Sorting Out the New South City, Second Edition: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875–1975

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION AND THE AUTHOR

"Tom Hanchett’s Sorting Out the New South City [discovers] surprising things about the development of Southern cities. The segregated Southern city of the mid-20th century originated not in the Old South or the early decades of the New; during those periods, the distribution of races throughout the city was in a ‘salt and pepper’ pattern. Urban segregation, Mr. Hanchett suggests, was a later creation, part of the rebellion against Reconstruction. Segregation was not a tradition; it was literally reactionary, a 20th-century reversal."—New York Times

Hanchett has become this city’s foremost ‘history ambassador,’ a historian with a wealth of knowledge and a knack for translating it into stories for the public.—Charlotte Magazine

This is a southern story of the emergence of mercantile, industrial, banking, and real estate entrepreneurs and how they shaped a city in an era of black disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, and the waning political power of white workers. … [Hanchett] provides a broad context for understanding that the shape of our cities is far from happenstance.—Southern Cultures

Engaging wider narratives and historiographical debates, meticulously mapping local particularities, and building upon years of experience in the city’s historic preservation effort, Hanchett not only illuminates Charlotte’s contested past but also makes a significant contribution to American urban history.—Journal of American History

This excellent study gives the city the attention it deserves, especially now that it has emerged as a major international financial center. … [It] chronicles Charlotte’s history through the lens of its landscape and spatial profile: the shape and character of its neighborhoods, land uses, street patterns, and populations. … Hanchett’s judgments are thoughtful and well-supported, and the result is a most worthwhile addition to the literature on the urban South.—American Historical Review

This well-crafted and extremely readable study of a small city and its development should be a touchstone for comparative analysis in both southern and urban history.—Choice

An excellent case study of long-term urban growth.

—Winston-Salem Journal

SORTING OUT THE NEW SOUTH CITY

SORTING OUT THE NEW SOUTH CITY

RACE, CLASS, AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN CHARLOTTE, 1875–1975

THOMAS W. HANCHETT

SECOND EDITION

WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Electra by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member

of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

To make this volume more affordable, the author has chosen

not to receive royalties.

Cover illustrations: map of Charlotte and postcard of

Tryon Street; courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina

Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

ISBN 978-1-4696-5644-1 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-5645-8 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

© 1998 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanchett, Thomas W. Sorting out the New South city :

race, class, and urban development in Charlotte,

1875–1975 / by Thomas W. Hanchett.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2376-7 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4677-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Charlotte (N.C.)—History. I. Title.

F264.C4H28 1998    97-40785

975.6′76—dc21        CIP

FOR THE SAWYERS AND THE HANCHETTS, ESPECIALLY LYDIA

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   The Preindustrial City

2   Habiliments of Progress

3   Insolence

4   Creating Blue-Collar Neighborhoods

5   Creating Black Neighborhoods

6   Creating White-Collar Neighborhoods

7   Downtown in the 1900s–1920s

8   The Limits of Local Government: Debating Annexation and Planning

9   The Federal City: From Patchwork to Sectors

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAPS

Charlotte Census Tracts, ca. 1980

Charlotte Black Population by Census Tract, ca. 2017

Charlotte Median Household Income by Census Tract, ca. 2017

Charlotte Foreign-Born Population by Census Tract, ca. 2017

TABLES

1.   Charlotte Population, 1850–1990

2.   Conveners of Charlotte’s First Railroad Meeting, 1845

3.   Black and White Populations of Charlotte by Ward, 1879

4.   1896 Election Margins in Charlotte Township

5.   Charlotte’s New South Banks, 1865–1930

6.   Downtown Charlotte’s Tall Building Boom, 1900–1930

7.   Largest New Deal FERA/CWA Projects in Mecklenburg, 1933–1935

8.   Most Racially Segregated Cities in the United States, 1940 and 1970

COLOR FIGURES

FOLLOWING PAGE 148

1.   Race and Occupation in a Portion of First Ward, ca. 1875

2.   Race in a Portion of First Ward, ca. 1910

3.   Federal HOLC Redlining, 1937

4.   Building Zone Map of Charlotte, 1947

FIGURES

1.   Charlotte Land Use, ca. 1975

2.   Charlotte Land Use, ca. 1925

3.   Charlotte Land Use, ca. 1875

4.   The City of Charlotte, 1925

5.   Neighborhoods Discussed in Detail in This Study

6.   Mecklenburg’s Social Pyramid

7.   Regional Railroad Hub, 1876

8.   Cotton Wagons Lined Up Near the Wharf

9.   Cotton Wharf and Downtown, 1877 Beers Map

10.   Business Buildings Old and New, Independence Square

11.   Jacob Rintels’s Mansion, Built 1874

12.   Tryon Street, ca. 1875

13.   A Portion of the Butler and Spratt Map, 1892

14.   Alpha Mill Cottages, Constructed ca. 1890

15.   Original Proposal for Dilworth, 1891

16.   Dilworth’s Proposed African Streets, 1891

17.   Dilworth’s Railroad Corridor, 1891

18.   Four-Room Mill Cottage

19.   Mallonee-Jones and Harrill-Porter Houses

20.   Charlotte Railroad Connections, 1919

21.   Southern Textiles Overtake New England

22.   Charlotte and the Piedmont Textile Region

23.   Belmont-Villa Heights and North Charlotte

24.   Map of Belmont Springs, 1896

25.   Charlotte Cotton Compress, 1899

26.   Blue-Collar Housing in Belmont-Villa Heights

27.   Highland Park #3 Mill, 1903

28.   Highland Park #3 Mill Village, 1903

29.   Real Estate Ads, 1901

30.   Black Neighborhoods, ca. 1917

31.   Hood’s Shotgun Houses

32.   Making a Shotgun House a Home

33.   Thad Tate Residence

34.   Good Samaritan Hospital

35.   Myers Street School

36.   Afro-American Mutual Insurance

37.   South Brevard Street in Brooklyn

38.   Johnson C. Smith University Campus

39.   Early Suburbs Developed for White-Collar Whites

40.   Piedmont Park Plat Map, ca. 1900

41.   Nolen Sketch for Cemetery Square

42.   Suburban Architecture: Colonial Revival

43.   Suburban Architecture: Rectilinear

44.   Suburban Architecture: Bungalow

45.   Second-Tier White-Collar Suburbs, 1910s

46.   Olmsted Plan for Dilworth, 1912

47.   Nolen’s Plan for Myers Park, 1911

48.   Nolen’s Plan for Queens (Presbyterian) College

49.   Nolen Lot Plan, Myers Park

50.   New Land Uses on North Tryon Street

51.   1897 Mecklenburg County Courthouse

52.   Office Development Begins on South Tryon

53.   The Financial Canyon

54.   1891 Charlotte City Hall

55.   1927 Charlotte City Hall

56.   Charlotte’s Expanding Boundaries

57.   Independence Boulevard

58.   From Convenience Shopping to Shopping Center

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

How did Charlotte get segregated? It’s a surprising story. When I started studying the city’s older neighborhoods as a young researcher for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission back in the 1980s, I assumed that Charlotte and other southern cities had always been segregated. If not always, then surely since the end of the Civil War or perhaps the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s.

But when I mapped the city’s land use, rich and poor, black and white, I found that separate neighborhoods for each of those groups did not become a reality until around 1900. My maps before that period showed a city with no elite residential district, nothing that we would call an exclusive neighborhood today. I had never thought about that term, by the way. It’s just a synonym for good neighborhood, right? Even more surprising, my research showed African Americans dispersed throughout the city, not relegated to a black side of town.

When I’m talking about segregation, you’ll note, I’m thinking of two kinds of division. One is racial separation—which until recently meant black and white in most of the South since immigrants were rare in this region until the last years of the twentieth century. The other kind of segregation is economic, where neighborhood populations are separated by income. Racial and economic segregation are not the same thing, though they often interact. Both kinds of segregation ramped up dramatically in the years around 1900 and continued to intensify throughout the twentieth century.

Why did things change around 1900? As I dug into that question, I learned about the deep economic depression of the early 1890s, which sparked a period of economic fear and political turmoil similar to the one following the Great Recession that began in 2008. Voters in the 1890s tried to change the political and economic system in a movement called the Fusion, supported by both blacks and nonwealthy whites. But the Fusion sparked a backlash by the white elite. How dare you take government out of the hands of the men of property and put it in the hands of those who are ignorant and own no property? thundered the mayor of Charlotte. Wealthy leaders searched for what we would now call a wedge issue. As a Charlotte Observer headline read in 1898: White Supremacy Shall Be the Issue.

The statewide white supremacy campaign of 1898–1900 was devastatingly effective. It demonized African Americans, blaming them for all of society’s ills. North Carolina wrote a new state constitution that sharply limited voting rights, not just for black people but also for low-wealth whites. More broadly, the political messages of white supremacy filtered into every aspect of southern life. Negroes and the lower class of whites were second-class citizens and should be set apart. In the years around 1900, racial segregation sharpened abruptly. Separate white and colored waiting rooms appeared at Charlotte’s train stations in 1896. A new North Carolina law in 1903 required African Americans to sit at the back of streetcars (and later at the back of buses). When people swore on a Bible before testifying in court, the Mecklenburg County courthouse now had separate white and colored Bibles.

Segregation was not just racial; it was also economic. Out in the suburban neighborhoods just coming into existence on the edges of the city, new restrictive covenants appeared in the land deeds starting in 1901. This property shall be used only by members of the Caucasian race, read a typical deed, for a house costing not less than XXX dollars.¹ The racial aspect was unmistakable, but the price point also intentionally excluded low-wealth whites. A similar sorting went on in nonsuburban parts of the city, as well. When a new white working-class district opened around the just-built textile mills along North Davidson Street in 1903, a prosperous downtown minister applauded the way it set apart the mill people as a class to themselves. If separate churches and schools are provided to these people, all to themselves, they … do better than where mill people and others are mixed promiscuously.

Once set in motion, segregation gathered momentum. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, for instance, the federal government sought to boost the faltering mortgage market. Washington mapped credit risk in every American city, asking local leaders to identify the neighborhoods where banks could most safely lend. Shown in green and blue, those neighborhoods invariably clustered where men of property lived—in Charlotte, that was to the southeast. The maps demarcated undesirable districts in red and yellow. Any land with African American residents was redlined, even places such as Biddleville, where professors lived near Charlotte’s black Johnson C. Smith University. Likewise, areas with working-class whites were marked in red or yellow. Redlining became a self-fulfilling prophesy. As it became harder for them to obtain loans, residents who were not white and wealthy found their neighborhoods dominated by absentee landlords.

Redlining by itself would have been bad enough, but it was just one of a network of programs that reinforced and deepened segregation throughout the mid-twentieth century, decade after decade. In the 1930s, the New Deal funneled federal public works—construction of Charlotte Memorial Hospital, for instance—away from the north and west sides of town toward the more wealthy south and east. In the 1940s, newly instituted zoning protected white well-to-do neighborhoods in southeast Charlotte by requiring single-family development. Nonwealthy white areas never got single-family zoning. Neither did black neighborhoods. Brooklyn, the city’s leading African American district, was zoned industrial—signaling that landlords should quit maintaining existing dwellings. In the 1950s, highway planners set the routes for Interstates 77 and 85, as well as the Interstate 277 inner loop. All went through black neighborhoods, which got virtually no say since most African Americans remained barred from the ballot box until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the 1960s, bulldozers rolled across Charlotte’s Brooklyn as federal urban renewal promised to wipe out blight. More than 1,000 black families lost their homes—owners as well as renters—and over 200 businesses closed, most never to reopen. Government built not a single unit of new housing to replace what was taken.

These programs and more all reinforced the same message: an exclusive neighborhood was the only place to be. For upscale whites, living in an exclusive neighborhood surrounded by other exclusive neighborhoods, as far away as possible from black people and also from low-income white people, seemed the only sure way to protect one’s future. By the 1970s, homebuyers who had the money and choice clustered in a wedge of wealth in southeast Charlotte. People with fewer dollars tended to live in a crescent stretching from Charlotte Douglas Airport at the west to Johnson C. Smith University northwest of the center city to Central Avenue and Independence Boulevard in the east. Within that crescent-and-wedge pattern of economic segregation was now also sharp racial separation. African Americans lived mostly west of Tryon Street. In the east, along Central Avenue, for example, neighborhoods were often totally white.

Discovering this history, I began to see segregation not as an age-old given but as the result of deliberate choices. Voices around me had always said segregation is natural, people just want to live with their own kind, it’s just the market at work. Instead, I realized, segregation had begun and deepened as a result of choices. Those choices were made by people, including people like me. Some were in government, some were outside of it.² Few, I believe, saw themselves as scheming to intentionally hurt particular social groups. If you were a decision maker insulated inside a neighborhood of people very much like yourself, there was little possibility that you would ever hear perspectives different from your own. A highway planner in the 1950s, for example, looking for where land was cheap and political resistance would be low, would be drawn to routes through black neighborhoods. An urban renewal official in the 1960s knew nothing of the vibrant life in the Brooklyn neighborhood he had never visited. So it was easy for him to pat himself on the back for wiping out blight and creating a better Charlotte for all. Likewise, a newcomer arriving in Charlotte might purely look for the best schools for her children. She’d find them in well-funded southeast Charlotte. Why they clustered there, or how society might be disadvantaged by that inequality, all seemed beside the point.

CHARLOTTE CENSUS TRACTS, CA. 1980

Crescent-and-wedge: a wedge of wealth can be seen in southeast Charlotte ca. 1980, and the rest of the city forms a crescent around that wedge. Racial division splits the crescent—black to the west, white to the east. Note the path of the interstate expressways. (Map by Laura Simmons, UNC Charlotte Urban Institute; based on maps in Clay and Stuart, Charlotte: Patterns and Trends of a Dynamic City.)

BREAKING THE PATTERNS OF SEGREGATION

If people created segregation, then people can dismantle it. This book reveals the history that gave us the crescent-and-wedge map and the daily realities of racial and economic inequality in Charlotte. But we do not have to be prisoners of that past.

The history in the pages that follow ends in the mid-1970s, when the sorting of Charlotte had coalesced into clear patterns.³ Here, I’d like to focus on four ways that Charlotte’s landscape has changed since then. We’ll touch on schools and busing, on housing policy, on the wave of immigrants who are giving Charlotte a global flavor for the first time, and on gentrification. I’ll try to suggest how the history of past inequalities still affects us today. But I’ll also show a city that is capable of great change. Segregation patterns are not what they were when I arrived here as that young researcher in the 1980s.

SCHOOLS: BUSING AND BEYOND

In mid-twentieth-century Charlotte, well-to-do political leaders from a small southeast sliver of the city controlled all public expenditures—and not surprisingly, the schools in their part of town had much better facilities than in either black or working-class white areas. The U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 disrupted that status quo, opening politics to fresh voices. Neighborhoods outside the wealthy wedge, black and white, began to band together for change. Could they end the old at-large system of representation? The at-large system required politicians to run citywide—which gave a big advantage to well-funded candidates. Instead, could Charlotte create a district-based system that would bring many perspectives to the table?

At the same time that these political changes were brewing, Charlotte’s long-simmering civil rights movement burst forth. Julius Chambers opened a law office in town, supported in part by the national NAACP. Among the lawsuits he launched was Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1966. Theoretically, Charlotte’s schools had desegregated in 1957, reluctantly following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that separate but equal schools were inherently unequal. In actuality, nearly all black children still attended segregated schools, which were woefully underfunded compared to white ones. Chambers argued (much as this book does) that public policy had helped create that inequality. Therefore, he asserted, public policy must dismantle it.

Careful research and passionate arguments by Chambers persuaded the local white federal judge, James B. McMillan, to rule that Charlotte must use effective tools to end inequality—including putting pupils on school buses. The U.S. Supreme Court backed him on April 20, 1971. Swann v. Mecklenburg became the national test case for busing, which now spread to nearly every American metropolitan area.

Chambers, McMillan, and their supporters expected busing to do two things. In the short term, it would pair schools: pupils in early grades would be bused from their neighborhood to the partner school, while pupils in later grades would be bused in the opposite direction. Instantly, children in poor neighborhoods would have access to much better schools. And decision makers would no longer have an incentive to funnel big dollars only to their neighborhood schools. In the longer term, busing proponents hoped, Charlotte’s education officials could build new schools between neighborhoods of different racial/economic populations, encouraging natural integration.

White Charlotteans struggled over how to meet the busing decision. Initially, well-to-do politicians drew up a plan that exempted their own neighborhoods. That affront pushed other areas finally to come together as an active political force. In 1974 they pushed successfully for a new busing plan that applied to all. (The momentum generated by that victory led in 1977 to a hybrid district/at-large election system, ending the political dominance of the southeast wedge.) Charlotte became known as the city that made busing work.⁴

Over the next twenty years, busing made Charlotte a better place. Achievement scores went up. School facilities improved. Center-city neighborhoods, which people with money and choice had fled seeking good schools, now stabilized. The city gained a national reputation as a leader in the South, a progressive place that embraced change. Companies put Charlotte on their shortlists for opening branches. Population shot up from barely 200,000 in 1960 to over 400,000 by the mid-1990s.

But not everyone liked busing. African American children bore the bigger burden, as they were more often bused in the earliest grades. White suburbanites complained that school construction never kept up with growth out at the city’s fast-expanding edges. County officials failed to find dollars to build the proposed in-city schools between existing neighborhoods. For everyone, bus rides got less and less desirable as the distances across the growing metropolis became longer and longer.

A group of newcomers to the city filed a lawsuit demanding the end of busing. In 1999 federal judge Robert Potter ruled that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) was unitary; there were no longer any lingering effects of historic segregation, he asserted. Potter now made it illegal to consider race in pupil assignment. Busing for racial balance was dead.

But debates over school assignment and funding have not cooled one bit since 1999. County budgets still squeeze CMS, resulting in many overcrowded facilities. Some schools remain integrated, but a growing number are resegregating racially—and, to an even greater extent, in terms of wealth. Families with money and choice vie to get into the best schools, mostly still in the southern wedge, which makes them especially overcrowded. Fed up, people threaten to leave for private schools or charter schools.

Two episodes symbolized the issues at play as the 2020s began. One was a grassroots effort to create a mix of pupils with different levels of family resources. The other story hinged on a basketball game.

Economic disparities, even more than race, have hindered opportunities for many children. National studies show that parents with resources are much more able to give their kids advantages that boost their readiness to learn. Who most often did well on standardized achievement tests? Children of wealth. But if you mixed children of wealth with other youngsters, scores improved at the bottom of the ladder—and children in the top echelon experienced no harm.⁵ Mixing economic populations brought an array of resources to schools that could benefit everyone. Children saw a range of role models, parenting styles, and cultural expectations. If the goal of education was to build adults who could function well in the world, it seemed smart for schools to include a broad cross section of society.

At Shamrock Gardens Elementary on Charlotte’s east side, a group of parents intentionally set out to create an economically integrated school. Built in the 1950s, the aging facility served a geographic area that possessed a mix of racial, ethnic, and economic groups. Few were wealthy, and most were people of color, including African Americans and one of the city’s largest populations of immigrant families. Relatively well-off white families predominated in one sub-neighborhood, Plaza Midwood, but no parents there sent their children to Shamrock.

Could that change? asked several idealistic young Plaza Midwood parents in 2006.⁶ Two families from the neighborhood joined the school that year; ten families had joined by 2010 and nineteen by 2014.⁷ A partial magnet for gifted students helped attract interest, but most youngsters in those classes came from the school’s regular population. There had always been plenty of smart kids at Shamrock, said Pamela Grundy, whose son was the only Plaza Midwood child in the first magnet class. The teachers had just been too overwhelmed to give them many opportunities to shine.⁸ As the magnet flourished, the rest of the school adopted its curriculum and teaching methods. Green-thumb parents planted a butterfly garden in the school’s courtyard, not only beautifying the space but also creating a teaching tool. When parents and staff launched a PTA—rare in high-poverty schools—Mexican soft drinks and pastries from an eastside panaderia helped attract families of every background to its meetings.

Test scores went up for every racial and economic group. In the early 2000s, the school had scored so low on federal guidelines that parents could opt out under the No Child Left Behind program. Improvements lifted that sanction by 2010. The school moved from a D on the state’s grading system in 2014 to a B in 2018. Yet economically disadvantaged children still made up 48.8 percent of the student body (slightly higher than the statewide average of 44.3 percent).⁹ Shamrock remained racially and ethnically diverse. Of its 492 students in 2018, 191 were black, 148 were white, and 129 were Hispanic.¹⁰

Parents in a handful of other schools across CMS began to voluntarily follow the Shamrock model. And in 2018 the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education moved to pair some schools. In two pilot experiments, a school in a higher-wealth, mostly white neighborhood would be matched with a school in a lower-wealth, mostly minority area. Kids from both schools would mix together in one building in early grades and in the other building in higher grades.¹¹ Some parents worried about property values. One complained on Facebook that we paid extra to buy a house in a prestigious assignment zone: So not only does our house lose value, but our son is losing some choices for curriculum and activities. I’m not saying those are terrible schools …¹² But other neighbors argued that the plan was worth trying for the good of all. We want to be diverse, not divided, said one of many parents who spoke in favor at a public hearing.¹³

The newspaper called the pairings Charlotte’s boldest bid to overcome school segregation. That seemed a sizable overstatement in comparison to the systemwide efforts of pre-Potter busing. But it did demonstrate that there was willingness to tackle the inequities of racial and economic segregation. Would additional steps follow?

In the spring of 2019, two Charlotte basketball teams vied to enter the final rounds of the statewide high school championships. West Charlotte High, on the city’s historically black west side, had racked up the better win-loss record, so it would have the home-court advantage over Ardrey Kell, located in Charlotte’s booming upscale south suburbs.¹⁴

Or would it? Days before the big event, the statewide athletic association ruled that West Charlotte’s gymnasium had too few seats for a playoff game. The match-up would be moved.

In the end, West Charlotte players rallied to win the game at the substitute site, but the episode stung deeply. Wrote the Charlotte Observer: CMS struggles with what county commissioner Velma Leake [a longtime westside leader] describes as a two-tier school system: the haves and the have-nots.

Ardrey Kell was not a segregation-era school. It had opened in 2006. It lay in the midst of a prosperous new area filled with families who could raise private funds and who lobbied hard for good facilities for their children. Most Kell parents had no personal connection with the era of officially separate black and white schools in Charlotte. They loved Ardrey Kell but often expressed frustration about inadequate facilities as more and more students crowded in. Shouldn’t Charlotte’s scarce tax dollars go to their part of the county?

West Charlotte High, on the economically struggling west side, had few wealthy and well-connected families. Alumni from the era before the Potter decision tried hard to make up the difference, organizing philanthropic funds to help the school. Despite that good work, enrollment trended lower than in the school’s heyday. County officials who looked only at statistics saw little reason to update its decades-old facilities.¹⁵

The decision by the out-of-town state athletic association put the difference between the schools into sharp perspective. Old patterns of inequality do not simply go away, the episode showed. History has a momentum. Today’s decisions, consciously or unconsciously, rest on the platform of the past. And so it was that more than sixty years after the end of white and Negro schools, twenty years after Judge Potter’s ruling, the history of racial segregation still affected the opportunities that were available to young people in different parts of Charlotte.

Charlotte’s ongoing struggles over pupil assignment show that twentieth-century patterns of racial and economic inequality have not vanished. They continue to have impact today.

At the same time, the saga of Charlotte schools gives hope. The impressive improvement in student achievement that came with busing, as well as the smaller stories now unfolding with Shamrock and with the 2018 school pairings, demonstrate a powerful truth: change is possible if people in the community organize to support it.

HOUSING LAWS

When I came to Charlotte in 1981, people were quick to tell me the lay of the land. Stay away from the west side, they said. People who have money and choice will never live west of downtown. Similar cautions extended northward: People with money and choice will never live north of downtown. I was fresh out of college, had no car, and was working for a nonprofit. When I bicycled around the older neighborhoods near the center city looking for an apartment I could afford, people I met through work would take me aside and kindly advise against looking in Dilworth, Elizabeth, Plaza Midwood, or even in gracious old Myers Park. Those neighborhoods are going down, they’d say.

As I carried out the research that became this book, I learned how government policies had shaped those trends. Redlining was a key example. The blocks marked yellow or red back in the 1930s were where cheap apartments existed in the 1980s. Meanwhile, a host of other federal policies, such as mortgage aid, highway construction, and tax breaks for shopping centers—all discussed in chapter 9 of this book—had helped underwrite the post–World War II rush to the suburbs.

If federal policy had spurred disinvestment in older parts of town and encouraged racial separation, could federal policy be used to reverse some of those patterns? Two major pieces of national legislation passed just a few years before I arrived in Charlotte had a big impact on the shape of the city.

In 1968, pushed by civil rights activists, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race in selling or renting housing. The law by no means instantly ended racist practices, but it did have considerable impact.¹⁶ In Charlotte, dozens of neighborhoods that had been closed to African Americans were opened up to everyone. On the east side of the city, for instance, the Central Avenue corridor had been 99 percent white in the 1960 Census. By the 1980s, in the wake of the Fair Housing Act, it became about 25 percent African American. That matched the black percentage in Charlotte’s population as a whole. The black-white mix on the east side would remain quite stable through the 2010s.¹⁷

Changing patterns of race in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, ca. 1980 and 2017. Note the east side. All census tracts were less than 30 percent African American in 1980. By 2017, most tracts were between 30 percent and 60 percent African American, and a few were higher. (Maps by Laura Simmons, UNC Charlotte Urban Institute; based on maps in Clay and Stuart, Charlotte: Patterns and Trends of a Dynamic City. Black population data source: 2013–2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.)

The Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 joined the Fair Housing Act as an important piece of antidiscriminatory legislation. It aimed explicitly to counteract the effects of redlining. Banks no longer could deny loans to entire neighborhoods. Now financial institutions had to show that they actively worked to lend in every part of town.

The Community Reinvestment Act and the Fair Housing Act, as well as local policies such as busing and district elections, all worked together to change perceptions of desirability in Charlotte. NCNB Bank, for instance, made a big point of offering low-interest loans in Fourth Ward and other center-city neighborhoods, and it partnered with African American community activists such as Louise Sellers in Biddleville and Mildred Baxter Davis in Third Ward to provide loans specifically to people living in black areas north and west of downtown.¹⁸

The biggest change turned out to be not in established neighborhoods but rather out at the edge of town. A new upscale district called Ballantyne, launched in the 1990s, extended the wealthy southeast sector further out, all the way to the county line and beyond.¹⁹ But developers also invested in areas west of downtown and north of downtown—the sectors I’d once been told would never be desirable. By 2010, the crescent-and-wedge map was complicated by a large area of wealth in the north end of the county, where many out-of-state newcomers clustered near Lake Norman and the college town of Davidson. There were also newly wealthy areas to the west between the airport and Lake Wylie, as well as to the east in the Mallard Creek area and the Matthews/Mint Hill suburbs.

IMMIGRANTS AND OTHER NEWCOMERS

As the maps above hint, Charlotte has grown dramatically in recent decades. In the early 1980s, the city was an urban area surrounded by mostly rural Mecklenburg County. Today, the countryside is gone, and Mecklenburg is almost entirely urbanized. In 1990 the county had half a million residents. During the mid-2010s, it surpassed 1 million. Many new arrivals are from the southeastern United States, but now it is also common to meet a Charlottean who is from suburban Long Island or northern Ohio or Texas or California. When I came to Charlotte, you couldn’t get a bagel. Today, you can find not only bagels aplenty but also Iowa’s breaded pork-tenderloin sandwiches, New Jersey–style crispy-crust pizza, or a beef on weck from Buffalo.

While most of the newcomers hail from the United States, a noticeable number are from abroad. This is startling, since until the 1990s, Charlotte had almost no immigrants. When the United States experienced its greatest wave of immigration back in the 1880s to 1910s, the South was still an impoverished region struggling with the aftermath of the Civil War. Immigrants streamed to the huge factory cities of the North, such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago, or they headed west to settle on fresh farmland. They did not come south.

For reasons that scholars are still debating, that started to change in the closing years of the twentieth century. Part of the impetus, ironically, may have been the tightening of border laws in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan, which made it harder for Latinos to move back and forth as they had always done—with the unintentional effect that they stayed in the United States and began seeking places where work was plentiful. The southeastern United States, already experiencing booming growth in the era of air-conditioning, became an immigrant magnet.

In 1990 less than 1 percent of Charlotteans were foreign born. By the late 2010s, that number zoomed to over 15 percent. About half were Latino, with the largest component from Mexico but also including very sizable groups from El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and beyond. The other half of the immigrants came from every corner of the earth: Vietnamese who had been refugees after the war in Vietnam; information technology workers from India; families fleeing wars in Bosnia, Serbia, Congo, Nepal, Bhutan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia; people from Russia, Pakistan, and Korea. All came seeking the American dream.

You could see the change along Central Avenue. All white in 1960 and a quarter African American by the 1980s, the area now attracted immigrants who settled in the same inexpensive apartments that had originally drawn me to east Charlotte. Today, I can walk to Bosna Market, started by Bosnian war refugees; munch on the Salvadoran stuffed tortillas called pupusas at Maria’s; sample Trinidad curry at Soul Central; enjoy an Ethiopian coffee at Abugida; or fill up on Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches and pastries at Central Tea—all in a two-block stretch of Central Avenue.

Immigrant entrepreneurs do not cluster by ethnicity. There’s nothing in Charlotte like the Chinatown or Little Italy we know from older cities. I call the new mixed pattern a salad bowl suburb.²⁰ Ethnicities jumble together like veggies in a tossed salad. It is not planned, but rather the result of immigrants being able to choose where to live and work based on what they can afford.

The location of immigrant businesses has some roots in the economic segregation patterns created in the twentieth century. Central Avenue and South Boulevard, where these small groceries and cafés are thickest, lie in the crescent part of the crescent-and-wedge. The modest shopping plazas of the 1950s and 1960s that line those streets were never hyperfashionable and now are a bit worn—and thus affordable for a mom-and-pop business.

While you can see the influence of old economic geography in business location, a larger look at where immigrants are living indicates that they are chipping away at segregation patterns. Immigrants tend to settle wherever their income level allows. Wealthy Ballantyne in furthest south Charlotte is 15 to 25 percent foreign born, even more in spots. That is also true in the prosperous new neighborhoods south and west of the airport all the way to Lake Wylie, and in Mallard Creek in the northeast and areas along Interstate 485 at the county’s eastern edge. It is remarkable how little the map of immigrant location in 2017 reflects the maps in previous pages of this preface.

NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING

As the 2020s begin, perhaps Charlotte’s greatest challenge is neighborhood change and loss of affordable housing. The phenomenon is unprecedented in its size and scope, touching every neighborhood within four or five miles of downtown. The scale may be new, but the forces set in motion by twentieth-century segregation are painfully evident. If you understand how choices of previous generations have warped the playing field of housing in Charlotte and across the nation, you’ll have a better handle on the causes and complexities of the problem and thus on the steps needed to move forward.

The one constant in city life is change, as an old saying goes. Perpetually, some neighborhoods are getting more desirable while others are becoming less popular. For all of America’s history, however, the general direction of people with money and choice has been outward—Victorian folks riding streetcars from downtown out to new suburbs, post–World War II commuters driving Country Squire station wagons out to ranch houses, and numerous other examples.

Sometime in the 2000s, that direction shifted. Scholars are not sure exactly why, but now many people with money and choice are choosing to move inward. In nearly every American city, housing prices are rising dramatically.

When I drive around Charlotte, I see transformation everywhere. Off of South Boulevard, there used to be small houses built by returning World War II veterans. Suddenly, nearly all of those 1,000-square-foot dwellings are gone, replaced by new 5,000-square-foot homes. On Central Avenue, the Thirsty Beaver honky-tonk bar stood surrounded by vacant lots for decades. Now it is bracketed by a 323-unit upscale apartment complex, one of nearly a hundred to go up citywide during the last decade.²¹ Even on Providence Road in the wealthy wedge, the slightly shopworn, somewhat affordable two-story 1970s apartments that clustered at Fairview Road have fallen to the bulldozer as four-story luxury apartments spring up. In fact, throughout the city, Charlotte lost 28,000 units of unglamorous but affordable 1950s-to-1970s-era apartment complexes in just the four years between 2013 and 2017.²²

Crescent-and-wedge: changing patterns of wealth in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, 1980–2017. The crescent-and-wedge income pattern was simple and sharp in 1980. In 2017, it could still be seen in older areas of the county. But on newly built-up land, the pattern broke down. Rather than clustering only in one well-defined wedge southeast of downtown, wealthy neighborhoods now could be found also to the west, the north, the northeast, and the east. (Maps by Laura Simmons, UNC Charlotte Urban Institute; based on maps in Clay and Stuart, Charlotte: Patterns and Trends of a Dynamic City. Median household income data source: 2013–2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.)

African American areas are especially hard hit. Biddleville, across from Johnson C. Smith University, a black neighborhood since its inception in the nineteenth century, is unrecognizable. Most houses there are new, many occupied by white people and others by upscale black professionals. A few blocks away lies Seversville. It was white up until the 1960s, when African Americans who were pushed out of Brooklyn and other places began to make it their home. Now it is changing again. Rental opportunities are vanishing. Single-story bungalows are giving way to new two-story residences in the $400,000–$600,000 range.

If you own your house, this influx of investment can be a boon. As buyers flood into a neighborhood, all home values go up. Assuming you can keep up with the rising property taxes, your biggest asset may double or even triple in worth. I own my house off of Central Avenue—just finally paid off its mortgage, in fact, so I’m sitting pretty.

But when I paid off my house, I thought back to how I was able to make that leap. My dad gave me a loan for part of the down payment—something that scholars call intergenerational wealth accumulation. It was easy for my dad, a white World War II veteran, to get a VA/FHA mortgage way back then. If he’d been African American, though, would he have been able to own his house? Would he have been able to pass that advantage along to me?

As gentrification sweeps through all of Charlotte’s neighborhoods, it is African American neighborhoods where the hurt is most acute, where the displacement is worst. Redlined out of opportunities for home ownership in the 1930s, urban renewal-ed in the 1960s, African Americans feel a rising anger: it’s happening all over again.

That anger spilled over in September 2016, when police shot an African American man named Keith Lamont Scott outside his apartment in a not particularly wealthy part of northeast Charlotte. Riots erupted overnight in that quiet corner of the city, shutting down Interstate 85. Then protestors moved downtown, where they tangled with police wearing military armor. Charlotte had never experienced full-blown riots, not even in the stormiest days of the civil rights era, but now they came. When the initial violence cooled, protests continued day after day for well over two weeks. This was not just about police actions, said the protestors—who included black, white, Latino, and Asian leaders. It was about access to jobs, to good schools, to affordable housing.²³

CHARLOTTE FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION BY CENSUS TRACT, CA. 2017

Immigrant residential pattern, ca. 2017. Immigrants were dispersed in Mecklenburg County by 2017, residing in many upper-income neighborhoods as well as in more affordable areas. (Map by Laura Simmons, UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Foreign-born population data source: 2013–2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.)

That November, Charlotteans went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected the city’s first African American female mayor. Vi Alexander Lyles had worked her whole career in local government, including running the city’s budget office. She campaigned especially on tackling the crisis of affordable housing.

Lyles was aided by the embarrassing results of a widely publicized national study directed by economist Raj Chetty with a team of scholars from Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.²⁴ The Chetty study tracked intergenerational wealth accumulation in American cities. It ranked Charlotte last out of fifty major U.S. metropolitan areas in terms of opportunity for someone born in poverty to rise to the upper rungs of the economic ladder.

Chetty blamed segregation. He sought to understand a complex network of influences, but economic segregation seemed to lie at the heart of the problem. Choices deep in history, dating back at least to redlining, had warped the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods, as a lengthy Atlantic magazine story put it. Charlotte was by no means alone. Cities at the bottom of Chetty’s rankings almost all clustered in the southeastern United States, where the sins of racial discrimination ran deepest in American society.

Mayor Lyles and other leaders, galvanized by the Keith Lamont Scott protests and the Chetty study, put a $50 million bond issue for affordable housing on the fall 2018 ballot. It passed by the largest margin in that election cycle. Foundation for the Carolinas pledged to raise a matching $50 million in philanthropic dollars. Churches made plans to construct affordable developments of their own.

Even in upscale Ballantyne, attitudes seemed to be changing. Since the neighborhood’s inception in the 1990s, Ballantyne’s developers and residents had strenuously and successfully resisted the construction of even a single unit for anyone below the median income. A public hearing in 2010 showed how the assumptions fostered by twentieth-century segregation continued to play out:

The residents’ anger was simmering just below the surface when one neighbor stood and seized the microphone. He looked at the two developers who hoped to put a subsidized apartment building in the heart of Ballantyne.

My house is over $1 million. I don’t want that crap next to me, he said defiantly. The crowd burst into loud and long applause.

A minute later, it was revealed that some of the prospective apartment residents would make 60 percent of area median income, or about $43,000 for a family of four. $43,000? the man said. My jet costs that to go across the country. … [H]e basked in his neighbors’ ovation.²⁵

I still remember that exchange all these years later because at that time, I was making about $43,000. That is roughly the income of many teachers, beginning police officers or fire fighters, nurse assistants, and many more people who are essential to our daily life and well-being. Yet the speaker did not seem to know this. Segregation put him in his own bubble, out of touch with the actual world and unable to realize the value of people who were not his neighbors.

So it was with considerable surprise that I read an article in the Charlotte Observer on the morning that I am writing this. A page 1-A story announced plans by Ballantyne’s main landowner to add office and retail space and over 2,000 new housing units. Developers touted the inclusion of affordable housing, reported the Observer. About 175 units, or 8% of those planned, are set aside for households earning 80% of area median income.²⁶ That’s closer to $60,000 than $43,000 per year, but it is nonetheless a step that gives hope.

What will be our next steps?

None of these stories is finished today. People make history. People in the past created the world that we see around us today. The choices we make today have power to help reshape that history in the direction we choose.

Tom Hanchett, July 2019

NOTES

1. The U.S. Supreme Court would declare racial covenants unenforceable in 1948, but the language still remains in the current deeds of most neighborhoods in Charlotte developed from 1900 to the 1940s.

2. For national perspectives on the history of urban racial segregation, see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017).

3. On Charlotte’s rapid growth since 1975, see, for instance, William Graves and Heather A. Smith, eds., Charlotte, N.C.: The Global Evolution of a New South City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Rick Rothaker, Banktown: The Rise and Struggles of Charlotte’s Big Banks (Winston-Salem, N.C.; John F. Blair, 2010).

4. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, Stephen Smith, and Amy Hawn Nelson, eds., Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Education Press, 2015); Stephen Samuel Smith, Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).