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.

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.

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.