The Second Ward High School Alumni House and Museum is a modest institution, a little brick house along Beatties Ford Road, the main artery in what’s historically the black part of town. For decades, the house has been a repository for photos, yearbooks, bricks—the beloved remains of Second Ward High, Charlotte’s first black high school. In the 1960s, the city demolished the school and its entire neighborhood, known as Brooklyn, in the name of urban renewal.
Last month, a Charlotte police officer shot and killed a black man, Keith Lamont Scott. Within hours, protests turned ugly—rock throwing and looting, riot police and tear gas. For Charlotte, this violence was unprecedented. At a press conference, Mayor Jennifer Roberts looked tense and weary. “We have a long tradition of working together to solve our problems,” she told reporters. “The events that we saw last night are not the Charlotte that I know and love.”
Charlotte, once a cotton mill town, now a major financial hub, has always been adept at reinvention. It’s been equally adept at burying its past. Uptown skyscrapers, luxury apartments and construction cranes testify to prosperity. You’d never know that this town was once part of the Confederacy, that slaves made up 40 percent of the population at the start of the Civil War. And unless you happen upon a historic marker, you’d be unaware that Brooklyn was once the heart of black Charlotte, a city within a city, like its New York namesake.
[For more of this story, written by Pam Kelley, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...in-charlotte/503627/]
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