Brooklyn

Brooklyn was a neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, located in the Second Ward of the city. It was a majority black community, developing its own churches, schools, and culture separate from the rest of the city. This neighborhood existed due to segregation, but it was an area of the city where African Americans had greater opportunity, for example, to be a pastor in the churches in the neighborhood, to be a teacher at Second Ward High School, or to own the corner store. Despite being relatively isolated from the rest of the city center, Brooklyn gained a bad reputation among developers and white city and suburban residents. Brooklyn was accused of fostering crime and being unsafe, while residents said otherwise (Funk 2019). Its “bad” reputation was not due to objective standards, but rather racist prejudices against the neighborhood and its residents. After the Housing Acts, developers throughout the nation had the ability to reshape entire neighborhoods if they were considered blighted without building enough or affordable housing to rehome the people displaced by redevelopment. Private developers had interest in urban renewal, so local governments as well as the federal government were interested in these projects so that these areas were more profitable. Urban renewal throughout the nation kickstarted in the late 1950s and Charlotte started an urban renewal project in 1960. The first area to be affected was Brooklyn.

1960 proved to be devastating for Brooklyn as the neighborhood lost more and more of its housing and institutions throughout the 1960s. Residents of Brooklyn had false hopes that their community’s buildings would be replaced, but by 1970 the damage was done, and the land was cleared for other projects (Funk 2019). The neighborhood was cleared by 1970 to make way for local government buildings and a park. Thousands of people were displaced and struggled to find housing in areas without a similar sense of community, and they were often the victims of predatory real estate practices and redlining (Hijazi 2014, xii). Now, Second Ward is an area cleared of character. Only a few buildings from the original neighborhood remain and the city government that cleared the neighborhood takes much of its former space. Brooklyn was wiped off Charlotte’s map in a matter of 10 years in a sweeping urban renewal project. A few factors in particular motivated the city of Charlotte to redevelop Brooklyn which include keeping schools segregated and to clear space for developers to make the area more profitable.

Many former residents of Brooklyn have fond memories of the neighborhood they grew up in and remind us that this neighborhood existed only a short time ago. Any type of service, business, or recreation, and Brooklyn had its own version of it. Arthur Griffin, a Charlottean who spent most of his time in the neighborhood said that he “didn’t have a white anything back then. They were all African-American back then” (Funk 2019). Brooklyn was a self-sustaining microcosm of African American society in Charlotte. Despite existing out of segregation, it was a vibrant and tight knit community. Dentists lived near bootleggers who lived near lawyers and everyone in between. The Brooklyn community had a strong sense of community evidenced by the living former residents. If Brooklyn had a bad reputation in the city, it was not from the fault of its own doing.

In Brooklyn, you could see a range of classes, from those who lived in the “shotgun shacks” to wealthy black professionals in big houses. While economic inequality existed, there was a support system in the form of community throughout Brooklyn. Grandparents usually lived in households with their children and grandchildren (Funk 2019). The librarian at the colored library in the neighborhood would assist poor kids to read. The teachers at Second Ward High School cared about their students (Funk 2019). Even the wealthy professionals in the neighborhood contributed to their community by being their doctors, lawyers, dentists, and shop owners that they relied on. If it were not a black neighborhood, it would be seen as a healthy and thriving one. While the community was healthy, infrastructure was not as housing suffered from a lack of resources and repairs (Hijazi 2014 ix). Unfortunately, Charlotte labelled the area as blighted without considering the dynamic of the neighborhood. Stanford R. Brookshire, former Charlotte mayor described Brooklyn in 1961, as “disgraceful, crime-and disease-ridden slums in the shadows of the uptown office buildings” (Hijazi 2014, ix). Infrastructure is what gave Charlotte justification for renewing Brooklyn. Renewal would displace the residents and sever the connections made over decades of interdependence and community.

In January 1960, Charlotte announced its plan to renew Second Ward (Anderson 1960). Developers were eager to use the land occupied by Brooklyn and the city of Charlotte had ulterior motives. Charlotte was a city that easily complied with the NAACP for desegregating public schools, yet this was not done out of compassion. Since Charlotte neighborhoods were segregated geographically, schools would not need to integrate much at all. Charlotte’s strategy to maintain the status quo was to technically comply with civil rights laws and NAACP demands and skirt around them through redevelopment. Segregationist article writer Trezzvant Anderson took note of this from Pittsburgh in 1960 through praising the city’s maneuvering. He remarks “unless somebody convinces me otherwise, I feel compelled to believe that the white folks here have found a safe way in which to ‘comply’ with the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, and still succeed--within the framework of the law--in keeping Negroes out of ‘white’ schools” (Anderson 1960). Avoiding school integration with means outside of the law was one motivator for Charlotte officials to pursue urban renewal. Second Ward High School was nearby white schools like Central High School in uptown Charlotte. 1969 was the last graduating class at Second Ward High. By then, most black students were displaced, and many moved to West Charlotte and attended West Charlotte High School, which became an extralegally segregated black school away from the city center (Anderson 1960)(Hijazi 2014, xx).

After the announcement of 1960, some Brooklyn residents saw urban renewal as a good thing, as something that would benefit the neighborhood rather than outright destroy it, so residents did not protest the decision. According to former Brooklyn resident Robert Parks, some residents held hope into the late 1960s that their homes and institutions would be rebuilt, and Brooklyn residents realized that their community was going to be permanently displaced too late (Funk 2019).

In 1963, Charlotte demolished a number of buildings in Brooklyn, including a café, a funeral home, and the Friendship Baptist Church (McLean 1963). The Afro-American article documenting these changes wrote that the church was reconstructed on Beatties Ford Road, in Northwest Charlotte where many displaced Brooklyn residents relocated (McLean 1963). Brooklyn residents moved here as well as the Friendship Baptist Church as their homes were demolished soon after it. While a concentration of Brooklyn residents moved to Northwest Charlotte, unfortunately the area did not have the same level of community or opportunity that Brooklyn had (Hijazi 2014, xx). In 1965, Charlotte received a federal grant of 1.2 million dollars towards the Brooklyn urban renewal project, further driving the demolition of the community ("Charlotte Gets $1,240,883 for Urban Renewal." 1965). Residents eventually scattered across that city of Charlotte by the late 1960s. More churches were demolished after 1963 and relocated across Charlotte but lost many of its familiar churchgoers and gained new, unfamiliar faces. Second Ward High School was one of the last remaining buildings in Brooklyn, demolished in 1970.

Former Brooklyn residents dispersed throughout the city wherever they could be housed. Many residents moved to west and northwest Charlotte, along the Beatties Ford Corridor, but lacked the economic success of Brooklyn relegated to the periphery of the city (Hijazi 2014, xx). Charlotte never compensated Brooklyn residents, nor rebuilt their buildings. Over 3000 buildings were demolished and over 3200 families were displaced. Little public housing was built in the 1960s to accommodate these families (Hijazi 2014, viii). Population demographics shifted drastically in Second Ward in a matter of 10 years. U.S. Census Bureau data shows that in the 4 census tracts that form Second Ward, all tracts in 1960 had a black population above 50%, and 3 of the 4 tracts had a black population above 80% (Race 1960). Brooklyn population displacement is all too glaring: in 1970, one of Second Ward’s tracts has no population, when it had about 3500 in the decade prior. The rest of the tracts have thinned population and show reduced percentages of black residents (U.S. Census Bureau Race 1970). It is clear that clearing Brooklyn would have major population impacts on uptown Charlotte. It reduced the number of black residents uptown and left a completely clear census tract in which the Charlotte city government would build the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, and Marshall Park, and more. In turn, the Beatties Ford Corridor and Northwest Charlotte development tripled the size of the city, and black people able to afford a house could move there (Hijazi 2014, 13). While some middle class black families and professionals were able to afford this, many families still struggled to find housing. Former Brooklyn residents had to compete for housing with each other and white rural residents moving to Charlotte (Hijazi 2014, 42). While black people still face hardship living in Charlotte now, the city grew, rezoned, added pricier urban housing uptown, and became known throughout the world for banking, especially for Bank of America and Wells Fargo (Overcash 2019). Charlotte followed and was characteristic of many other cities in the US that undertook urban renewal projects. Displacement, especially among black people was common after these projects were completed and Charlotte, like many other cities, did not do much to replace the housing the city demolished. School zoning and redevelopment drove the city to wipe a neighborhood from its map and offered nothing back to its residents in return.

While uptown Charlotte has grown and changed over the last 50 years, there still feels like there is something missing. Second Ward is nothing but a boring complex of government buildings, parking lots, and a park that is never inhabited. Tourist attractions and recreational buildings like the NASCAR Hall of Fame and the Spectrum Center on the edge of Second Ward tower over the government complex. Grace AME Zion Church, one of the last Brooklyn buildings to remain, is surrounded by parking lots. There was a sign signifying where Second Ward High School once was, with the only the gym remaining. The area itself feels drenched in grey and bureaucracy, but former residents of Brooklyn are strong and resilient seniors who keep the memory of their neighborhood alive. Second Ward High School held a high school reunion in 2019 and former students reminisced over their beloved high school and the community they once shared (Armus 2019).