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Last week, a century-old wood-framed schoolhouse made the slow journey across Charlotte on the back of a trailer to a new, permanent home at the Charlotte Museum of History. The Siloam School is one of the last physical relics of a time — more recent than we often like to think — when Black children were relegated to legally segregated, often inadequate schools.
The Charlotte Museum of History plans to refurbish the Siloam School and use it to teach future students about segregation and resilience in the face of racism. The building stands out not only for the history it represents but for the fact that it was saved at all in Charlotte, a city in love with the shiny and new. The museum raised about $1.2 million to fund the acquisition, move and restoration of the school building.
But while the Siloam School will stand for years to come, many other notable Black sites in Charlotte have been lost, often to development. These buildings, now accessible only through photographs and words, also constitute interesting and important aspects of the history of Charlotte’s Black community. And the fact that they were torn down is often just as notable as the buildings themselves.
Here’s a look at four other notable Black history sites in Charlotte — three that were lost and one that’s soon to be gone.
Good Samaritan Hospital
For decades, Charlotte’s sickbeds were segregated. Good Samaritan Hospital opened in 1891 as the city’s first independent hospital for Black patients. A school to train Black nurses opened in 1903.
The hospital was a source of pride for the community — it was one of few such institutions at the time.
“Good Samaritan's founding gave Charlotte the distinction of having the first privately funded, independent hospital built exclusively for blacks in North Carolina,” the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission wrote in a report detailing its significance.
But it was a place of pain as well: Charlotte’s first documented lynching occurred there in 1913, when a mob pulled Joe McNeely, a teenager accused of having been involved in a shootout with a Charlotte police officer, from his hospital bed and murdered him.
After legal integration, the hospital’s fortunes declined. Patients could go to facilities with more resources. Good Samaritan was sold to Mecklenburg County in 1961 and closed in 1982. In 1996, it was demolished to make way for the Carolina Panthers’ stadium, where crowds of fans still rush past a plaque commemorating the building on their way in for kickoff. (Read more in NC Health News’ 2019 story Separate and not equal: Remembering Charlotte’s Good Samaritan Hospital.)
Murkland Presbyterian Church
After the Civil War and the end of slavery, Black people in Charlotte gained more than the freedom from forced labor: They gained freedom over their spiritual lives.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, newly freed slaves no longer had to attend church with their former masters. Before, they could have their own meetings and Sunday school lessons only if at least two white men were present to supervise. The Black members of Providence Presbyterian, one of the most prominent local congregations, promptly split off and formed a new congregation called Murkland.
“The majority of the first members of Murkland Church were ex-slaves, who were formerly compelled to attend the dominantly white Providence Presbyterian Church,” according to the Historic Landmarks Commission’s summary. “Slave members of Providence Presbyterian Church were allowed to attend church services from the upstairs gallery built especially for this purpose.”
After Emancipation, Murkland grew until it was accepted into the local all-Black Presbytery in 1887.
“The original church building is no longer standing. No one remembers what it looked like, but some members vaguely recollect that it resembled the Providence Presbyterian Church. Mr. Adolphus Jones, oldest living member of the church at age 102, remembers that this church was called ‘Little Providence’ and Providence Presbyterian was called ‘Big Providence,’” the Landmarks Commission wrote in 1990.
Though the original Murkland building is gone, the church still exists. It's now called "Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church. It's off Providence Road, a few miles from Providence Presbyterian.
A whole neighborhood vanished
When Charlotte moved to demolish the Brooklyn neighborhood in what’s now uptown’s Second Ward in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was called good planning — urban renewal, slum clearance, blight removal.
To be sure, there was blighted housing in Brooklyn, a neighborhood largely owned by absentee landlords who let housing deteriorate. But the demolition wiped out more than 1,000 homes and 200 businesses, as well as the all-Black Second Ward High School (all that remains today is the gymnasium). Residents were scattered to other housing complexes or left to find their own new places to live.
Only a few original buildings remain in Brooklyn. Most of Second Ward is now government buildings — the county jail, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, the Mecklenburg County Courthouse, the old Board of Education building — and little else.
Brooklyn wasn’t the only example of urban renewal in Charlotte, and other neighborhoods were also impacted by urban highways that sliced through low-income areas. But Brooklyn is the biggest example in Charlotte of urban renewal’s impact, and arguably the single biggest local erasure of a Black community.
For more information, I’d recommend checking out this UNC Charlotte research guide or the Brooklyn Oral History Project.
A symbol of pride, now on the chopping block
On the southern edge of what was Brooklyn, one remnant of earlier ambitions remains: Bob Walton Plaza. The seven-story building was developed by a consortium of Black professionals, led by civil rights attorney Julius Chambers and future congressman and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt.
The building opened in 1973, at the tail end of urban renewal, an act of the Black community reclaiming some of its agency and its land. The building was a hub for Black lawyers, politicians and professionals like Chambers, Harvey Gantt and Mel Watt. With its distinctive black glass and brick face, the building stood out at a time when Charlotte’s skyline was far more modest.
Jason Watt recounted the Black community’s pride in the building in a 2021 interview with Charlotte Magazine, recalling “the pride the building created and … how people who frequented the building, even non-investors, referred to the building as ‘our’ building.”
But the building didn’t attract enough tenants to thrive as more office space opened uptown. In 1994, the investors behind the building sold it to the county for less than their asking price. Since then, the building hosted a succession of drab county offices (if you needed to pick up a copy of your marriage license or your kid’s birth certificate, that’s where you went) before closing in 2019.
Now, demolition is getting started on Bob Walton Plaza as part of a county-sponsored redevelopment deal in partnership with Peebles Corporation. The project Walton Plaza will make way for Brooklyn Village, a plan to redevelop the land that was once Brooklyn into a new, mixed-use, mixed-income community in Second Ward.
