‘All the things a city can have.’ Here’s why some are calling Charlotte a ‘Black mecca’
On an unseasonably warm Tuesday night in early February, Camp North End transformed into Charlotte’s largest outdoor mixer.
Congregating in the heart of the 76-acre open-air business and shopping complex on the city’s North End Smart District were hundreds of majority Black faces.
Some were millennials. Others were a bit more seasoned. The occasion? They all gathered to participate in the weekly Mad Miles Run Club event that attracts runners of all races and backgrounds.
The club, started by Cornell Jones — who is Black — encourages African Americans to run and also dispel the notion that the activity is a white-centered one.
There is also something else Mad Miles does besides promoting fitness. Intentional or not, the club has acted as an entry point for recent transplants to integrate themselves into Charlotte’s expanding Black cultural scene.
“I’ve tried to get out, explore and meet other people,” said Brittany Hill, who moved to Charlotte from St. Louis in 2021. “But, I’ve literally met everybody at the run club.”
Hill, who works in the information technology sector, explained that she “wanted to try something different,” and Charlotte, from what she heard about its booming young Black population, seemed to be a city of opportunity.
“I guess this (Charlotte) is as good as any (city),” she told The Charlotte Observer. “So I tried it and I moved here.”
The largest growth in pure numbers of Black residents since 2010 hasn’t taken place in popular cities like Atlanta or Houston, but rather in Charlotte during a period where there is a mass exodus of Black people leaving America’s largest industrial hubs like New York and Chicago for the South.
In 1970, just as America was slowly transitioning from the civil rights movement, the city’s Black population stood at 72,938 people, according to U.S. Census Bureau demographic records. By 2020 — a half-century later — Charlotte’s Black population swelled to 307,858.
Currently, Black residents account for 35.2% of Charlotte’s population.
The Charlotte metro area was recently identified among the fastest-growing in the nation, according to a 2022 study. Charlotte and surrounding areas, including Concord and Gastonia, gained 201,349 residents from 2016 to 2021, the study showed.
About 44,250 Black residents moved within Mecklenburg County in 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. About 14,250 moved to Mecklenburg from another county in North Carolina. Another 25,400 moved to Mecklenburg from a different state.
The Charlotte Business Alliance reported that “the largest number of movers” to Charlotte between 2020 and 2021 — nearly 7,000 people — previously resided in the New York or New Jersey metro areas.
Moving to Charlotte
The reasons why Black people have flocked to Charlotte, regardless of their origin, vary.
Charlotte is home to many Fortune 500 companies, such as Bank of America, Duke Energy, and Wells Fargo. Charlotte Douglas International Airport is one of the most accessible air travel hubs in the region. The area is less congested than many other large coastal cities. The quality of life for some who move into Charlotte is a nice refrain, too.
And their dollars — compared to other major cities — go a little bit further, said Angela Ambroise, a real estate agent with Urban Roots Real Estate Advisors.
Ambroise has worked with Black professionals who have relocated to Charlotte from as close as Washington, D.C., to as far as California. Many homebuyers, she said have settled in neighborhoods such as Hidden Valley and Westchester.
But Steele Creek, Huntersville, east Charlotte and University City have become secondary settlements for buyers who can’t immediately acquire housing in desirable locations because of steep price points or scarce inventory.
“In terms of real estate, people who are moving here can afford more,” she said. “A lot of my minority clients can afford more than the ones who are here trying to buy a home for the first time.”
Sekou Cooke is a Jamaican-born architect and UNC Charlotte urban design program director who arrived in 2021 after a seven-year stint as a professor at Syracuse University. Charlotte presented a canvas for Cooke to reimagine how cities should function to serve all people.
Having lived in San Francisco and New York, Cooke admittedly wasn’t familiar with Charlotte prior to his only visit to the city in 2018. Before then, he only knew Charlotte was in close proximity to Atlanta and the Raleigh-Durham area where relatives — who implored him to consider North Carolina — lived.
“You really didn’t hear much about the city (Charlotte), but I knew there was something happening here,” he said. “The city is very active. Charlotte has all the things a city can have. There is a cultural complexity that makes it an interesting place to study.”
Cooke believes that Charlotte — at least for someone not indigenous to the city — is Black-friendly.
“I think it is in general,” Cooke explained, adding that he’s worked closely with local civic organizations that have attempted to preserve Charlotte’s Black cultural arts presence. “I haven’t had any specific instances as a Black resident where I feel not catered or listened to or feel like an outsider.”
When he’s not involved in work or teaching, Cooke says he found social community connections through weekend pick-up soccer games and watching European football matches at a local Liverpool bar for the club’s die-hard fans.
“I’m not the most social person in the world,” said Cooke. “But as long as there is a place to play soccer, play golf, and do yoga — the simple things.”
Black Charlotteans fought for inclusion
But Charlotte, in its current welcoming incarnation, wasn’talways considered an inclusive haven for Black people within or outside its boundaries. For decades after the Civil War, Charlotte, like all of America, was wrought with racism and segregation.
One turning point, according to longtime local historian Tom Hanchett, famously occurred during monthslong demonstrations in 1960 led by 200 Black Johnson C. Smith students who participated in sit-in protests at several then-white-only lunch counters and restaurants.
“They (JCSU students) were not immediately welcomed by any means,” Hanchett said.
After the public protests and marches went on for months, then-Mayor Stanford Brookshire assembled what was dubbed a “friendly relations committee” to help ease racial tensions and to assist in the gradual desegregation of public venues.
And by that summer, many lunch counters were soon desegregated, according to Hanchett.
“It was pretty remarkable because a lot of cities like Birmingham still had not desegregated its lunch counters,” he said. “That moment put us (Charlotte) on the map.”
Another watershed moment, explained Hanchett, was an effort made by civil rights leader and dentist Dr. Reginald Hawkins in May of 1963 to further wrestle Charlotte from the grips of segregation.
Hawkins, who has been referred to as “the father of Charlotte’s civil rights movement,” led a march from JCSU to downtown Charlotte’s county courthouse to protest, this time, the city’s upscale restaurants refusing to serve Black patrons at their lunch counters.
Brookshire later called a meeting of Chamber of Commerce leaders and urged them to desegregate hotels and eateries. A resolution was approved asking that all businesses serve people regardless of race.
Charlotte later gained a reputation as the place to do business where African Americans could successfully live, work and play through the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that dealt with the busing of students to promote public school integration.
And by the start of the new millennium, influential Black-owned publications like Essence magazine routinely listed Charlotte, said Hanchett, as “one of the best places for African Americans to live” because of the city’s intentional efforts to be inclusive.
‘Black people are ready to return’
As native of Columbia, South Carolina, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles often visited the city in her youth for trips to the old Charlotte Coliseum (now Bojangles Coliseum) to see circus acts and the famed Harlem Globetrotters make basketball magic.
In the midst of her third term in office as the city’s first Black female mayor, Lyles describes the nation’s 15th-largest city encompassing “a different kind of balance” thanks to its reputation of being accepting of African American interests.
“I think there are more opportunities for minorities to come into our community,” she said, adding that Southern cities like Charlotte are the beneficiaries of “reverse migration” — something that didn’t seem possible several generations ago when Black people fled the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century as part of the Great Migration.
“It took us longer to try to figure out how we were going to deal with racism and inequities,” she said. “Now that we have figured that out, we have become a place where Black people are ready to return. So you have to be ready to accept people that are coming to you because they want to participate in our prosperity. They want to participate in a way that they can build wealth and opportunity.“
Dammit Wesley, a now vivacious and renowned Charlotte artist, was once a bright-eyed 19-year-old who became enthralled by the familiar glow of the city’s night skyline during driving trips to the area.
The Greenville, South Carolina, native moved to Charlotte 12 years ago, right after relatives made the jump. At first, Charlotte just didn’t appeal to Wesley. But he knew the city attracted Black residents from his hometown. Many often would travel the two hours to attend work and worship services, he said.
“I already knew there was a Black population there,” Wesley said.
Charlotte, explained Wesley, initially became alluring through the CIAA basketball tournament that drew hordes of Black people from across the country to the event.
“The CIAA is a social experience,” he said. “For that week, Charlotte truly became like a Black mecca. I could go days without having to interact with any white people at all during CIAA.”
The games and events around the tournament brought in an estimated economic impact of $43.7 million in 2019 alone, the Observer previously reported. The tournament had an estimated $600 million economic impact, including $370 million in direct visitor spending in the 15 years it was held in Charlotte, according to the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority.
The tournament is now in Baltimore for the foreseeable future.
“At CIAA, I learned about the different pockets of communities and of blackness and how to really navigate the city,” Wesley said. “I saw endless opportunities for entrepreneurship and all those kinds of things. “
Wesley observed that Charlotte had branded itself, in a lot of ways, as a Black city. But not in the same way as other cities branded as Black hotbeds.
What Charlotte did have was a culture that embraced the Hornets. A larger-than-life “Grandmama” national ad campaign was centered around Charlotte’s mid-90s NBA star Larry Johnson. The Kings of Comedy live show turned box-office hit movie was filmed in the city. All of those things, Wesley said, placed Black Charlotte at the forefront.
“It (Charlotte) seemed like the right place to be and grow and spread my wings,” he said. “I was kind of correct.”
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