Chapter 1: They
Excerpt 1 of 4 from Our Trespasses
Reynard Wright and I are standing in the back parking lot of First Baptist Church of Charlotte, or, as he used to call it, home. His street was Watkins Lane,1 an alley packed tight with residences from Alexander Street to McDowell. From our resting point, we must imagine everything: houses, streets, yards, churches, people. All of it vanished. The neighborhood is gone. Rey’s old yard is now part of a reflecting pool.
Sixty years ago, the city government inundated the area with sledgehammers and bulldozers and after that with water and unchecked ambition. They built a new city hall and a courthouse and a jail and a park with a pond and no people. The city ran off a dozen churches, four of them Baptist. They held an auction with a predestined winner—First Baptist Church, now conjoined across empty sidewalks with the structures of local power. Rey remembers the vibrance of the area. I have only his memories to go on.
Rey and I were in the parking lot of First Baptist Church together after we’d been leading one of our series of tours centered on the development of neighborhoods in Charlotte. “How did our city come to be the way it is?” we asked. Rey—Black, early seventies—would talk in great detail about what the neighborhood was like years ago. My job—I’m white, in my early forties—was to narrate the policy context sweeping across the hundred years from Reconstruction to Urban Renewal that shaped American cities into what they are today. I had memorized the dates and names of far-off decisions as a complement to Rey’s intimate memories of the place where we were walking. We talked about disappeared neighborhoods and how they ceased to be. Those stories, we thought, tell us a lot about the cities we live in now, defined as they are by affordable housing crises, hardened segregation, and manifold entrenched social issues. The stories of yesterday describe the cities we have today.
Rey and I made a good team. I would zoom out into a wide-angle shot. Rey would zoom in and capture just the right detail. After doing these tours numerous times, we developed a good rapport. We could select just the right narratives to animate the place.2
But we still had gaps. People would raise questions we could not answer. We would notice things that were missing that we could not account for. We would also see things that were present, but we did not know how they got there. The largest of those presences was First Baptist Church, a white congregation now in the center of the place that was central to Black life in Charlotte for many decades. Standing in the First Baptist parking lot with Rey, it was clear to me that there was a story to tell and that I needed to dig below the surface to find it. I could not shake the feeling that its importance extended far beyond the confines of any one church and into the political and theological entanglements that have made the United States. But no one I could locate knew the story in any detail. It was hidden from public view.
Rey’s neighborhood was called Brooklyn. It was the chief cultural and economic center of Black life in a fast-growing city that fancied itself part of the “New South.” Residents of Brooklyn set out to build what they needed on their own. They lacked the same access to money and resources that the white districts around them had, and yet they persevered in building a vibrant home for themselves. They saw in their neighborhood the promise of a great urban area, and so they named it after the New York town that was one great city next to another.3
Many people thrived in Charlotte’s Brooklyn. Neighbors there squeezed every ounce of goodness possible from the materials available. And yet their lives were circumscribed by the limitations that white institutions imposed on Black ones. There were hundreds of businesses and associations and well over one thousand families but few landowners. By 1960, fewer than 10 percent of residences were owner-occupied, making the neighborhood susceptible to slumlords who made large profits at the expense of tenants.4 Like other Black neighborhoods in the city, Brooklyn lacked the same public investments that white neighborhoods received for basic amenities like sidewalks and paved streets, schools and flood-control measures.5 Yet it was also filled with immense creativity and determination. There were businesspeople who met the needs of neighbors, social reformers, and doctors and lawyers. Alongside them were working-class people who labored long hours to provide for their families, and hustlers whose daily bread depended on their creativity, and desperately poor people for whom consistent employment was a challenge. Brooklyn was a complex village, a city within a city that was at once both self-reliant and deeply interconnected.
A neighborhood like Brooklyn created space for growing culture, for growing businesses, for growing families. Within the friendly blocks there, neighbors maintained a certain order, a way of structuring life that made for the best possible scenario for Black people within the iron frame of the Jim Crow South.
“We had everything we needed right down the street,” Rey says, stretching his hands southward from the corner of Second and Davidson. “There was one big grocer but lots of smaller ones as well. There were tailors and barbers and restaurants. On Fridays, everybody fried fish. You could walk up and down the sidewalk and smell salt and grease from every house you passed.”
He remembers other smells, especially from the laundromat. “The largest laundry facility in the state employed people from all over the neighborhood, all over the city, really, and when it was running—which was almost all the time—you could smell the clean clothes for several blocks. It was just a block down from here. You know, where the expressway is now.”
I see you are not there.6
“During the summer, the churches took turns having Vacation Bible School so that we would have a place to go and get out of the house. Dozens of us kids would show up at one church for a week, and then the following week we would go on to the next church. You could do that for basically the whole summer. That’s probably how our parents managed to get by.”
Charlotte’s Brooklyn was a living, breathing example of Black brilliance and resilience in the heat of the Jim Crow South. It was bakers and mechanics and undertakers and musicians, holidays and funeral processions and struggle and triumph. Rey says, “This is what it was like: The preachers lived here, as did architects, and businessmen, and lots of domestic workers, and railroad men, and day laborers. I went to school at Second Ward School. I walked over every morning. My teacher lived just down the block from me and spoke to my mother regularly, so I had to stay on the straight and narrow. Which I didn’t.”
“It was a real community, and the way you could tell it was this: not many folks had telephones, but if you acted ugly out in the street, your mama would know before you got home, even though there was no phone to call her and tell what you had done.”
Each time I hear Rey, he raises a new image. He walks between two worlds, the one of his childhood just as close as the one of today. He speaks, and I can see gray air in winter from the coal-burning fireplaces or visualize workers tromping through muddy, unpaved streets after spring rains.
I can imagine the crowds outside the Savoy Theater on McDowell Street, thrumming with energy as they wait to get into a live show. Little Richard is in town maybe, and the young people are lined up hours early to get in. The fellows without dates are looking around to see who they might ask to dance. An older man with a snack cart stops by a group of young women to hawk cold drinks and popcorn. Word on the street is that the star of the evening is already nearby, getting his famous hair touched up at Ivy Campbell’s salon over in First Ward. The rumor flames down the sidewalk and sends a jolt of excitement through the fans as it does. It gets confirmed when Ivy’s son Richard comes strutting down the street with a whole twenty-dollar bill in hand, telling them he had just seen Little Richard, who always treated little Richard extra special since they shared a name.7
Rey conjures a memory of the trombone and percussion bands that came parading during the annual convocation of the United House of Prayer for All People. The streets would flood with onlookers as the national bishop returned to the church on McDowell Street, the Main Street of Black Charlotte. “Daddy Grace” he was called, and people showed up from all over to hear him preach. Days of parades, nights of revival services. All of it took place around the House of Prayer, a Black church group that owned all of their spaces outright. They had never once taken on a cent of debt.
When we get to one key part of Rey’s life—when he went off to Vietnam to fight in a war for a country that never really loved him back—he says that the bulldozers had already started knocking down houses. “You would go to school in the morning,” he says, “and when you came home, your house was a pile of rubble. They just came in and took everything.”
They.
Unnamed. Mysterious. Violent. All-powerful. Able to make neighborhoods disappear. Never accountable, always hidden, someone else’s names on the paperwork. Ever-present but beyond words.
They: demigods, the masters of the universe, the men behind the curtain, too big to fail. They look from up high, stories above, the world at their controls.
But they are hard to identify. They are surrounded by silence that conceals, obscures, shrouds, masks, covers. They aren’t talking. They may not even know who they are.
The above is from Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods by Greg Jarrell, ©2024 Fortress Press. You are welcome to share this post, but it should not be reprinted, excerpted, or reproduced without the written consent of Fortress Press.
Over the next three weeks, I will release chapter one of Our Trespasses in small excerpts. Like what you’re reading? Purchase a copy of the book:
Don’t like what you see? Order a copy of the book. Chapters 2-12 get progressively better. I promise.
Release Party: February 20. About one dozen tickets remain. Reserve yours now.
One Last Note: Tomorrow begins Black History Month. Here’s a favorite performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
The Charlotte Sanborn maps label the street as “Watkins Alley.” Wright called it “Watkins Lane” instead. I am adopting Wright’s name for his street. The Sanborn company began making detailed maps of thousands of American cities and towns shortly after the Civil War. The maps were used by fire insurance companies but now are of enormous historical value for tracking changes to the built environment over time. Local libraries or university archives often house those map collections.
Reynard Wright died on September 11, 2020, while this work was in production. His shaping of my imagination is reflected across the work.
Thomas W. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875–1975, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 130. Hanchett cites the earliest reference to the area as “Brooklyn” coming from 1897. He also notes several other connections that might help explain the name on pp. 303–4, note 50. Brooklyn became a borough of New York City in 1898. Prior to that, it was a separate municipality.
The Charlotte City Directories of that era provide an estimate of owner-occupied residences. They show that about 10 percent of residences were occupied by owners in 1960. A Charlotte Observer story of the same period estimates owner occupancy at 7 percent, a similar figure. See “Brooklyn Homes Give Owners High Returns,” Charlotte Observer, January 11, 1960.
See Rose Leary Love, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies (Charlotte, NC: Charlotte Mecklenburg Library) for firsthand descriptions of Brooklyn. Text available at https://tinyurl.com/2p9a3enc.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16.
This paragraph is built from my interview with Richard Campbell, Ivy’s son. Richard was a brilliant storyteller and gifted musician. He died on November 10, 2022. His memory remains a blessing.
Looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for all your hard work on it, Greg.
Can't wait to dig into this book. ;)