Brooklyn: The City They Demolished

A century ago, a neighborhood called Brooklyn occupied the Second Ward of Charlotte, and it was, as one historian put it, an African American city-within-the-city, complete with its own downtown. The geography was lower than surrounding wards, close to drainage ditches, not a place wealthy white Charlotteans wanted. Which meant it was available. And so after the Civil War and emancipation, freedpeople built there.

By the early twentieth century, Brooklyn was a self-sustaining community. Second Ward High School, Charlotte's first public high school for Black students, opened there in nineteen twenty-three. The Brevard Street Library served the community since Black residents could not use the white public library. The Second Street YMCA provided meeting space. There were Black-owned banks, grocery stores, pharmacies, funeral homes, law offices, churches. People were born in Brooklyn, educated there, married there, buried from there.

Federal urban renewal legislation in the nineteen fifties gave cities money to clear what planners called blighted land. Charlotte's planners looked at Brooklyn and saw blight. Between nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty-seven, the city demolished the neighborhood in five stages. One thousand four hundred eighty homes were torn down. Two hundred sixteen businesses were destroyed, most of which never reopened. The city's own records document that one thousand seven families were displaced.

The land became the site of the Charlotte Convention Center, government office buildings, and a new arena. Not one replacement housing unit was constructed. The Brevard Street Library was gone. Second Ward High School closed in nineteen sixty-nine. Of the hundreds of structures that defined Brooklyn, four survive today: the Second Ward High School gymnasium, Grace AME Zion Church, the Mecklenburg Investment Company building, and one other structure.

Four buildings. That is what a thriving community looks like after urban renewal has done its work. When people talk about generational wealth in Black Charlotte, they are often talking about what was lost in those seven years.