Truth and Reconciliation – Righting Charlotte’s Historic Wrongs

Charlotte is growing fast but also faces an upward mobility crisis rooted in a long history of discrimination and injustice, tracing from slavery, to Jim Crow, to urban renewal, to gentrification.

Charlotte had a vibrant Black Wall Street developing the Brooklyn neighborhood of Second Ward prior to policies of urban renewal. Between 1960 and 1967, Brooklyn Village was razed in five stages, during which the community had no say in plans for their neighborhood. The destruction and trauma included:

• 1,007 families, totally nearly 10,000 residents, were displaced to the periphery of the city.
• Not a single new residential unit was built to replace the 1,480 demolished homes.
• 216 Black businesses were closed, many never reopening.
• Eleven Black churches, the Good Samaritan Hospital, the Lincoln and Savoy theaters, and the Brevard Street Library were just a few of the historic institutions that sustained the Black community in Charlotte that closed as a result of Brooklyn's demise.

The Stan Greenspon Holocaust and Social Justice Education Center supported the building of a coalition committed to restorative justice. Through listening sessions and community research, the restorative justice advocacy team identified six key issues in response to a specific harm done towards the Brooklyn community. The wrongdoings committed towards the Brooklyn community were within education, faith communities, business, home and land values and ownership, criminal justice, and mental health. These community identified issues will drive all projects and priorities of Restorative Justice CLT, a new organization launched under the leadership of Dr. Willie Keaton, to support this effort.

From 2019 to 2021, a Greenspon Center restorative justice advocacy team, led by Dr. Willie Keaton, built a coalition of organizations seeking to enact transparent, accountable, and sustainable projects to redress the history of discriminatory practices and policies in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Their work led to the creation of a new organization Restorative Justice CLT.

The Greenspon Center strongly believes in the healing and restoration that must occur to redress the legacy on injustice done to Black Charlotteans.

Truth and reconciliation requires three steps:

• Apology - truth telling and public acknowledgement of wrongdoing
• Restorative Measures - allocating resources and creating programs that provide harmed residents with a supportive path to equity and economic mobility
• Systemic Change - Transformative change so that African American communities ceased to be harmed by public policies and practices