The Sharp End, Columbia's Black Business District and Urban Renewal

For the first half of the twentieth century, a stretch of Columbia centered on the intersection of Eighth Street and Walnut was called the Sharp End. It was the commercial and social heart of Columbia's African American community, a place where, under the rigid constraints of legal segregation, Black residents built their own economy. The Sharp End had barbershops, beauty parlors, restaurants, pool halls, and small hotels where Black travelers could stay when white-owned establishments refused them.

It had doctors' offices and lawyers' offices and an insurance company. Musicians played in its clubs, and the music attracted white audiences as well as Black ones, though the geography of who could sit where remained defined by the same laws that had made the Sharp End necessary in the first place. In the decades after World War Two, the city of Columbia used urban renewal funds, the same federal program that displaced Black neighborhoods in cities across the country, to demolish the Sharp End.

The official rationale described the buildings as substandard. Much of the cleared land was later redeveloped for other uses. The community's businesses did not relocate together.

They scattered. Many did not reopen. Douglass Park, a few blocks away and named for Frederick Douglass, remained a center of Black community life.

The Blind Boone pavilion there honors one of the neighborhood's most celebrated sons. It is one of many places in American cities where a community was displaced by the same government that was supposed to protect it.