“But what you don't know is I'm sometimes more fearful when I put this uniform on. I’ve had that reaction since I was eight years old,” Putney said in July, after police officers were killed in Dallas. “Even now when I see blue lights, it hits me in the stomach. Putney has been outspoken about racial issues, weaving in his own experiences as both a black man and a cop. In stark contrast to violent and deadly riots in Boston over busing, Charlotte was widely known as “the city that made desegregation work.” In the meantime, Charlotte was becoming a gleaming, corporate city, home to corporate giants like Bank of America, Wachovia, and Duke Energy. The city undertook busing, producing a school district that was both well-integrated and produced strong student outcomes. What followed in Charlotte was a surprisingly successful experiment. The justices ruled that busing was an appropriate remedy for racial imbalances in school districts. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the Board of Education, with the case eventually going to the Supreme Court six years later. That year, a black couple wanted to send their son James Swann to an integrated school, and were refused. A photo ran in newspapers around the country.īy 1965, however, there were still 88 segregated campuses. Board of Education, with Dorothy Counts enrolling at Harding High School, an all-white school, in 1957, surrounded by jeering whites. Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools desegregated after Brown v. Greensboro, with a large, middle-class black population and North Carolina A&T University, took the lead. On the eve of the Civil War, Mecklenburg County had nearly 7,000 slaves, accounting for about 40 percent of the population.Īfter the Civil War, African Americans briefly gained political power in North Carolina, but by 1900, Democrats had returned to power and purged blacks from government.Ĭharlotte was not at the forefront of protests during the height of the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The ability to easily move the produce of the slave economy out of the region and to markets transformed the village into a prosperous hub, its population more than doubling between 18. That changed when railroads came through in 1852, transforming Charlotte into a central hub for the plantation economy. At one time, it was just another small Piedmont town. It struggles with a history of segregation, racial tension, and difficult relations between African Americans and their police department.Ĭharlotte does have a history, one that stretches back to before the American Revolution Mecklenburg County claims to have declared independence from Britain way back in 1775, though historians aren’t sold. Although Uptown’s gleaming skyscrapers and chain restaurants seem to suggest a city that is both without, and untethered from, history, the Queen City was built on slavery and its racial politics remain fraught, just like those of nearly every other city. The banking mecca-the Southeast’s second-largest city-has tended to see itself as an avatar of modernity and moderation in a state where both are uneven. This is clear in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week, where intense demonstrations and riots have followed the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by a police officer on Wednesday.
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