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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0008, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Architect and politician Harvey Gantt describes his ascent from a childhood in segregated Charleston, South Carolina, to becoming the first black mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. Along the way, Gantt led sit-ins in Charleston, integrated Clemson University, and became a successful architect in Charlotte. While he describes his career path, Gantt discusses civil rights in the American South. As a southerner, he sees the accomplishments of the civil rights movement as dramatic; as a member of the black middle class, he leans toward negotiation rather than revolt. After the movement's major successes, while northern activists were pushing for more change, Gantt sought to take advantage of his new opportunities. He sees his success both resulting from and contributing to civil rights for African Americans.
Architect and politician Harvey Gantt describes his ascent from a childhood in segregated Charleston, South Carolina, to becoming the first black mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. As a southerner, he sees the accomplishments of the civil rights movement as dramatic; as a member of the black middle class, he leans toward negotiation rather than revolt.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Lynn Haessly. It is January 6, 1986, and I'll be interviewing Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt in his city hall office. As I explained, I'd like to talk to you about your life beginning with your childhood and your family background. Can you tell me about where you were born and your family?
Well, I was born in Charleston County, on one of the islands surrounding Charleston, Young's Island to be exact. My family, my mother and father, were very young—my father was twenty-one, my mother was eighteen. We moved immediately to Charleston when I was an infant. I lived in public housing in the City of Charleston then, as opposed to the county. My father got a job working in the war industries. At that time, Charleston was a big naval base; it still is. For the first four years of my life I lived in public housing. Then my father decided to move out of public housing as things got better for him and he got a leg up on the economic ladder. And as the war wound down, we moved to the center of Charleston in our own house. Probably I got my first interest in architecture by remembering that he built the house himself and started off and the house sort of grew with our family. I ultimately had four sisters, me being the oldest in the family. I went to public schools; first went out to a kindergarten school that I remember very vividly because I somehow didn't like the idea of going to school and the teacher was rather mean. But I went to public school and never went to first grade—I always remember that, I never was a first grader. I went from kindergarten to second grade.
Why was that?
Well, because the first day or two that they put me in first grade they found that I had done so well in kindergarten that there was no point in keeping me there and so they put me in second grade. My mother was very pleased about that.
You were a high achiever from early on.
I didn't call it a high achiever then but, yes, I guess you could say that. I remember her being so very happy about me going into second grade after only about two days in school. But apparently they tested me, I don't remember the test, and I moved to second grade.
Let me turn you back and ask you about your family background a little more. Had your family's families lived in the sea islands off Charleston? Is that where they had come from?
Yes, they all came from Young's Island. My mother's family, as far back as they can remember, and my father's family came from two different sections of the island. My father came the Adams Run area of Young's Island and my mother came from the Oakville area of Young's Island. She was an only child but my father came from a big family of Gantts that were there. I would assume, you know, we got into this thing with Alex Haley, but we assume that there must have been some Gantts that owned a plantation or something in that area maybe a couple of generations or more back. My father's father had considerable landholdings, or at least it was considered amongst the folks in that area to be fairly large.
Do you know how he acquired that?
I think he was given it, or at least earned it in some fashion. As a matter of fact, this last July 4th, we all took a sort of historical tour of the family holdings and went back into some deep sections of the islands to see land that was still being held by our family and had been passed on.
Had you visited the island regularly as a child to visit relatives?
Oh, yes. I visited my grandmother; it was a yearly trip that my sisters and I would go and spend the summer or at least two or three weeks of the summer where my father grew up. Very few trips to my maternal grandfather's home. He had a rather small farm and he died when I was about eleven years old. We spent most of our time with my paternal grandmother's homeplace. And so we got an appreciation for the rural life of South Carolina. We were always kidded as being the city kids because my father's brothers and children, our cousins, all grew up in the country so to speak.
So your forebears were farm owners rather than tenants on Young's Island?
That's right.
One question I had wanted to ask you was to kind of characterize your family's social and economic status when you were growing up.
Well, I would have to say that my folks were economically the lower,
lower income family, what I call salt of the earth working people, not a
lot of frills, a great deal of
What kinds of different jobs did he have?
He would do a little carpentry work on the side because he had taught himself carpentry when he built our house, so he would assist a small contractor on weekends. Oftentimes he held a job picking up dry cleaning for a dry cleaners. Things that you could do on the weekend. His most stable job, obviously, was the one he had working as a rigger mechanic at the navy yard, and as I started to say, he did generally that kind of laborious work for quite a few years until the latter part of my stay at home, which was when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old. He started to move up in the ranks to supervisor, etc., and I would say most of the years away from home before he retired he had entered some kind of supervisory position within the same group of people, where the physical work was not nearly as intense.
Was your mother employed?
My mother was a housewife for all of our time. We have these strong
standards about women. My father had a strong feeling for the fact that
with five children that my mother needed to be home with them. It's a
value that I sort of carry, I'm kind of old-fashioned about that. I
still feel very strongly about children coming home from school because
when I used to come home from school, beginning as a little kid in
kindergarten, the first thing I'd say when I hit the door was "Mama" and
she would answer back and it was so reassuring to me. I didn't realize
it was reassuring until later years looking back on it. And that really
happened all the way through high school. I'd come home, whether it was
from a football game or football practice or senior high club meeting or
something and holler out that same "Mama." She was always home and I
always tell the story about my father. The role of a father I think I
probably emulate from the way my father treated us. He was never a pal
to me and I was an only boy. You know, he didn't try to get out and play
Little League baseball with me, occasionally he'd come to the games when
I played football in high school and they would come as a family to the
game. But he didn't get very gung ho and never tried to be a pal; he was
always there, sort of reassuring. He would always be stern on discipline
at the appropriate times. But he was a great talker about the weightier
issues of the time, politics, etc., and it really is in my father that I
got more of the inspiration to enter the world of politics first as a
pioneer involved in other kinds of activities during the civil rights
How young were you when you first realized that you wanted to be an architect?
I'm one of those fortunate people who early on recognized that I wanted to be an architect and that was in ninth grade. I consider that to be early, I mean, you toy around with a lot of things and I did probably as most kids do, wanting to be everything from a pharmacist to a doctor to a preacher to a lawyer. But finally it was putting together my aptitude for drawing and my interest in the technical aspects of putting things together that led me to architecture.
What church did you go to?
I attended Morris Street Baptist Church with my family. I literally grew
up in that church. My father and mother came from the island and they
were members of a small Baptist church that we revisited this summer
also. They came right in and settled into that church and that's the
only church that our family has known. They were both very active in it
and we grew up in it literally to speak, you know, being members of
What do you remember about drawing and what kinds of things did you do mechanically?
Well, I first of all remember about third grade one of my teachers noticed that I doodled in my pad quite a bit, and I would try to draw the prettiest girl in the class. She thought she would take that stray energy that was always doodling and drawing and get me to draw the Christmas scene or the Thanksgiving scene or the pumpkin and horn, etc. And I would do right well at it. She'd tell other teachers that "he can draw," you know, "let him draw this." I did that all the way through elementary school and people started to know me as a person who really could sketch very well. As I look back on it they weren't all that good in terms of sketches but they were probably better than most of the kids could draw. And I stuck to doing that. I did that all the way through high school for my own edification, just sketches, just drawing things that I saw and I do it even in city council meetings when I'm sitting down, just drawing things—doodling.
But you were rewarded for it early on, too, at least teachers recognized.
Well, they recognized the talent there and I guess by their pushing it,
it gave me confidence. It was pulled out of me more so. My mother was
concerned. She didn't want me to be an artist. She thought that that
wasn't really a stable enough career. As I said, she was a very
practical person who looked at
Can you talk a little about the social atmosphere in Charleston in the '50s when you were growing up?
Changing! You know, for the first ten years of my life I paid no attention to it. The things that happened around me were accepted. From our little house that my father built, I would walk past an elementary school—I mean, I'd walk up to the corner and I'd look to my left and there was a white elementary school, but I would turn to my right and go four or five blocks to a black elementary school. But they looked no different in my opinion and I thought nothing of it except that that's the way things were. If my mother took us on Saturdays shopping, we got on the bus, we as young kids would go to the back of the bus and we wouldn't question that too much at all. When we got to water fountains, we were taught early on that you drank from the colored fountain because white folks drank from the other one. So in other words, the world was made up a certain way. We lived generally in an integrated neighborhood. It was very strange. There were white people nearby and numbers of cases on the playgrounds without sanction we'd end up playing together. The law, we later found out, did not really allow that but kids would do it anyway, basketball …
Charleston is a city of alleys, isn't it?
No, really it's a city where servants lived closer to the bigger houses
and then they live along the alleys. Traditionally that's the way it is,
not the alleys, of course,
How would you characterize the education you got in elementary and in high school?
Excellent. I always have said that. I mean, I didn't know that the bad books or the books that were out of date were out of date. And I thought people were generally interested in me and my classmates and they wanted us to do well. There was a great deal of competition to do well, to achieve excellence, a lot of pushing about education. My folks were very much involved with the PTA and other people that were around me were involved. We were all relatively low income folks as it was. I don't want to use that term "low income." We were all salt of the earth kind of average, lower income Americans who had jobs.
Did you have jobs when you were in high school?
Yes. I did the traditional: carried the paper, a black newspaper that I carried.
What was the name of it?
The Baltimore Afro-American, it's still there. As a
matter of fact, I remember I used to sell the paper for fifteen cents,
got four cents for each paper I sold and, God, it seemed like a lot of
money in those days. And after you sold forty papers you got four times
forty which was a dollar sixty cents. It was a big deal. I graduated up
from that to working as a delivery boy at a drugstore and I did that in
my junior high school years. And then I graduated up from that to
working in a supermarket on weekends. I guess that's ultimately the last
job I had before I graduated from high school. In the last couple of
years, I was involved in athletics.
What sports?
Football. Can't you guess? Let me go back to the social thing a minute
because I said it was changing. It was comfortable up until year eleven.
It changed dramatically for me with the Supreme Court decision in 1954.
The Supreme Court's decision in 1954 was a watershed year in my whole
life. I was about eleven years old and had become an avid reader. A
couple years earlier I found this small branch library in the black
community and teachers would encourage me to go there and to read. I
started reading little boy's type novels about baseball, football, some
short stories. And I started reading everything that I could get my
hands on. But when this happened I started
When your father talked about politics, were civil rights one of the
things that he talked about even before Brown?
He was talking about it before but he talked about it primarily with my
mother then. When I started asking questions it became more of a topic
of conversation at the dinner table, as it started to become a topic of
conversation at everybody's dinner table, I suppose. And I just
voraciously consumed everything I could find. I read novels, news
magazines, and he reinforced a lot of it. He himself was a member of the
NAACP so I was very proud of my father for having the courage back then
to be a member of that organization as I found out more about it. It
finally manifested itself in the fact that he led an effort of parents
to get the use of the white high school stadium because ours was in such
bad shape. It was very dramatic to see him and other parents get
together and cause a change to occur. So it was probably my family's
first direct encounter with politics and
Tell me about that.
We sat down at S. H. Kress's lunch counter, after planning to do so for about three or four weeks in selecting our students very carefully, about twenty-three of us. All of us seniors in high school, about to graduate, one April day in 1960, one month before graduation. Our parents were fit to be tied. We couldn't tell them about it. But we felt very strongly. I guess we were caught in that whole thing as it spread across the across the country. This wasn't right; it seemed ridiculous now that you really examined it.
Did you have any organizational support for that?
We were all youth members of the NAACP. But the whole effort was kind of
an adjunct thing that was done in secrecy. We didn't want any and
everybody to be a part of it. We started reading about Martin Luther
King and non-violence and we were concerned that we got people who were
not hot-headed because they would be a liability and all kinds of
complications to occur. We didn't want any violence beyond whatever was
necessary. We trained ourselves to resist the ridicule we would
experience. What we were doing was developing statements on a lot of
things that we'd read. We didn't get any of the national leaders to come
down to give us any advice. In fact, they would
Yes. I think it was unusual for high school students to have taken the initiative.
Very unusual.
Why?
We were the only high school at that time when we got involved.
Why do you think that was?
Primarily because parental sanctions wouldn't allow it anyway, and we decided if we were going to do it we couldn't tell our parents.
Is there not a black university in Charleston?
There is none. That was probably one of the other reasons is that it
would never occur here, that it never would come to a head, and we felt
that if thing were going to happen, the kind of negotiations they had
gotten into in Greensboro to bring about some changes, you had to do
something to make it happen because
Who were some of the other people who led the sit-in?
James Blake who is now a Methodist minister in Charleston, who is doing
quite well and probably will be a bishop Sports Illustrated. A lot of people are doing very
in their professions today.
And it was the boys rather than girls?
Well, there were women but the men led that actually. Anyway, that happened and it turned out to be a positive result. We were not locked up in a jail, we were kept in a courtroom. My parents came to pick us up. The City of Charleston acted in a very civil manner. We were charged and our case ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court which was thrown out. This was a couple years later, I was on my way to Clemson.
Did it permanently change the segregation at the lunch counter?
Oh, it started a change in the minds of the whole place. It ultimately
ended up in a movement that spread throughout all of Charleston. That
occurred two years later, three years later. The year I went to Clemson,
one of the same people, the young minister that led a movement called
the Charleston Movement, which was massive demonstrations a la the
When you began to think of going to college, what colleges did you pick out and apply to?
Well, there were two ways I looked at that. In the circumscribed world of segregation, there was Howard and Tuskeegee and A. & T.
North Carolina A. & T.?
Yes. I never applied to them. I only applied to Howard. But I had made a
decision already, being into what I thought America was going to be all
about in the future—that is an integrated world—I had already made a
decision that I was going to go somewhere to get an integrated
education. In other words, I wanted to be in a school where I was taught
by black and white professors, etc., because architecture is practiced
mainly by whites and I thought that you needed to be in an environment
where I got that kind of teaching, or at least integrated teaching. I
was a National Achievement Scholar out of high school and that meant
that I had some scholarship to any school that I could get accepted to.
Howard, and I applied to Iowa State, and Ohio State, and a few others, I
don't remember all of them. And decided ultimately, I think I got
accepted to all of
How many black students were there?
Not many. In fact, there weren't many blacks anywhere. And that was a culture shock for me; it was really a considerably different place than I had thought it would be. I was mesmerized by the big-time college football and seeing so many black athletes and assuming that the schools were a lot more integrated than they were and made it complicated to find out. Very few blacks matriculated at those universities and those that did were primarily athletes. As a matter of fact, in the first couple of days I was there standing in the registration line, everybody assumed that I was playing on the football team, which insulted me and was degrading.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Had you considered going to college on a football scholarship?
I had a scholarship at a small school in South Carolina, Claflin College. My high school coach was a graduate of that school. But, no, I wasn't that good, really, to consider myself for anything more. Our high school team did play in two state championship games and I love football a lot, but not enough to sacrifice architecture which required a lot of afternoon laboratories, which is precisely the time you play football. When I got to Iowa, I used to go occasionally and look at the football practice primarily because I'd gotten so used to playing football in high school during the fall of a year. As I watched the people play I felt I could play with them but it was just not in the cards. And my mother would have had a fit had I not stuck with architecture. That turned out to be the best decision.
When did you begin thinking of transferring and what schools did you consider transferring to?
I only considered one school and it was for the reason that I didn't like
the cold weather and as I got more and more into it I found that Clemson
had a pretty good school of architecture. Things just came to some
logical conclusions as they do in my life. I mean, there are times when
truth itself sort of snaps its head straight up in my face and you know
that you've got to go in a different direction. It's like that period
when I was politicized by the segregation decision, which was
You must have known that Clemson, even though it was close to home, would be even more all white and culturally different from your upbringing than Iowa State was then. What were your thoughts about that?
Well, as a matter of fact, Clemson turned out to be blacker. The great
surprise was the day that I went up to register amidst the hullabaloo of
all the news and press people. Once that was over, I remember going to
my room, getting a clue of what the world was going to be like seeing a
janitor in the corridor, black, and I realized how different that was
immediately from Iowa, where the janitors were all white. Then I walked
into the dining room, and here I'm expecting to see this sea of white
faces, and literally all over the dining room are black people.
Admittedly, in a subservient role or workers in the dining hall. I felt
very comfortable. I walked through the line and I got the biggest piece
of apple pie because these folks were handing it out to me. They were
saying, "hey, we are glad you're here. Boy, we're going to take care of
you." So, all of a sudden my world was a different one. It was, "hey,
you're not alone at all. You're the only student but, my gosh, look
around
I had wanted to ask you how you survived that experience emotionally. That was your support?
That was the initial support. I don't think there is any environment I
can ever go into where I'm not going to make friends with anybody, I
don't care how hostile you're likely to be. Whether it's a group of
females or whether it, back in those days, being a single man, I could
never believe that anybody could stay angry with me. I just always have
this confidence that if I can get you to sit down and look you in the
eye we can talk, we can get to know each other. So all of the business
at that time about ostracizing this pioneer, this integrationist, who
wants to destroy our way of life, all of the efforts to make me
something other than a human being, all of those efforts that say that
he was an agent of some evil force that was causing some changes, just
was ridiculous on its face. I always had a feeling that South Carolina
was going to be like South Carolina was going to be, which is
aristocratic, dignified, stiff upper lip. We are going to resist this to
the end but we are going to do it with dignity and when we lose we are
going to lose with dignity. We were one of the thirteen original
colonies, da da da da da. I grew up in Charleston, I was accustomed to
this kind of aristocracy that says that even if I can't appeal to your
morality I can appeal to …, or to put it another way, if I couldn't, in
my efforts to get into Clemson, appeal to the morality of the situation,
which is that I had a right to go
Let me turn back and ask you about what the process was that enabled you to enter Clemson.
Well, after so many different efforts to get in at the beginning of the sophomore year at Iowa, I mean the latter part of freshman year at Iowa. Ultimately, I left Iowa State in the first quarter of my junior year, having filed a suit the previous summer, after we had tried on three different occasions for each semester to get in to it and being given different kinds of excuses.
Who was "we"? You said "we" had tried to get in.
My lawyer and I. The first time I started this, I did it on my own and I
sensed that they would do it. They sent me catalogs and nice things
about Clemson. They delighted to have it in an application. I filled the
application out and then we had trouble. The application then signalled
that this was not a usual application because it was coming from a
student who was at Iowa State who attended Burke High School in
Charleston, South Carolina. Burke was known as a black school, so he had
to be a black student. I got a letter back essentially saying, "hey, we
notice you are doing very well at Iowa State. You're getting some state
aid to go to school there, plus you are on a scholarship. Enjoy
yourself!" Then I got mad. I went back and said, "but you don't
understand. I want to go school there." The same lawyer that assisted
us, Matthew Perry, in the sit-in
Now, the case that led up to the Brown decision had
been very much orchestrated by the Legal Defense Fund and they were
bringing suits all over the country. Your decision to enter Clemson was
not a part of that.
People keep wanting to make it that. No, it was not a part of that grand design. It really wasn't. I never had anybody to talk to me about doing that or even thinking about doing that. A lot of people have wondered about that all these years. Stories about Harvey going to Iowa State as a kind of training for going to Clemson, and that it was planned by the Legal Defense Fund, but that is not true, absolutely not true, never was.
Did you get any support from the NAACP after you began to file your suit?
Oh, the Legal Defense Fund took the case over once it had gotten to the point where it was clear that they were going to resist my application. We sought to exhaust all the administrative avenues we could force. And after Perry took the case, after about the third or fourth exchange of letters, and I think the state then knew that we would be getting some legal help.
He was with the Legal Defense Fund?
He had his own law practice but he was like Julius Chambers. He was really employed by the Legal Defense Fund for a lot of the cases in South Carolina.
So they paid the legal fees.
They paid our legal fees. My family didn't have to pay it; they couldn't
afford it. I could not have afforded to do that. Let's see. We proceeded
to file it in district court in Anderson, South Carolina, and that was
heard on its merit and the federal district judge ruled that Clemson was
not guilty. So we took it to the court of appeals in less than three or
four weeks, trying it in January of 1963
Tell me about the basketball bounced on the floor above your room.
I think too much has been made of that. I don't recall any … Somebody
developed that story and they've attributed it to me that people were
rude and they bounced basketballs all night long and I never could go to
sleep. That's
Were you isolated in your dormitory?
No, we had people in our hall. The way the design of the hall was made
up, there was a solid wall on one side,
You met your wife, Lucinda Brawley, at Clemson. Was that relationship of being the first black student …
I didn't intend to marry her then. I'm sorry what was your question?
I just wanted to ask you what that was like and if that's what drew you together.
Yes, somebody said, "boy, you guys got caught in an environment where you were made for her and she was made for you and there was nobody else anyway so you might as well get married." It could have been like that. I met her prior to her coming to Clemson. I became a very famous person all of a sudden in the period leading up to that and so I went to speak to a lot of high schools and got to meet her and heard that she was interested in being a student at Clemson and she was a very smart girl. So I finished talking to her class and then we talked. She was pretty and I thought it was nice. She matriculated at Clemson the very next semester. She got in.
With no question of her application?
With no fanfare, no questions about her application. She was more than well qualified for it and she was a math student. At first I had no idea of ever really dating her, you know, in the sense of carrying her out for a date.
There were people who were quite concerned about my dating habits as to
So did you go?
Yes, I went.
Did you dance?
Yes, I danced.
With white girls?
Yes.
Any problems?
No. Nobody did anything. That's the way I felt, anyway, that they
wouldn't. I just thought that the administration was a little bit too
cautious. At any rate, that's the only sign that people were concerned
about what my social life might be like. One of the big fears of that
period was the fear of the mixing of the races; the fear of interracial
dating was always in the back of the minds of the dyed-in-wool
segregationists. They saw that as the end of whatever. Then Cindy comes
along and I just primarily treated her as a sister for maybe six months.
I mean I would just take her and we'd go
Did you feel that the attitudes towards racial mixing had to affect the way you came to college? Did you feel like you needed to be extra careful because of it?
No. I didn't believe in that attitude and I guess I was developing fast as being a person who would, if I didn't believe it I could take it all away. I couldn't support doing something that was not a part of my belief system. What I'm saying is that if I met a person and I liked that person I thought I had the right to talk to that person and be whatever I wanted within the bounds of decorum and everything else, with the values of our society. But someone simply say that because I'm black I can't talk to someone white insults me in terms of who I am. So you can't confine me that way and I refuse to be confined that way. So, I admired some very attractive girls that were on campus but I've never been aggressive in the sense of pursuing them and I didn't in that case. I think most of my concentration probably was on my studies and my social life was somewhat limited.
How would you characterize your education at Clemson? I mean the quality of your professional training.
Very good. Much better than average. I'm not saying that individually I
got better or special treatment, I just think that the program in the
School of Architecture was a very, very good one, and it still is. I'm
still hiring students
In 1965 when you graduated from Clemson, did you consider going to Charleston or did you, when I looked at your background thinking of the social atmosphere in Charleston and Charlotte as a New South city, were those the kinds of things that you were balancing when you picked Charlotte?
Probably not very consciously but I admit the reason I didn't stay in South Carolina was that nobody offered me a job. It was about as simple as that. Not that people wouldn't have offered me a job, I was graduating third in my class in architecture, and usually the first three or four or five students are the ones that are gobbled up. It didn't take me long to figure out I wasn't getting the offers from South Carolina, I was getting them from North Carolina and Georgia, Atlanta specifically. I came to Charlotte because I got the best offer. I had never heard of the place; I mean, I'd heard of it, I'd been here once during a civil rights rally or something back when I was in college, and I guess it was prior to me going to Clemson. Other than that, I knew nothing about Charlotte. Beyond the North Carolina colleges that I grew up being familiar with—A. & T. and Central—we didn't pay much attention to North Carolina.
But the first time I saw Charlotte I fell in love with it.
Why?
Well, it just seemed perfect in terms of size. It just had an air about
it that said, "hey, here is a place that's growing. You might be able to
grow with it." Besides I got the best job offer, as I said. Atlanta was
too big, kind of overwhelming. I was newly married. I thought that we
could do better in Charlotte. God, I'm glad I made that decision! [laughter]
When you'd been talking about your involvement in civil rights, it seems
like you're very much of the generation of Jesse Jackson, younger than
King, that group that came up with the expectations of Brown, but older than Rap Brown and Stokely [Carmichael] who
moved on to black power. Do you think that is kind of an accurate
assessment of where you might fall?
Well, we're in the group now that are becoming the mayors. We did the
demonstration things, too, believe me, in the King philosophy. We saw
what happened to the black power movement and probably never thought it
was reasonable. Many of the people who led those movements, Stokely and
Rap and others came from the North, really, they were not Southerners.
We Southerners growing up under the shadow of King really did see change
occur, dramatic change, and so there was a certain believability about
pushing direct action and then ultimately evolving that into politics
that made some sense to us. Jesse really is still a civil rights
activist, he and I really have taken two slightly different roads. I'm
more a believer in taking the benefits that were brought about by Martin
and Jesse and all the other direct action kinds of things and molding
them Observer's report yesterday on the
increasing amount of blacks that are registering. That is significant to
me and its been significant enough in this community that I've been
elected to public office and it's been in no small part due to the
increased amount of participation by black voters in the electoral
process. We see that now as the vehicle for change: to assume and to aim
higher in local and state and other places to bring about, carry on that
revolution that started back there when the Supreme Court made that
decision. And so for us, it was the civil rights movement had its
purpose; black power, those people were slightly younger than we are
(well, I guess, we're really about the same age) that was an offshoot of
the student non-violent coordinating committee, the shock troops of the
civil rights movement that got disillusioned with the lack of more rapid
progress, the falling away and the more tension beginning with the
Vietnam war that got into totally different things. Again, you know,
you've got to remember folks that came from the South, many of us were
very much attuned to the changes that we saw occurring that were in our
eyesight dramatic and many of us came from those middle-class type
environments that said, you know, the way to do things is not to destroy
them but to try to negotiate power.
I've read that many white voters who vote for Jesse Helms also vote for you.
That's remarkable, isn't it?
I'd just like to know what your assessment of that is.
Where did you read that? [laughter]
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Can you tell me about your involvement with Soul City?
When I left graduate school, I left Boston and came south, I accepted a
joint appointment, one which took me to Chapel Hill to do a visiting
lectureship in the planning school. And I would spend three days a week
working with Floyd McKissick
What year was that?
'70. Anyway, this grant was there, and I went down to work as a senior
planner on a project. I was already a registered architect, now with a
new master's degree. I helped to assemble a group of eight or nine
people who were economists, housers, people who worked in housing, land
planners, and designs of that nature. And I served one year as a senior
planner and then as a director of planning for what we called the
overall base maps for how to use something like two thousand acres of
land. So I got to work with Floyd for two years. It was very exciting to
work on this idea of a new town being grown literally out of the tobacco
fields of North Carolina's eastern corridor where there was a great deal
of poverty. Floyd's idea of a new town where you built an economic base
as an alternative to the welfare state, appealed to me. It was a very
Republican idea but it was a very appealing one to a fledgling planner
who was looking for experimentation in an area that architects and
planners could find fascinating. It also was occurring at a time when
there was a great deal of emphasis being placed by the Nixon
administration on new towns. And Soul City ultimately ended up
Why do you think Soul City failed?
For what I just said earlier.
Jesse Helms had a certain amount to do with that.
Well, no. Jesse Helms was more extraneous to it, you know. He would like to have you believe that he did but I don't agree with that. I think that had Soul City been rolling along, selling land at a pace that could ultimately pay the interest or service the debt for the funds granted by the federal government, Jesse Helms or no one else could have touched it because it would have been a successful experiment working itself out. But it didn't do that, as did most of the other new towns that had a better chance, I think, than Soul City. Soul City was built about fifty miles from any large town, and it was the only new town that was going to be holding on, so to speak. The others were parasites to larger metropolitan areas and were just better planned housing communities, in my opinion.
Something located like Research Triangle? That's not a new town, but having a better location.
Well, Research Triangle still is parasitic, in my opinion. It's basis for
being is the universities that exist in other towns. Most of the other
new towns were the same way. I mean, if you built one outside of
Minneapolis you could enjoy
Let's turn to Charlotte politics. It was not that long after you ended your involvement with Soul City that you got your first appointment to a council seat here.
Well, it was three years. I mean, I got that appointment that December of
1974 to fulfill a term. I didn't come here with the intentions of going
into elected politics. But I did come here and got very much involved in
architectural type activities with the AIA, American Institute of
Architects, and got involved in a task force study of the planning and
development going on here in Charlotte that got a lot of attention in
'74. I think that ultimately gave me the visibility that you wouldn't
normally get because of what we said in that planning study. A lot of
what we said then we have started to take up over the twelve years I've
been involved in local politics, which is much more
I've talked to reporters who covered you and they say that you really enjoy the political process, that being out and meeting people and all those kinds of things. I would find it very gruelling and I'd just like to ask you why you enjoy it.
I love people. I love this city. I like what I'm doing. I think I'm very
comfortable with myself first, so you start there and then the second
thing is that I've always been one who sort of enjoyed working with
people. My mother tells a
When you said that you were infatuated with politics, there is certainly more to politics than involvement with people. What else have you been infatuated with?
Power. To get things done, I mean. You know, mayors in North Carolina are
not strong mayors as they are in other states. But Charlotte comes
closest to being the strongest mayor that you have with veto power and
the ability to appoint people, the ability to set the agenda for what
the city ought to be thinking about or doing. It is definitely in the
mayor's office and it has been dictated in the years past by other
mayors. But it's the ability to get things to happen for the good. I
think I've seen a different kind of world since being an eleven-year-old
boy. That big decision on segregation being unconstitution. There is a
different possibility for the South and for North Carolina and South
Carolina and other places. And
What would you say is you biggest accomplishment as mayor?
People working together. There is a lot more communication in this town
than in a lot of other places. When I hear about other communities
having race relation problems, Charlotte certainly hasn't reached the
millenium in terms of that either but there is a fairly good network
going on in this community. I can pick the phone up right now and talk
to the Greek community, the Jewish community, the black community, and
so forth and so on. And we can have everybody in this office inside a
couple of hours to resolve a problem. That's very important. It's just
as important as getting the community to attract new industry, build the
next highrise, build the next park. When you've got the people sort of
working together you can get them to put away their thing for our thing,
that is the city. That to me is a big accomplishment. I see a lot of
that happening. We passed a lot of bond issues, big ones, since I've
been mayor and they've all overwhelmingly passed because we could get a
diverse group of people who might have been disparate on
That style sounds very different from that of your predecessor, Eddie Knox, who I've heard characterized as an arm twister.
I don't twist arms very well, but I try persuade you in other ways.
Where would you like to be more effective?
Where? I want to be very effective doing this job.
I meant in what kind of areas would you like to be more effective as mayor.
I want to have more influence on young people. I want them to grow
faster, maybe, and that's not realistic. But I do spend a lot of time
worrying about whether or not a forty-three-year-old mayor has any
influence on a sixteen-year-old high school kid about what direction he
ought to go in. I think I see things about what's going on, what's going
to happen in the nation that I'm not sure he's seeing. And I worry a
little bit about it. Maybe it's because I'm a father of four children,
and I've got two teenage daughters and one who's in college. I wish I
could be more effective there. As far as the actual machinations of this
government in terms of what we're doing, I'm comfortable. I think the
people who need to hear what my thinking is and the people I need to
work with, the city council, the manager, we enjoy a very positive
up-beat relationship. I think I couldn't ask anything better. But it is
how the constituency is hearing me. And I believe that the older
One question on political ambition and possibilities. In looking for a 1986 U.S. Senate candidate for the Democrats, your name is not one name that I've heard mentioned and you seem to me that you would be a politically ambitious man, but it seems that some possibilities are limited. What are your thoughts about that?
I didn't get the last part of the question. Some possibilities of it?
Some possibility at this time might be warranted.
I'm not running for the Senate in 1986 and I don't think you would hear
my name. First of all, you've heard too many names from Charlotte
already. So, you wouldn't likely hear me interested in it. I was busy
running in the campaign telling people of this community that I wanted
to be their mayor for the next two years when everybody else was
Well?
Got it?
Yes, thank you.
END OF INTERVIEW