Brooklyn, Johnson C. Smith, the busing case that changed the country and Harvey Gantt.
Brooklyn
After the Civil War, freed people settled in an area of Charlotte first known as Logtown. It grew into Brooklyn, the center of Black commerce and life in the city, home to businesses, homes and churches, a YMCA, a library and the A.M.E. Zion Publishing House.
In the 1960s Brooklyn became the city's first urban renewal project. It was demolished for government and commercial buildings, and its families were displaced. The Old Grace A.M.E. Zion Church is one of the few buildings left, and in 2022 Stonewall Street was renamed Brooklyn Village Avenue in recognition of the neighborhood.
Johnson C. Smith University
On April 7, 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, the Biddle Memorial Institute was founded in Charlotte. Renamed Johnson C. Smith University in 1923, it is a private historically Black university on Beatties Ford Road and West Trade Street.
Swann
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued on behalf of six-year-old James Swann and nine other families to desegregate Charlotte's schools. Julius Chambers argued the case, and in 1971 the Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that busing was an appropriate remedy for racial imbalance in schools, a decision that reached far beyond the city.
Harvey Gantt
In 1963 Harvey Gantt became the first African American admitted to Clemson University. In 1983 he was elected the city's first Black mayor, serving two terms. In 2009 the city honored him with the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture.
Black Charlotte Today
From Beatties Ford Road to the Gantt Center, Black Charlotte carries this history forward, and Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Charlotte.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Charlotte on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
The Dr. George E. Davis House, home of Johnson C. Smith University's first Black professor. Photo: Algorhythms, CC0, Wikimedia Commons The Harvey B. Gantt Center on its opening day. Photo: Mark Clifton, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons