The stories told by many generations of Charlotte's African American residents mingle strength and hardship, accomplishment and setback, joy and pain. Through slavery, through war, through Jim Crow segregation and into the 21st century Black residents from all walks of life have played essential roles in making Charlotte the city it is today. Everyone needs to know this history.

The stories told by many generations of Charlotte's African American residents mingle strength and hardship, accomplishment and setback, joy and pain. Through slavery, through war, through Jim Crow segregation and into the 21st century Black residents from all walks of life have played essential roles in making Charlotte the city it is today. Everyone needs to know this history.About the AuthorPamela Grundy has lived in Charlotte for three decades, pursuing a range of writing, teaching, museum and education projects. Much of that work has depended on the generosity of the many Black Charlotteans who have shared their wisdom and experience with her, among them Vermelle Ely, James and Barbara Ferguson, James Peeler and Sarah Stevenson. Legacy began as a series of articles on Black history published in the Nerve in 2020 and 2021. Grundy's other works include Color & Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality.The mural on Legacy's cover, which features early Black leaders Thad Tate, J.T. Williams and W.C. Smith, is by Abel Jackson, one of many Black History murals he has painted around town.This second edition adds new material to chapters 8 and 9; an afterword that describes some of the challenges of researching and writing Black history; and an index. I am also delighted to note that the success of the first edition has connected us with the dynamic staff at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture, who are using these stories to expand their efforts to preserve, present and celebrate Charlotte's Black history.

Bittersweet Legacy is the dramatic story of the relationship between two generations of black and white southerners in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1850 to 1910. Janette Greenwood describes the interactions between black and white business and p

The history of Charlotte is inseparable from the history of its neighborhoods. From the city's founding until the late 1890s, the four wards created by the crossing of Trade and Tryon Streets defined the residential fabric of Charlotte. As the twentieth century approached, the Southern textile boom fueled labor and housing demands that were met by the earliest suburbs that rose out of the farms and pastures surrounding the small town. Dilworth was the first of these suburbs, connected to the town center by the city's maiden electric streetcar line. More new communities quickly followed. Some, such as Myers Park and Elizabeth, have remained strong throughout their history. North Charlotte, Belmont, and others have changed under economic and social challenges. Still others, such as Brooklyn, are gone; they survive only in the memories and photographs of the families that called them home.

“An ambitious look at the cost of urban gentrification.” —Atlanta-Journal Constitution “Kelley could have written a fine book about Charlotte’s drug trade in the ’80s and ’90s, filled with shoot-outs and flashy jewelry. What she accomplishes with Money Rock, however, is far more laudable.” —Charlotte Magazine “Pam Kelley knows a good story when she sees one—and Money Rock is a hell of a story. . . like a New South version of The Wire.” —Shelf Awareness Meet Money Rock—young, charismatic, and Charlotte’s flashiest coke dealer—in a riveting social history with echoes of Ghettoside and Random Family Meet Money Rock. He's young. He's charismatic. He's generous, often to a fault. He's one of Charlotte's most successful cocaine dealers, and that's what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history—by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic—of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic. The saga begins in 1963 when a budding civil rights activist named Carrie gives birth to Belton Lamont Platt, eventually known as Money Rock, in a newly integrated North Carolina hospital. Pam Kelley takes readers through a shootout that shocks the city, a botched FBI sting, and a trial with a judge known as "Maximum Bob." When the story concludes more than a half century later, Belton has redeemed himself. But three of his sons have met violent deaths and his oldest, fresh from prison, struggles to make a new life in a world where the odds are stacked against him. This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies—racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration—help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past.

Inspired by the 2010 "Spirit of Mecklenburg"--a bronze statue of Captain James Jack, "the South's Paul Revere," in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina--this history details the lives of 12 Charlotteans who made important contributions to the Queen City, from the early Colonial period to the 20th century. Subjects include Catawba Indian chief King Haigler, Founding Father Thomas Polk, freed slave Ishmael Titus, African American celebrity barber Thad Tate and North Carolina's first woman physician, Annie Alexander.

Our Trespasses uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What responsibilities do we bear toward those who have been harmed, not just by individuals but by our structures and collective ways of being in the world? Abram and Annie North, both born enslaved, purchased a home in the historically Black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the years following the Civil War. Today, the site of that home stands tucked beneath a corner of the First Baptist Church property on a site purchased under the favorable terms of Urban Renewal campaigns in the mid-1960s. How did FBC wind up in what used to be Brooklyn--a neighborhood that no longer exists? What happened to the Norths? How might we heal these hauntings? This is an American story with implications far beyond Brooklyn, Charlotte, or even the South. By carefully tracing the intertwined fortunes of First Baptist Church and the formerly enslaved North family, Jarrell opens our eyes to uncomfortable truths with which we all must reckon.

The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away. Tim Tyson’s gripping narrative brings gritty blues truth and soaring gospel vision to a shocking episode of our history. FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Blood Done Sign My Name is a most important book and one of the most powerful meditations on race in America that I have ever read.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “Pulses with vital paradox . . . It’s a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson’s powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo.”—Entertainment Weekly “Engaging and frequently stunning.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.

How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central concerns facing our nation. As Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues in this thought-provoking book, within our metropolitan areas we are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school-district boundaries to divide students--and opportunities--along racial and economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities, though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and students accountable through test performance, and promoting private-sector competition. Siegel-Hawley takes us into the heart of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between city and suburb. Based on evidence from metropolitan school desegregation efforts in Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, between 1990 and 2010, Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping tools both to underscore the damages wrought by school-district boundary lines and to raise awareness about communities that have sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school desegregation policy is related to clear, measurable progress on both school and housing desegregation. Revisiting educational policies that in many cases were abruptly halted--or never begun--this book will spur an open conversation about the creation of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our multiracial future.