The Hornet's Nest Never Stops Buzzing

Cornwallis called it a hornet's nest in seventeen eighty and retreated north. The name became a badge of honor. But the quality Cornwallis was describing, a stubborn, organized, persistent refusal to accept the terms being imposed from outside, is not merely a Revolutionary War story. It is a recurring pattern in Charlotte's history.

The Catawba Nation was terminated by federal policy in nineteen fifty-nine and fought back through the courts for thirty-four years. They won. The Brooklyn community was demolished in the nineteen sixties, its people displaced and its institutions erased, and some of those same families organized and built again in other parts of the city. J. Charles Jones led students into Charlotte lunch counters in February of nineteen sixty, and within months the counters were integrated. Darius Swann tried to enroll his son in a neighborhood school, was refused, and his case ended up reshaping public education for the entire country.

Charlotte took the name of a queen and the motto of a hornet's nest and seemed, historically, to mean both at once. The banking industry that rose here was not modest in its ambitions. The NASCAR culture that centered itself here was not deferential to establishment tastes. Even the city's self-reinvention, from gold to textile to finance to whatever comes next, has a certain aggressive quality.

The latest iteration is demographic: a city that was overwhelmingly Black and white for most of its history is now among the fastest-diversifying in the South, with significant Latino, South Asian, African immigrant, and other communities reshaping neighborhoods, food culture, religious institutions, and political coalitions.

Charlotte is still a hornet's nest. The question it keeps asking itself is whose hornet's nest, and for whom.