- [Announcer] This is a production of PBS Charlotte.

(mysterious music) - [Narrator] Over the past 150 years, Charlotte has transformed from a dusty Southern town rooted in cotton and textiles to a corporate and financial epicenter.

Today, towering skyscrapers shimmer in the sun, and the traffic flows on modern interstates.

(traffic rumbling) But the price paid by some for the Queen City's growth was high.

Coming up, learn how Charlotte's leaders set urban renewal in motion.

Then meet former residents of Charlotte's Brooklyn and Greenville neighborhoods impacted by the program.

And hear from historians and archivists working to bring untold stories to the digital realm through apps and websites.

All of that and more on Trail of History.

(upbeat music) (whimsical music) Tree lined streets, front porches, parks.

The American dream, right?

But what really defines a neighborhood?

Meet Marie Sadler.

- Well, I was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina, but I grew up in the Brooklyn community of Charlotte.

As a kid growing up, you had plenty things to do, plenty people to watch over you and take care of you.

Times were a little hard, but we grew up doing things that children today no longer can do.

Playing in the woods, in the creeks.

- [Narrator] Marie's husband, Thomas Sadler, also known as Pop, grew up a few miles away in the Greenville neighborhood.

- Part about Greenville was that everybody in the neighborhood, when they say it take a village, it took a village, but the village was there.

We did everything outside.

You couldn't stay in the house.

Your parents made you get out.

- [Narrator] Times back then were different.

- My wife made a quote once.

She said, "We were poor, but we didn't know it."

Because the neighborhood had such a happy and fulfilling spirit that we didn't have time to think about what was missing because, in our opinion, we weren't missing anything.

- [Narrator] But to hear Pop describe the home he lived in, life wasn't all roses.

- Where we lived, we had a wood stove, wood burning stove.

Most of the folks rented, and we had absentee landlords that did not look after the property.

Some of 'em had cracks in the walls that you could see out.

A lot of times there was windows and that was out, gone.

We had cardboard or stuffed clothing in the panes where it keep the air out because the landlord just didn't fix stuff like that.

As dilapidated as it seemed, it was home.

- [Narrator] But change was on the way.

- We used to see people come up the street, a lot of times news people taking pictures and they was getting photographs of the blighted, dilapidated conditions in which we were living.

I hadn't heard the term slum.

Didn't know what it meant.

(ominous music) - [Narrator] Blighted, slums, crime ridden.

Words used across the nation and here in Charlotte to justify demolishing homes and businesses to make way for massive civic projects, such as parks, government buildings, roads, and interstates throughout the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

- Often, many cities had, at their center, as Charlotte did, older communities that had been neglected - [Narrator] With World War II in the rear view mirror, cities across the United States experienced unprecedented growth.

Many Americans were optimistic about the future.

During this period, the concept of urban renewal was introduced to the nation.

- Urban renewal is a program that was started by the federal government with the concept that federal money could be used to clear out what was called slum housing in city centers, and ideally, do things that would then improve both the lives of the people who had been living in those houses and then also the cities.

- [Narrator] The promise of federal money was too alluring for city leaders.

Urban renewal became an attractive concept.

- And it ramps up in the '50s, and Charlotte, the city council votes to accept money and begin a project in January of 1960.

- [Narrator] For the city of Charlotte to qualify for the federal money, projects had to meet certain criteria.

- You had to identify areas that were majority blighted.

Leadership here stepped in and they started in Second Ward.

- [Narrator] Second Ward, also known as the Brooklyn neighborhood by those calling it home at the time, was predominantly African American.

- Essentially what happened, just to sum it up very briefly, a large chunk of Charlotte was bulldozed, and the people who lived there, who were predominantly African American, who had communities there, many of whom didn't live in the best of houses but who had significant social ties and community that they had built up during the years of segregation.

And that was essentially wiped away.

- [Narrator] Nationally and locally, urban renewal efforts coincided with the civil rights movement.

On the outside, city leaders made promises to African American communities being displaced by urban renewal, many of which welcomed the promise of a better life.

- Many African Americans, particularly leaders, they wanted to see urban renewal.

And that's what a lot of people don't understand.

African Americans were for a program that promised to clean up a community.

And as you said, renewal, we think about something that is going to refurbish and bring about a new community.

One of the things that Kelly Alexander was trying to push city leaders to do was to promise that they would provide more housing, new places to live for these African Americans who were being displaced, but that didn't happen.

- And to talk about the promises.

I mean, there's this very ceremonial moment in 1961 where Mayor Brookshire takes a sledgehammer and whacks the porch of a dilapidated house and says, "No one will ever have to live in a house like this again."

And that promise does not come true.

- [Narrator] Along with those broken promises, historians suggest urban renewal may have been used to break up Black communities and hamper the civil rights movement just as it was gaining steam.

- It really fractured the community.

Some scholars suggest that this was by design because if you look at the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, this is the time when African Americans are organizing.

- This is an incredible time in Charlotte.

Less than a month after the city council votes for to start this urban renewal project, Johnson C. Smith students come down the hill to the center city to start the sit ins.

Then, two months later, there's a new project unveiled, which is the highway plan for Charlotte, which is all the 77 and the Brookshire and the Belk and where all those highways are gonna go, which happen to be right through African American communities.

- If you break these communities up, it'll be harder to organize.

With the NAACP here in Charlotte, its best years were between the 1940 to around the mid 1950s.

And then that's when you see urban renewal.

(ominous music) - [Narrator] For the Sadlers, though, the term urban renewal still, to this day, triggers negative memories.

- When I hear the word urban renewal now, I think about bulldozers.

That's the first picture that come to my mind is bulldozers.

And I feel a sense of sadness.

- [Narrator] One particular day was the hardest.

It was the day Pop Sadler had to move his mother from her home in the Greenville neighborhood.

- They had the bulldozer sitting at her house.

She refused to go.

He had to physically go get her, move her out of the house, and this is where she grew up.

This is the only place that she knew, and she didn't wanna leave it.

- We tried several times to prepare her for leaving.

She was mad as everything because we had moved her to a new place.

This is not my home.

- You take me out outta this house and setting me in somebody else's house.

You put me in somebody else's history, you know?

What about mine?

- You have this broken social fabric and you have tremendous mistrust because there were promises.

"Well, you know, there'll be something better."

And then there really wasn't.

- The truth is a lot of people left Greenville, and they died of broken hearts because their whole way of life had changed.

You had a better house.

You had a nicer house.

But you didn't have that community support.

You didn't have your friends, the store that you used to go to, and Lord knows the relationships you had built over time with people.

And you're here now in the new neighborhoods where people are more concerned about the house than they are the people that's living in it.

And I don't think it took a rocket scientist to figure out that this was just not right.

- [Narrator] Decades have passed since the bulldozers knocked down the houses, apartments, and stores that made up these communities.

- Now those were major, major sacrifices.

People gave up their homes so that you could have a freeway.

- It's one of those things that you would come back and look around and wonder what life would have been like.

- [Narrator] One can argue that Charlotte, as a whole, benefited from the projects that followed such as the parks, civic buildings and freeways, but Pam says there are bigger lessons to be learned.

- I just think it's so important, continually, when in a city people think of something that seems like a good idea to really look closely at everybody that it's going to affect and really do that community work to really know what's going on and to not assume that a rising tide is gonna lift all boats.

That, "Oh well, this will be good for our city.

It'll make us look good.

That means there'll be more growth.

And that will be good for everybody," but it's not.

- I think the major damage is breaking up these business districts.

And if we think about a lot of the conversations that we have today about economic mobility, economic inequality, and just the loss of those, the visible loss, more than anything, whereas African Americans, young African Americans who may not have been from well to do families, they could be in a neighborhood and see people who look like them doing well.

They could walk out in their neighborhoods and see doctors, lawyers, all living in the same block as a person who was a custodian.

- When I think about urban renewal, I wonder why was it necessary to renew or remake something, especially here in our neighborhood, instead of improving on what we already had.

We need to learn how to improve and make it better instead of destroying it - [Narrator] While there's no way to turn back time, the Sadlers and others are working to make sure the full story of urban renewal is shared.

Pop and Marie are currently working to build a small park here in the Greenville neighborhood.

- Greenville meant a lot to a lot of people.

Now, the government may not think so, but those who are here, who got relatives that's dead and gone, the story still lives on through us, and we're just trying to preserve it.

The rock symbolizes the strength and the fact that Greenville has made so many sacrifices.

It's been a rock for the city of Charlotte.

Any way we can preserve the name and be able to preserve some of the history, oh, it makes you feel good just to know that you're not forgotten.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] The Sadlers aren't the only ones in Charlotte working to share the complete story of urban renewal.

At Johnson C. Smith University, two researchers are working to turn a treasure trove of city documents, maps, and images into an online repository.

- We were given a generous gift of some documents and maps from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission.

And these were the documents that they used when they were, and the maps they created when they were doing urban renewal in the '60s and '70s.

I knew it was amazing material that no one really had ever seen before.

'Cause these are huge maps, and these maps show the areas that were under urban renewal.

There's five zones in Brooklyn.

There's Greenville.

There's downtown Charlotte First ward, third ward.

All these streets are gone.

Brown Street, Short Street.

- [Woman] Freetown.

- [Brandon] Palmgood Street.

Stan Street.

(indistinct) Street.

These streets don't exist anymore.

And these were the maps that show three different levels of projects that they did.

There's a map level that shows all the structures that were there, and there's a map that shows what it looked like when those structures were all torn down.

And there's the proposed plan where they put the government center in Marshall Park.

- [Narrator] The maps help you visualize the numbers truly impacted by urban renewal.

- There were about 17,000 African Americans living in these neighborhoods, and in particular, what we now call Uptown Charlotte before urban renewal.

And there's about 2,000 afterwards.

Lost their homes, lost their schools, lost their neighborhoods, lost their wealth in some cases.

- [Narrator] Brandon Lunsford and Dr. Tekla Ali Johnson received grants from the National Park Service, the Knight Foundation, and the National Archives to catalog and digitize the collection of maps and papers.

The plan is to combine the collection with oral histories from former residents, then make it all available through a virtual reality experience and online database.

The duo is leading the project, but is also working with experts at Duke University to develop the technology side of the project, called A Virtual Sense of Place: African American Urbanism.

- If we could rebuild the community, we would for the residents that lived here, but we can't do that, but we can do it virtually.

- [Brandon] The ultimate goal of this project is to use augmented reality technology, expanded reality technology, to bring these neighborhoods back to life and also to create a resource hub, sort of a repository.

- What we learned was that, I think without exception, folks said that what was put in the news or what was presented about the community, that they were run down, that it was slum, that it was blighted wasn't their experience at all.

In fact, they said that the blighted aspects, which there were some houses that weren't, as in any community, that weren't as good as others, but that those were what was emphasized in the news, and the middle class homes that were maybe low income but people took care of the property, they weren't shown at all.

And so they felt that there was almost a half a truth and then a lie that was mixed in there to help justify the forced removals.

One of the things that's emphasized by everybody is that there is a issue with not being able to pass on generational wealth, generational wealth in terms of financially, but then also in terms of culturally.

And I think that has been what is a stream across all of the interviews that we've talked about.

- [Narrator] Lunsford for believes it's critical for Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black institution, to lead this project.

- And I think it's very important that an HBCU is the one that's driving this project, too, because there's often historically Black institutions that are not given the opportunity to direct these projects and do these projects.

And so you don't really get that voice very much, and I think it's very important and crucial that we are the ones that are driving this project 'cause there's a lot of work being and done.

I think it's important that people really get the perspective of the people who had to live through it and who survived it.

We want these documents and these stories to tell the story themselves.

And we're trying as hard as we can to stay out of this story because I think a lot of the the mistakes that's been done in the past is that people tell their perspective of the story.

Historians, often white historians, in Charlotte and many other places are telling the story from their point of view.

And what we're trying to do is tell the story from the point of view of the people who lived it.

So we're letting the oral history speak for themselves.

We're letting these maps and documents speak for themselves so that you can understand the story without our interpretation of it.

- [Narrator] The project from Johnson C. Smith University is still in the building and research phase.

It's not yet ready for public release, but over at the Levine Museum of the New South, they have recently launched a unique app called KnowCLT.

- We wanna meet people where they are, right?

And everybody's on their phone, everybody's online, and we want history to be more accessible.

And so part of our vision moving forward is to provide people opportunities to explore history where it happened via our new app KnowCLT.

And so people will be able to download the app, explore the neighborhood from the comfort of their home, or if they'd actually like to go see historic sites where they once stood, they can walk around Uptown and Second Ward, and these sites are identified, either through the app using GPS points, or they will be able to find some footprints on the sidewalk and some signs telling you where to stand.

- [Narrator] The museum partnered with nonprofit app developer Potions & Pixels.

- And they were able to incorporate some cutting edge technology around augmented reality.

That means people will be able to stand across the street from, say, AME Zion publishing house, or where that once stood or the Bravard Street Library, which is now part of NASCAR Hall of Fame.

And people will be able to stand there, hold up their phones, and watch these historic sites appear in front of them across the street.

- So you can see it tells you the instructions.

So to stand on the footprints here, so that's what we're standing on.

And then it's gonna aim at a target, and it's gonna tell you to click on that target, and then you press it, and if you all notice, do you all see that?

So right now, that image faded over it, and this one's really incredible because you can see the preexisting buildings here and you can see there is JT Williams' home.

And you can see obviously, the cars and everything else in reality, the image sticks in place.

- [Narrator] For the Levine Museum of the New South, the project serves as an extension of their mission.

- This next step for the museum to be able to put history in people's hands and allow them to go explore it where it actually happened.

And so, it's one thing to be able to say we've built this impactful exhibit that reaches those who are able to make it to our building.

And it's another thing to say anyone can find this information from the comfort of their home, and they are able to go out and stand on this historic site and kind of be connected to the past through the actual sense of place of being there.

- When you see these AR sites and you realize, yeah, there was a publishing house, library, school, churches, you get a whole sense of the diversity of just life and experiences as any healthy community has.

And so, what this experience and this app has really done a great job and the people at the Museum of the New South have done an amazing job is collecting so much different information to show the full, diverse experience of life that was here.

The cultural experiences, the political experiences, the economic experience, that this truly was the heart of Black Charlotte.

- [Narrator] Those who lost homes and communities know what is gone is gone, but they hope by sharing the full history of urban renewal, future generations will learn from what happened.

- We're gonna preserve what history we have left because it's a history that our children and our grandchildren need to know.

Where did they come from?

How did they get to where they are?

How can I appreciate what I've gained or learned if I don't know what it was like?

We have to let them know that life has not always been like they're living.

That somebody paid the price for the way that they live that you are living now.

- [Narrator] And as Charlotte continues to evolve.

- Real estate and economics, these are social forces that we cannot stop.

These things are gonna continue to happen.

Gentrification is going to continue to happen.

But as people move into these places, there's a misconception that we're moving into these places because people could not take care of them.

We're coming here to save these communities in many ways.

And so I always tell people that when you move into these communities, they have a history, and it would behoove everyone who moves into a community to try to understand how that community developed.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Thank you for watching Trail of History.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] A production of PBS Charlotte.