THE SMELL OF OLD WOOD and creaking sanctuary floorboards tip you off to the age of the Grace AME Zion Church on South Brevard Street in Second Ward. It’s one of the oldest black churches in Charlotte, dedicated in 1902 after a $2,000 fundraising campaign by the founding congregation. Next door, at 229 South Brevard, stands one of the oldest commercial structures in the city, the Mecklenburg Investment Company Building, completed in 1922.
A brightly colored mural, painted last year by young artist Abel Jackson, incorporates portraits of three black men critical to the MIC Building’s development and the neighborhood, Brooklyn, where it was developed: J.T. WIlliams, Thaddeus Tate, and William W. Smith. Williams and Tate were prominent business leaders in Brooklyn and investors in the building’s construction; Smith, the project’s contractor, was Charlotte’s first black architect. If you stand on Brevard and look at the building’s façade, you notice a strip of light-colored brick just below the roof line with dark, diamond patterns embedded along its length. The diamonds were Smith’s signature design.
This intersection of Brevard and East Third streets was one of the social and commercial hubs of Brooklyn, a historic black community razed and redeveloped in a series of urban renewal projects in the 1960s and ’70s. More than 1,000 homes and 216 businesses were demolished. Brooklyn remains the foremost symbol in Charlotte of a pattern that repeated itself in city after city in that era: Black communities with homes, businesses and fully formed identities condemned as slums and destroyed to make way for government buildings and developers’ plans.
Esta historia es de la edición June 2020 de Charlotte Magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición June 2020 de Charlotte Magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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