Photography by Daniela Stallinger
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A Taste for Tolerance
By Barry Yeoman, May & June 2004
How years of struggle taught Charlotte, North Carolina, and other American cities that diversity is a growth industry
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Reginald Hawkins could feel his heart racing as he and three friends made
their way through Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Dressed in his best Sunday suit, the 30-year-old dentist and Presbyterian
minister sought to accomplish a simple task: to sit at the Airport
"77" Restaurant, with its big picture windows overlooking the two
asphalt runways, and eat his lunch unmolested.
Hawkins was small and bespectacled, but he carried himself with an
unmistakable fierceness. As he saw it, the federally funded airport's
facilities were required to serve African Americans like himself. But Hawkins
also understood the social order in Charlotte in 1954. Like most Southern
cities, it insisted on total racial separation. When he and his friends had
approached the restaurant a few days earlier, the hostess had said, "We
don't serve blacks here." Armed with this rejection, the four had
appeared before the Charlotte City Council, threatening to sue the city if the
discrimination persisted.
It was a bold gambit for its time. Just weeks had passed since the Supreme
Court had issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision, the first
major step toward dismantling Jim Crow segregation. Lynchings still made the
news, and even the mildest protests met with harsh white resistance. In Macon,
Georgia, two men—one white, one black—had just been jailed for the
crime of socializing together.
But Hawkins pressed on. As he and the others entered the restaurant, the
hostess again tried to stop them. This time, the four brushed past her, spotted
an empty table, and took their seats. The ensuing commotion caught the ear of
Frank Littlejohn, Charlotte's chief of police, who was at lunch with
several city bigwigs. The chief knew Hawkins from previous protests. He walked
over to the dentist's table. "Doctor, won't you all leave?"
he said. "You're embarrassing us."
"I'm sorry," Hawkins replied. "But we've been
embarrassed all our lives."
And here's where our story departs from similar events happening at that
time in the South. Littlejohn went to talk to the restaurant manager. When he
returned, his demeanor was different. Perhaps the chief really believed the law
was on the protesters' side. More likely, he wanted to spare Charlotte the
notoriety of jailing four well-dressed professionals for such a benign act.
Littlejohn told the men they could stay.
It would take two more years of agitating before blacks would be guaranteed
seats at the Airport "77" Restaurant. Still, that small victory 50
years ago is symbolic of a remarkable civil rights battle that history has
largely forgotten: the story of how Charlotte and a few other forward-thinking
Southern cities painstakingly dismantled Jim Crow laws without bursting
violently apart in the process.
To be sure, the decade after the Brown ruling produced stories that
seared the conscience of the world. In Montgomery, Alabama, police arrested
Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. In Little Rock,
Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to block African
American children from entering Central High School. In Birmingham, Alabama,
public safety commissioner Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on
civil rights demonstrators.
But in Charlotte, civic leaders worked to avoid confrontation, believing
that the city's growth and prosperity depended on its ability to embrace
the new era. Today, many of them see a direct line between a Southern
city's present quality of life and how it approached the Civil Rights
Movement decades ago. And they may be right. Cities like Charlotte, which
managed to abolish Jim Crow without bloodshed if not without tears, are the
jewels in the crown of the New South. Once, Southerners headed north in great
numbers—many fleeing poverty and discrimination. But today, the reverse
is true. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people who move
from the Northeast to the South each year is more than double the migration in
the opposite direction. And it's the places that practiced racial
moderation—Charlotte, Jacksonville, Nashville, Atlanta, Dallas—that
have prospered from this explosive growth over the past half century.
Back in 1950, according to the last census before the Brown decision,
Charlotte was the nation's 70th-largest city. Its population of 134,000 was
less than half that of Birmingham. Since then, Charlotte has shot up to 21st
place, with 581,000 residents, while Birmingham's population has actually
fallen by more than a quarter. Charlotteans believe it's no coincidence
that the city that used diplomacy blossomed while the city that used attack
dogs did not.
"What made Charlotte a modern city, a city that didn't bleed, is
that you had a strong business community that tried to stay in front of
anything that would give a negative impression," says former Charlotte
mayor Harvey Gantt, who in 1983 became the first African American to head a
large, predominantly white Southern city. "The leadership wanted to
project an image to the nation that we could deal with the racial issue without
becoming another Birmingham."
That image didn't come easily. At times, Charlotte came perilously close
to being blown apart—by angry white mobs, by defiant politicians, by bomb
scares, and eventually even by bombs. But in each case, civic leaders managed
to preserve the city's reputation—and its peace.
One February night in 1960, 22-year-old Charles Jones was driving his Buick
to Charlotte, where he was a student leader at Johnson C. Smith University, a
historically black Presbyterian campus. Sometime around 4 a.m., the radio
broadcast an astounding report: 90 miles from home, in Greensboro, North
Carolina, African American students had sat down at a Woolworth's lunch
counter and refused to get up, even as Klansmen taunted them. "Yes!"
Jones said aloud. "This is the handle for our generation." He knew
about Hawkins's success six years earlier at the airport—it was still
the only place in Charlotte where blacks and whites could dine
together—and he considered it the "first small step of hope."
But he also knew the city's elite would not make more concessions without
more pressure. Hearing about Greensboro, Jones felt the time had come for
aggressive action in Charlotte.
The next day, Jones showed up at a student council meeting and threw down
the gauntlet. He planned to go down to the Charlotte Woolworth's, he said,
even if he had to go alone: "I'm gonna sit, and I ain't gonna get
up until they open up." When Jones arrived the following day, 200 students
were waiting for him—one fourth of the student body. Risking mob
violence, police brutality, and the stain of a criminal record, the students
shut down Charlotte's whites-only lunch counters one by one.
Woolworth's. Kress. McLellan's. As Jones gave interviews to the local
press that first day, his classmates ran to him with breathless progress
reports: "Charles, we just closed down Grant's. We're going to
Belk's."
Unlike their counterparts farther south, though, Charlotte's leaders
didn't respond with fire hoses or mass arrests. Instead, Mayor James Smith
and Chamber of Commerce president Stanford Brookshire announced a new biracial
committee on race relations. Their motivation was less ethical than financial:
the two men worried that noisy protests would disrupt business. "It seems
odd now," Brookshire would later say, "that Mayor Smith and I ...
were overlooking both the legal and moral aspects of the problem." The
committee spent the next five months trying to negotiate a peaceful
desegregation. Finally, to avoid a threatened boycott by the black community of
the whole downtown, the lunch counters relented. Charlotte had dodged the
headlines once again.
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website.
The next years were some of the most violent throughout the South:
firebombs, mass arrests, fatal riots. Charlotte's leaders desperately
wanted to avoid confrontations such as these. It began promoting itself as the
"Spearhead of the South," leading the region to a friendly,
progressive future. Meanwhile, activists like Hawkins pressed to desegregate
all public accommodations. Hawkins held demonstrations; he announced boycotts;
he threatened to embarrass image-conscious Charlotte. "We will not be
pacified with gradualism," he declared.
In 1961, Brookshire became mayor. He knew that racial animosity was plunging
the Deep South into recession. Birmingham's hostility to the Freedom Riders
who tried to desegregate interstate buses had cost more than $40 million in
investment from a single Ohio firm. Little Rock had not seen a major industrial
expansion in four years. Brookshire had a hunch about how to spare Charlotte
from noisy protests by militants like Hawkins: by cooperating with diplomatic
black leaders like NAACP state president Kelly Alexander Sr. Alexander's
son, Kelly Jr., calls the interplay between his father and Hawkins a form of
"good cop, bad cop" that kept up the pressure for change: "If
you don't have a bad cop—if they can't look out the window and
see old so-and-so marching back and forth and raising hell—there's no
impetus around the table to get anything accomplished with any speed," he
recalls.
The first test came in 1963, when Brookshire brokered the desegregation of
Charlotte's white-tablecloth restaurants. He quietly arranged for white
professionals to invite black professionals to lunch—something they were
willing to do in order to avoid more protests—and convinced the media not
to report the details until after the fact, also for the good of the city. When
the news finally was reported, the public response was a collective yawn.
What Brookshire couldn't know was that Charlotte's biggest and most
dangerous struggle was still two years in the future. Jim Crow's violent
death throes would ultimately drag Charlotte into the conflict that was roiling
the region. And the city's attempt to use diplomacy to avoid
bloodshed—and bad publicity—would face its harshest test.
Charlotte had reacted to Brown v. Board of Education with only token
desegregation. Back in 1957, it had allowed four black children to attend
all-white schools. At Harding High, whites spat on tall, graceful Dorothy
Counts and pelted her with ice as she tried to attend class. "Someone hit
me in the back of my head with a sharp object," she recalls. "That
was the first time I felt violated." Finally, she transferred to a private
school up north.
By 1964, ten years after Brown, only 800 of Charlotte's more than
20,000 African American public school students attended school with whites. But
Darius and Vera Swann, black Presbyterian missionaries recently returned home
from India, challenged the status quo. In 1965, after their son was barred from
attending an integrated school, the Swanns filed suit—and released a
torrent of racism. The prospect of fully integrated schools repulsed some white
Charlotteans and moved at least one to horrifying violence.
On November 22, 1965, Reginald Hawkins woke to a blast that shattered not
only the windows in his children's playroom but also Charlotte's
illusions of invulnerability to the violent clashes of the Deep South. Early
that drizzly morning, four bombs went off almost simultaneously in the homes of
Hawkins, Swann attorney Julius Chambers, Kelly Alexander Sr., and his brother,
Fred. No one was hurt, and the bombers were never caught, but all four homes
were extensively damaged and the flying glass came perilously close to slashing
two of the Alexander children. For Hawkins, it was a reminder that the crusade
for equality could, at any time, turn lethal. "I knew that day they were
out to kill me," he says. "I had already talked to Jesus about the
role that I had to undergo. Any man that was afraid for his life didn't
have a life."
Instead of inflaming racial tensions, though, the bombings seemed to quell
them. Local leaders worried about the city's reputation. "The good
name of North Carolina is at stake," editorialized The Charlotte
Observer. Mayor Brookshire organized a relief fund and raised more money
than was actually needed to repair the houses. The mayor also urged
Charlotteans to attend a racial-harmony rally the following week—and
thousands showed up. "It was the kind of response you get when a community
rallies around flood or hurricane victims," says Kelly Alexander Jr.
The unity lasted until 1969, when federal judge James McMillan issued his
ruling in the Swann case. A white jurist not known for radical thinking,
McMillan nonetheless wrote that the school board must act immediately to
desegregate, even if it meant busing children away from their own
neighborhoods. Charlotte became the nation's test case for school
busing.
Reaction was harsh. Furious white parents flooded board of education
meetings. Board members angered McMillan by submitting plans that left some
schools segregated. Bomb scares proliferated. But as McMillan rejected one
temporary plan after another, forcing children to shift from one school to the
next, Charlotteans grew weary of the instability. Ministers, neighborhood
leaders, and politicians began to step forward, announcing that it was time to
cooperate with the courts.
In 1973, a group of 25 citizens—black and white, pro- and
antibusing—began hammering out a plan. "We had a great camaraderie
between moderate whites and blacks that was rather amazing when you look back
at it," says Maggie Ray, the homemaker who led the group. "We were
shoulder to shoulder—it was exhilarating." Busing opponents
developed respect and affection for their one-time adversaries, and vice versa.
Author Frye Gaillard recalls how, when the debates grew heated, one opponent
would lean back in his chair, breaking the tension with the good-humored
declaration, "Picky, picky, picky!"
From those meetings, Charlotte developed a fully—and
peacefully—integrated school system by the mid-1970s. White flight to
private schools and outlying counties was minimal compared with other Southern
cities. Test scores rose systemwide. While racism hardly disappeared, many
African American and white students came to shrug off their differences.
"I've been going to school with blacks all my life," West
Charlotte High School senior Casey Smith told an Atlanta Journal
reporter in 1987. "They're not another race. They're just my
friends."
A half-century after he forced the Airport "77" Restaurant to
serve African Americans, Reginald Hawkins is no longer agitating. With
arthritis slowing him down, he spends his days "listening to the
Lord" at his lakeside retirement home near Charlotte. Still, at 80,
Hawkins maintains the look of a fighter, bejeweled in turquoise and gold, his
hair slicked back Al Sharpton-style. Playing his usual bad-cop role, he says
Charlotte still has a long way to go to become a race-blind city. "It
claimed that it did these things voluntarily," he says, his voice gravelly
and emphatic. "But Charlotte is more interested in the banking interests,
economic interests, than it is with justice."
Others reflect in more measured tones. "Some people still harbor
hatred," says Julius Chambers, who, after the Swann decision, went
on to head the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and now practices law
in Charlotte again. "But all in all, race relations in Charlotte are
positive. People are much more tolerant and respectful than we saw 50 years
ago."
One thing that can't be denied is the city's economic success. In
the center of downtown stands the 47-story Hearst Tower, featuring Chinese
marble and bronze grills from a 1920s Paris department store. It joins a
skyline dominated by the towering headquarters of two financial giants, Bank of
America and Wachovia, which have made Charlotte the nation's second-largest
banking center after New York. Surrounding the business district, lively new
residential neighborhoods are going up—where white and black Charlotteans
now live side by side. (The metro area is one of the most integrated in the
country, reports the U.S. Census Bureau. Of course, in America, that's not
saying much.) Just as dramatic, on the block that once held the Woolworth's
of the 1960 sit-in, African American multi-millionaire Robert Johnson is
building a $200 million stadium for his NBA team, the Charlotte Bobcats.
Inequities persist. Charlotte's blacks still earn half of what whites do
per capita and are three times as likely to live in poverty. "The bulk of
financial wherewithal is all in white hands," says Mel Watt, a Democratic
congressman from Charlotte. "Marginally, gradually, we're making
progress, but it's going to take a long time."
And desegregation suffered a major setback in 1997, when a newcomer from
California sued the board of education because his daughter was rejected by a
magnet school for reasons of racial balance. The case eventually came before
federal judge Robert Potter, a former antibusing activist. Potter reversed the
Swann decision, and racial busing ended in 2002. Because the city still had
many homogeneous neighborhoods, the result was an immediate lurch backward.
"We have more schools that are identifiable as racially segregated than
there were before the court ruling," admits assistant school
superintendent Susan Agruso. West Charlotte High School, held up in the
'70s and '80s as a model of integration, is now 86 percent African
American and only 5 percent white.
Which raises the question: can Charlotteans preserve the gains of the past
50 years, despite persistent challenges? Civil rights leaders are optimistic
because of the respect Charlotteans have developed for one another since the
days of Reginald Hawkins's 1954 sit-in. A funny thing happened on the road
to progress: in its efforts to project an image of tolerance, Charlotte
actually came to honor diversity. "If you strive hard enough for
appearance, sometimes you get substance," says Tom Hanchett, staff
historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. It's that
respect that offers hope, even when some of the substantive gains appear to be
slipping away.
"I kick Charlotte's behind every time I get a chance," says
former sit-in leader Charles Jones, now a 66-year-old attorney and neighborhood
activist. "But I'm also proud of how we've grown. Charlotte is
still struggling where the rubber hits the road, and it still stumbles and
falls. But it gets up, shakes off—and continues to fight for a community
where all God's children are blessed."
Barry Yeoman last reported on abuse by legal guardians of the elderly
in "Stolen
Lives" for the January-February 2004 issue of AARP The
Magazine. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
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