![]() ![]() The club also played host to numerous Civil Rights leaders as they planned their strategies for Charlotte. Local player Wilbert Harrison started at the Excelsior Club before launching to national fame with “Kansas City.” Community leader “Genial Gene” Potts, WGIV radio host, made the club his informal base of operations. Built in the Art Modern style, the Excelsior has hosted many famous African American musicians. ![]() In 1940, Jimmy McKee and his wife Minnie started the Excelsior, a nightclub. However this did not stop business from booming. 6 The area was referred to as “The End” because the streetcar line ended right at the new commercial district. Grocery stores, pharmacies, barber shops, and beauty salons appeared to serve the local residents. Wooden storefronts were replaced by concrete and brick buildings. 5įollowing the Great Depression, Beatties Ford Road experienced an uptick in commercial growth. In 1938 the city school board decided to build West Charlotte High School on the old Thad Tate farm for African American students. Until the late 1930s, high school students (grades eight through eleven) from Washington Heights had to travel to Second Ward High School, the city's only secondary facility for Black students. The market boomed until 1919 from the economic depression that followed World War I. By June 1913, a year after the creation of the Freehold Realty Company, 43 lots had been sold. Watson advertised Washington Heights in his pamphlet called Colored Charlotte, written to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Civil War and Black emancipation in 1915.Ībout 200 one-story houses were built during the 1910s-1930s, ranging in price from $500 for a lot on Beatties Ford Road, to $300. Smith University.” 3 Local Black leader C.H. S anders, the first Black president of Biddle University, now known as Johnson C. Davis (now Dundeen) Tate Street, for Black Charlotte barber and community leader Thad L. Several other streets were named for honored African Americans as well “Davis Avenue was named for Charlotte's pioneer African-American professor George E. Unlike other suburbs around Charlotte, Washington Heights had no race restrictions for buying or renting properties. The new streetcars were extended into Washington Heights to make it a streetcar suburb. Washington Heights was created in 1913 as a planned neighborhood for middle-income African Americans. McDonald organized the Freehold Realty Company in June 1912 and bought a tract of farml and along Beatties Ford Road north of Biddleville. With a rising Black middle class, white real estate developers decided to take advantage of the ready market. However, “ a suburban location seemed a fashionable and fitting attainment for families who had worked their way up from penniless ex-slavery in two generations.” 1 These race clauses were a fairly recent thing in Charlotte, though they were popular throughout the South and parts of the North at this time. In the early twentieth century, districts such as Dilworth and Elizabeth were booming as suburbs as the city exp anded, but they were kept racially segregated by “race clauses”. ![]()
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