our overall character and our heart towards others. But their existence says something about us.

These deep-seated inequities won’t be solved by just a few more family conversations, a few shifts in school funds or a few charitable donations. We all have to grapple more deeply with the forces – cultural, political and economic – that have brought us to this point.

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article227171024.html

By Pamela Grundy

Late in August, 2002, North Carolina researcher Jack Boger stood before a gathering of colleagues and described the “perfect storm” gathering above southern schools – a convergence of racial resegregation, high-stakes testing, and inadequate funding that was poised to blast away the hard-won gains in educational equality made after the region was forced to abandon its system of separate and decidedly unequal schools.

A generation of schoolchildren later, the wreckage that storm produced lies bare for all to see, chronicled in painful detail in articles such as this week’s Newsweek cover story: “School Segregation in America is as Bad Today as it Was in the 1960s.”

Newsweek singled out Charlotte, North Carolina as a dramatic example of resegregation’s ills, documenting the gaps between the system’s wealthy, predominantly white schools and its low-income, predominantly black and brown schools. Stark inequalities in teacher experience, staff stability, advanced classes, and extracurricular offerings all underscored the persisting truth that separate will never be equal.

Not, of course, that we here in Charlotte didn’t already know. The story has unfolded right beneath our eyes.

In the 1960s and 1970s, pushed by the energy of the civil rights movement, the pressure of federal policy, and a growing understanding of the value of racial integration, residents of Charlotte and other communities took steps to desegregate their schools and other areas of public life. Charlotte’s busing program, which narrowed achievement gaps and produced the most desegregated major school system in the nation, became a point of civic pride.

At the same time, however, other actions undercut these efforts. Urban renewal, highway construction, the closing of historically black schools, and the War on Drugs tore at the fabric of African American communities. Even as civic leaders worked to desegregate their schools, they enacted policies that channeled investment away from the center city neighborhoods where most African Americans lived and toward far-flung, predominantly white suburbs, creating new patterns of residential inequality.

As the century approached its close, more challenges arose. The election of Ronald Reagan opened an era in which political and cultural priorities shifted from the community-building work of the civil rights movement to a celebration of competitive individualism. The harsh rhetoric associated with the War on Drugs, and with the federal push to abandon social welfare programs, revitalized longstanding racial stereotypes. Alarming accounts of the supposed failings of American schools, along with a new obsession with standardized test scores, heightened parent anxiety about securing the “best” school for their children.

In 2003, when a Reagan-appointed judge forced Charlotte to end its desegregation plan, the school board adopted a “choice” plan instead. I well remember how parents scrambled to take advantage of that “choice” to get their children into what were expected to become the “better” schools – the schools in “better” neighborhoods, with “better” test scores and, most important, with “better” ratios between middle class and low-income students. A poverty rate of 40 percent, which generally (although not always) translated to a white majority, was seen as the maximum acceptable.

Fifteen years later, the inequalities those decisions helped create lie bare for all to see.

This narrative of decline can lead to resignation, the tone that Alexander Nazaryan adopted near the end of his Newsweek expose. “Integration is difficult work, the work of generations,” he wrote. “It may not be especially gratifying to those who must undertake it. Segregation, on the other hand, feels natural enough.”

But there is also room for hope, and fuel for determination. The story of the Charlotteans from all backgrounds who rolled up their sleeves and worked to build the nation’s most integrated schools testifies to the power of cooperative effort. While their efforts had flaws – flaws that offer lessons on how to do better in the future – they mustered the courage to confront a formidable status quo, and built a system than was better and fairer than the one that went before, better and fairer than the one we have now.

I first felt the power of this story twelve years ago, when my son, Parker, reached kindergarten age. Our middle-class, predominantly white neighborhood was assigned to Shamrock Gardens Elementary, a high-poverty, high-minority school with high teacher turnover and some of the lowest performance levels in the entire state. Four years earlier, when the “choice” plan debuted, fewer than one in five of the families assigned to Shamrock had chosen to go there.

But I was working on a history of West Charlotte High School, a top-flight historically black school that became a nationally celebrated model of effective integration. Writing West Charlotte’s history meant listening to graduate after graduate, black and white, talk about how much attending an integrated West Charlotte had meant to them, and about the role that desegregated schools had played in making our city a better place.

As my husband and I watched the gains of integration crumble before our eyes, we decided we would not be part of its demise. When the time came to choose a school for Parker, we placed him at Shamrock, and rolled up our own sleeves.

That decision launched us on a remarkable adventure. A decade of hard work by students, parents, staff, administrators, community members and district leaders turned Shamrock into a vibrant school that now offers a marvelous education to a racially and economically diverse group of students. “Gratifying” does not even began to describe what that experience has meant to us.

This is an important moment. The popularity of city living has created – for the present – a balance that makes it possible to take meaningful steps to reintegrate the high-poverty, racially isolated schools that populate the centers of so many cities (how to maintain that balance is, of course, an important question in itself). But in a time of legal and political constraints, when reversing resegregation depends in large part on families’ willingness to undertake the very real challenges of true integration, we need to keep the stories of past accomplishments before us, to create a culture of possibility strong enough to overcome the pressure to make the “safe” choice of decamping to the suburbs, to private institutions, or to the highly segregated realm of charter schools.

Knowing how school desegregation came apart tells us a great deal about where we are today, as communities and as a nation. Knowing how it was built tells us where we can go. As we confront the challenges of our own day, we must keep both stories before us.

West Charlotte student Kaycee Hailey uses a Charlotte Observer article to discuss the challenges facing West Charlotte students and the strengths needed to overcome them.

By Kaycee Hailey

Charlotte Observer, 20 November 2017

The first time I visited West Charlotte High School, I was in fourth grade. I saw run-down buildings, unruly students and exasperated teachers. I was scared. That day I promised myself that I would never go to that school again.

But at the end of eighth grade, I faced a haunting realization. I had been assigned to attend the school I so despised. There was a general stigma about West Charlotte that I bought into. But when I arrived, that belief faded away.

I am one of many students at West Charlotte who are dedicated to their coursework and work hard every day. Although students at West Charlotte face many obstacles, they still strive to achieve their best. One of those obstacles facing the kids in our community is systemic educational injustice.

CMS is a segregated district. I go to a segregated school. I see the problems within my school and know that not every school in our district is like this. In my first semester of school I saw a fellow student get handcuffed and escorted out of the cafeteria. I’ve seen teachers storm out of classrooms and quit halfway through a class. I am often advised to take more rigorous classes, such as AP courses, but few are available at my school. I have friends at other schools whose entire schedules can be filled with AP courses. It is easy to tell that teachers here are also fed up with the conditions of our school. Teachers are in and out very quickly. It frustrates me that the quality of education available to a child can depend on factors out of our control.

West Charlotte is a microcosm of a global issue. Too often, where children are born limits their educational opportunities. In some places children are barred from getting a quality education simply because there is not a strong school close enough to their home. Lack of education can trap children in the situations they were born into. Education cannot solve everything, but it can open many doors for young people.

When I think about how I can pursue answers towards the problem of systematic educational inequity, I start with what I can do to change that. I represent black youth and young black women. I view it as my responsibility to represent these groups to the best of my ability.

One of the reasons I work so hard in school is to show that I can make the best of any circumstances. I work hard to show that I am worthy of an excellent education, just as so many of my peers are. I take every opportunity I can to vocalize systematic educational inequity and my frustrations with the way things currently are. I make sure my experiences are known to those who might otherwise not understand my perspective. I also encourage my peers to work their hardest to show that we are all capable of success no matter the obstacles we face.

Read more here: charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article185311053.html#storylink=cpy

By Pamela Grundy

Charlotte Observer, 1 October 2017

David Switzer’s message to parents at Ardrey Kell High School minced no words.

“We had a significant number of students who were intoxicated, high on drugs, cussing at other students, spitting and throwing items at our band, chanting inappropriate cuss words, shouting racial comments towards other students, vaping, and physically abusing their peers,” the Ardrey Kell principal said of his decision to clear the student section at a recent home football game.

While the incident raises many issues, I want to highlight an especially troubling piece, the “shouting of racial comments.” Switzer gave further details to an Observer reporter, explaining that some participants targeted a visiting African American eighth-grader with calls of: “Black boy, you better watch your back! Black boy, you better keep your head on a swivel!”

Our children are growing up in an era of rising racial polarization, when black activists and white supremacists are taking to the streets in numbers not seen since the 1960s; when issues such as police shootings of African Americans and deportation of young Latinos have become the focus of intense public debate; and when the occupant of the White House has opened a racially charged feud with, of all institutions, the NFL.

We need to take a hard look at what our young people are learning from the world around them.

Regardless of what teachers, parents, ministers and other adults say, young people take important lessons from the separate and unequal world in which too many of us live – lessons about who belongs where, about who matters and who doesn’t, about who challenges injustice and who defends the status quo.

No one is better than a teenager at figuring out when platitudes don’t match reality.

Those ugly threats hurled at the football game do not, of course, represent the views of a majority of Ardrey Kell students. Nor is Ardrey Kell the only school where this kind of conflict arises. But that a group of young people at one of our county’s wealthiest, whitest high schools felt empowered to menace a black eighth grader is a warning.

The dramatic racial and economic divides that mark our county’s housing patterns, and thus the makeup of many of our public schools, do not serve the interests of our county or our nation. We all need to do more to address the mix of developer priorities, public policies and private choices that has brought us to this crossroads.

Our community has a history of doing this difficult work. In 1974, faced with the greatest crisis in the county’s history, Mecklenburg County residents rose to the occasion and pitched in on a school assignment plan that created the nation’s most desegregated schools. Parents who could have sent their children to private schools put them on the bus instead. Sadly, this heroic effort did not extend to housing, which limited its long-term legacy. Still, it made our community a better, fairer more prosperous place.

The present day holds little prospect for such bold action. But plenty can be done to tackle racially and economically isolated schools.

Dedicated parents at Billingsville, Cotswold, Dilworth, Sedgfield and Eastover offer one example, as they work to merge their attendance zones and create strong, racially and economically mixed schools that help all their students grow in many ways.

So do parents at places such as Idlewild, Oakhurst, McClintock and East Mecklenburg, who have bucked the status quo and chosen homes and schools based on the belief that schools are not defined solely by test scores, and that educating a child and bridging racial and economic gaps are not mutually exclusive.

Reaching across social divides is not easy for anyone. As students at West Charlotte High School noted in 1971, the work requires “giving of oneself, sharing with others, investigating the problems of our society . . . and finding workable solutions.” It involves a level of commitment, energy and courage that goes beyond volunteerism. But this is precisely the kind of commitment, energy and courage that our community and our country need right now. These are the kinds of lessons that our children need to learn.

By Pamela Grundy

Sixty years ago this week, Charlotte, North Carolina vaulted into the worldwide spotlight when 15-year-old Dorothy Counts was met by a jeering white mob as she arrived for her first day at previously all-white Harding High School.

Seeing a newspaper photograph of the confrontation from his home in Paris, author James Baldwin decided to return to the U.S. “Some one of us should have been there with her,” he wrote. In India, missionaries Darius and Vera Swann saw the same picture and made a similar decision. They moved to Charlotte to join the struggle for equality, and became the lead plaintiffs in Charlotte’s landmark Swann school busing case, in which legendary civil rights attorney Julius Chambers convinced federal judge James McMillan to order Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to fully desegregate every school in the district.

The changes Swann required transformed Charlotte. School desegregation helped break down racial barriers, dramatically reduced educational inequalities and raised student performance across the board. Initially a focus of resentment, busing became a point of pride. Residents still talk of the day in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan came to town to preach his rising gospel of colorblind, competitive individualism, and was greeted with a chilly silence when he called busing a “failed experiment.”

This fall, however, many Charlotte-Mecklenburg students walk through the doors of schools that are once more separate and unequal, and that have been linked to some of the nation’s lowest rates of social mobility. Less than two decades after a Reagan-appointed judge put an end to busing, nearly half the schools in this booming city have poverty rates of 70 percent or higher. Many are more than 90 percent nonwhite. Performance levels, course offerings and extracurricular activities are dramatically lower at the district’s high-poverty schools than at its high-wealth schools. Rather than fostering connections, schools now exacerbate divisions.

A year ago, when the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparked an uprising that once again thrust dramatic images of Charlotte conflicts into the worldwide spotlight, separate and unequal schools became a key focus of the protest. As a man with a bullhorn announced on one tense evening: “They got us in failing schools without adequate resources and then you don’t have the education to get jobs.”

Urban districts across the nation need a new direction. In an era rife with inequality and growing racial unrest, we need to turn back to the hard-won wisdom of the 1960s and 1970s, to work together to recapture the many benefits of desegregated schools, and to extend those benefits to other areas of urban life. Although current federal policy has doubled down on individualism and the false promises of “choice,” the new wave of young families drawn to urban centers offers new opportunities to build connections and community – if families and school districts will do the work required to turn ideal into reality.

The Swann case addressed the problems of segregation in multiple ways. Darius and Vera Swann stressed the value of interracial interaction. “We believe that an integrated school will best prepare young people for responsibility in an integrated society,” they wrote about their son, James. “Having lived practically all of his life in India, James has never known the meaning of racial segregation. We have been happy to watch him grow and develop with an unaffected openness to people of all races and backgrounds, and we feel it our duty as parents to insure that this healthy development continue.”

Julius Chambers pointed to the realities of politics and power. In his assessment, Charlotte’s predominantly white leadership would only make all schools genuinely equal if all schools educated white as well as black 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,” he told the U.S. Senate in 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.”

Reaching those lofty goals proved far from easy. Charlotte’s first year of busing, 1970-71, saw boycotts, demonstrations, bomb threats, school closings, fights, and student walkouts. That spring, students at West Charlotte High School, the historically black school that would eventually become the flagship of the desegregated system, outlined the profoundly personal commitment required to overcome racial differences and build new kinds of schools. “To change things for the better, everyone must do something,” they wrote. “COME TOGETHER. At first glance, that may seem simple enough, but it is really a tremendous task. It means giving of oneself, sharing with others, investigating the problems of our society . . . and finding workable solutions.”

Charlotte residents rose to the occasion. A grassroots community group crafted a communitywide plan in which children from some of Charlotte’s wealthiest white neighborhoods were assigned to historically black West Charlotte. Rather than fleeing to private schools, parents put their children on the bus. In 1974, West Charlotte students proudly invited students from busing-torn Boston to come see desegregation in action. The irony of a group of northerners coming South to learn lessons in race relations was lost on no one. In the years that followed, school communities across the county engaged in the demanding work required to build genuinely integrated institutions.

In the process, Charlotte became a better, fairer, more prosperous community. “Almost immediately after we integrated our schools,” leading banker Hugh McColl would famously write, “the southern economy took off like a wildfire in the wind. Integration – and the diversity it began to nourish – became a source of economic, cultural and community strength.”

But the schools in which Charlotte residents took such pride stood on shaky ground. The painstaking efforts devoted to the busing plan were not matched by similar endeavors in jobs or housing. Instead, those sectors were shaped by a now-familiar combination of market forces, public policies, and investment priorities that favored the already powerful. The neighborhoods in Charlotte’s center city faced the same challenges that eroded urban black communities across the country: urban renewal, highway construction, deindustrialization, limited investment, an expanding drug trade, mass incarceration. The outer edges of the county, in contrast, filled with prosperous new subdivisions.

Commitment to desegregation also began to wane, eroded in large part by the Reagan-era emphasis on “colorblind” individualism. In 1999, Reagan-appointed federal judge Robert Potter, ruled that Charlotte-Mecklenburg had overcome the ills of segregation “to the extent practicable,” and ended the busing plan.

The return to neighborhood schools opened huge gaps between the expansive offerings at the district’s high-wealth, predominantly white suburban schools, and the far narrower opportunities at low-wealth, predominantly minority center city schools, whose students struggled with the challenges – poverty, instability, violence, trauma – that plagued their counterparts across the country. The change at West Charlotte was especially dramatic. In 2005, a judge surveyed the school that had once been a national model of excellence, and accused it of “academic genocide.”

Charlotte and the nation have now seen two decades of bipartisan, largely ineffective efforts to make segregation work, primarily through the deployment of reform strategies focused on “business efficiency,” “accountability,” and “choice.” These failings – most notably the stark inequalities that mark the large, unified district of Charlotte-Mecklenburg – underscore the lasting truth of the arguments made by Julius Chambers half a century ago. The essential task of educational equality cannot be left to policy or to the workings of a supposedly free market. Everyone must pitch in.

Around the country, families and districts are working on pieces of this challenge, employing a range of strategies. This spring, for example, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board resurrected a busing-era strategy of “pairing” high and low poverty elementary schools. The district has turned to partial magnet programs to diversify and revitalize neighborhood schools without displacing current students. Families in a number of neighborhoods have launched efforts to reintegrate struggling schools. While these efforts are not without their perils – especially if better-off families focus their energy and resources on efforts targeted to their own children – they offer the best hope for building stable, thriving schools.

While some of these hands-on efforts are longstanding, many are in their infancy, and need to be supported through vigorous public policies and private actions that once again actively encourage racial and economic integration, in neighborhoods as well as schools. Only then will communities be able to genuinely engage the talents and resources of a wide variety of residents, allow children to “grow and develop with an unaffected openness to people of all races and backgrounds,” and offer the equal opportunities promised in our Constitution.

Photograph of Dorothy Counts, September 4, 1957. By Don Sturkey, courtesy of The Charlotte Observer.