Race and Place: The Upbuilding of Hayti and Black Wall Street — Andre D. Vann

BY ANDRE D. VANN Coordinator of the University Archives and Instructor of Public History at North Carolina Central University.

“Go to Durham....You need the inspiration. Go to Durham and see Negro business with an aggregate capital of millions. Go to Durham and see twenty-two Negro men making modern history. Among your New Year’s resolves, resolve to go to Durham!” - Excerpted from a 1928 article written by the editor of the St. Luke Herald, a Black weekly newspaper in Richmond, Virginia

The study of African Americans on Parrish Street (also known as “The Black Wall Street”) is the biography of a determined people who worked within the confines of Jim Crow to build an enduring legacy of leadership and service. Durham, North Carolina has served as a true role model of the “New South” since the 1880’s and throughout the early 1900’s. Durham’s leaders, both Black and White, represented a new breed of Southerners that were not content with the status quo and were willing to be a model throughout the South.

This historical narrative explores the role of public and private memory in shaping interpretations of the past. Also, this research offers a more complex understanding of Durham’s rich history by examining the business, social, political, and cultural connections during significant periods of social change.

This piece will trace the growth and development of the African American citizenry that has impacted and shaped the City of Durham from the Reconstruction era, during the Jim Crow era and during the post-desegregation years. Further, it is important to note that a majority of African Americans resided in the South in the early twentieth century and they exercised group economics by pooling resources and group politics by founding organizations that were representative of the African American citizenry that survive today.

Over the years, the City of Durham, North Carolina, once called the “Chicago of the South,” has become a major center of economic, social and political advancement for African Americans. It, was much like most southern cities in the 1880s and 1900s, had rigidly segregated communities. The majority of African Americans resided in the southern and southeastern sections known as “Hayti,” (pronounced “haytie”). The first reference to the name Hayti appeared in an 1877 deed that was described as a lot “in the settlement of colored people near the South East end of Durham known as ‘Hayti’.”

With this interracial and economically progressive environment, Durham emerged as one of the centers of the African American middle class in North Carolina and the South. Many members of this middle class resided in impressive, large residents in the Hayti district. The architecture of the houses was Victorian. They had spacious porches and large lawns. Also located in Hayti were churches, stores, funeral homes, a hospital, a library, a college, civic clubs, and fraternal lodges.

By 1900, the Hayti business community grew rapidly, and was annexed into Durham City between 1901 and 1903. It emerged by the 1920s as a major center that supported an economy that included over 120 businesses that included restaurants, grocery stores, real estate, professional offices, shoe repair shops, florists, grocery stores and churches.

In 1911, Dr. Booker T. Washington, the noted educator at Tuskegee Institute and founder of the National Negro Business League, noted in an article entitled “Durham, North Carolina, A City of Negro Enterprise” published in the Independent Magazine that Durham provided an opportunity for African Americans to excel economically. This conclusion was based on his visit to Durham in 1910 to view the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua Incorporated for the Colored Race, Inc. and the progress of the African American race. But, Washington also recognized the existence of amicable relations between African Americans and the White community. He stated, “Of all the southern cities that I have visited I found here the sanest attitude (among) White people toward the Blacks.”

In 1912, prominent sociologist and African American historian Dr. W. E. B. DuBois referred to Durham, specifically the Hayti area, as the “Negro business mecca of the South.” Published in World’s Work magazine, the article,

entitled “The Upbuilding of Black Durham — The Success of the Negroes and Their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City” stated: “There is in this small city a group of five thousand or more colored people, whose social and economic development is perhaps more striking than that of any similar group in the nation.”

The majority of this community rested in the confines of the original town limits and was inhabited by many of Durham’s earliest Black families (e.g. the Ameys, Markhams, Pearsons, Pratts, Faucettes and O’Danielses) who migrated from various outlying communities. The early Black families came in search of greater economic opportunities that existed as a result of the tobacco industry that was thriving at that time. The creation of the American Tobacco Company by Washington Duke and Sons proved pivotal in the formation of Durham County that grew out of Orange and Wake counties in 1881. The Dukes, the Wattses, and the Carrs were instrumental in supporting African American pioneers such as John Merrick (barber), Dr. Aaron M. Moore (physician), Charles. C. Spaulding (clerk), Richard Fitzgerald (brickmaker), Dr. James E. Shepard (pharmacist and real estate), and Durham natives Dr. Stanford L. Warren (physician) and William G. (“W. G.”) Pearson (educator and fraternal leader).

Key to creating and sustaining the community’s economic, social and political landscape were the dreams of Merrick, the humanitarian efforts of Moore and the work of Spaulding. Their most noted joint achievement included the 1898 funding of the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association, later known as the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Mutual). Originally established to provide sickness and burial insurance (which African Americans could not get from White-owned companies then), within a half century it expanded into the largest Black-owned business in the United States and subsequently the world.

Since its founding in 1898, Mutual served as a catalyst for social and economic development since its founding. The company relied upon the tenets of self-help and uplift with the phrase, “merciful to all,” was the company’s first motto. With a sense of corporate social consciousness and responsibility, the company formulated the concept of and belief in the “double-duty dollar.”

It was modeled after the popular “mutual benefit societies” with the concept based on the premise that income derived from insurance sales could be channeled back into the community. Throughout its history, the company has had programs to build strong businesses, families, and communities through jobs, investments, loans, contributions and support of social programs.

Although Hayti was the residential and social center of African American life, Parrish Street, in the very center of Durham’s business district, became the hub of African American business and commerce. Here, in 1911, Merrick and his associates built a brick building to house the offices of their rapidly expanding insurance company, which by then had associated itself with the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, another Black-owned enterprise chartered in 1907. Within two years, Mutual had purchased additional lots and also added to its offices, forming an African American business complex that included two clothing stores, a barber shop, a real estate company, a large drugstore, a tailoring shop, the offices of the Durham Negro Observer, the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and a hosiery mill.

More African American businesses were founded, such as the Royal Knights of King David (1883), Mechanics and Farmers Bank (1908), People’s Building and Loan Association (1915), Banker’s Fire Insurance Company (1920), Fraternal Bank and Trust Company (1921), Mutual Building and Loan Association (1921), National Negro Finance Corporation (1924), Southern Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company(1926), Royal Knights Savings and Loan Association (1927), Union Insurance and Realty Company (1928), the T. D. Parham and Associates, which aided in the financing of numerous additional Black businesses (1929), and the Durham Textile Mill.

EARLY BLACK WALL STREET

This Black economic achievement did not go unnoticed. The Black press lavishly praised Durham as the “capital of the Black business class” and “The Magic City.” Also, the

editor of the St. Luke Herald, a Black weekly newspaper in Richmond, Virginia urged its readers “Go to Durham…. You need the inspiration. Go to Durham and see Negro business with an aggregate capital of millions. Go to Durham and see twenty-two Negro men making modern history. Among your New Year’s resolves, resolve to go to Durham!”

As early as 1905, Mutual purchased its first lot on Parrish Street and erected its initial office building and as more adjoining property became available they purchased additional lots on Parrish and Orange Streets. Mutual also purchased additional land on the east side of Orange Street, which consisted of a total of three-fourths of the block bounded by Parrish, Orange and Chapel Hill Streets, Rigsbee Avenue and Mangum Street. As noted earlier, the part of West Parrish Street that housed the Mutual and its neighbors became known as the “Black Wall Street.”It is important to note that White businesses occupied the rest of the street with their businesses.

On this site sat the former first home office building of Mutual, which was demolished in 1920 in order to facilitate the construction of a building to accommodate the ever expanding business. The Durham architectural firm of Rose and Rose created the designs and plans for the building. This new, Neoclassical Revival style structure at 114-116 West Parrish Street was built by noted contractor and builder H.L. Smith and was completed in October of 1921. Mutual’s second home office was officially dedicated on Saturday, December 17, 1921. In 1922, the headquarters of the Mechanics and Farmers Bank relocated to the first floor of the Mutual building.

The new office building was described in great detail by the December 31, 1921 issue of The Durham Sun in which the editor wrote: On the first floor of the building were the Mechanics and Farmers Bank and the Mutual Building and Loan Association, which shared space with the bank. The second floor was occupied by the Bankers Fire Insurance Company and North Carolina Mutual. An assembly room and cafeteria were located on the sixth floor. As a result of the increased and steady volume of business even more space became needed and by June of 1948, the home office had to be expanded into the second floor of the adjoining building and into the first and second floors of property purchased at the 111 Orange

NORTH CAROLINA MUTUAL BUILDING, HEADQUARTERS OF BOTH NORTH CAROLINA Street building. MUTUAL AND MECHANICS AND FARMERS BANK In 1965, the Mechanics and Farmers Bank purchased the building and, in 1966, Mutual moved to its new headquarters on West Chapel Hill Street. This building was later renamed the Mechanics and Farmers Bank Building. On May 15, 1975, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service and was so named a part of the local Historic District of Downtown Durham. In 1997, the old Mutual Savings and Loan office (later renamed Mutual Community Savings Bank) which was located at 112 West Parrish Street was sold to Mechanics and Farmers Bank for $135,000 which operated out of an adjacent building and needed the space for expansion. Now owned by the North Carolina Institute of Minority Economic Development, the expanded North Carolina Mutual and Mechanics and Farmers Bank building stands as a towering monument to the achievements and achievement of the race.

“The newly completed home office of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company was erected at a cost of $250,000. it is a strictly modern fireproof building, six stories high, towering 86 feet in the sky, occupying a triangular lot with an area of 3,316 square feet and with a basement 10 feet deep. The framework is wholly of steel, reinforced with trussed bars, incased in concrete. The walls are of hard burned brick, with the exception of the street front which is faced on the first floor with the Indiana Stone, and on the upper floors with buff colored brick, bonded to the backing with galvanized iron bond ties. The covering of the walls is terra cotta, which substance also lines throughout all floors. The wainscoting in the bank, toilet enclosures, throughout the structure, is of Tennessee gray marble, with polished surface. For the convenience of those who do not care to climb six flights of steps, an elevator, of steel construction, has been installed.”

As African Americans in Durham progressed materially, their culture, through its social institutions and music, created strong community bonds. The oldest African American social institution in Durham, as in other cities, was the church. White Rock Baptist Church, organized in 1866, by Margaret Faucette and Sallie Husband, and St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1869, were multifaceted institutions that served as places of worship and centers of uplift. Schools also shaped the community. In 1910, Dr. James Edward Shepard, a pharmacist, founded the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race (which would ultimately become North Carolina Central University). His vision included training students in moral leadership as well as academics. Not only were the school’s graduates expected to better the condition of their race, they were to be model citizens deserving the virtues of a democratic nation.In 1925, the school became the first African American statesupported liberal arts college in the nation and graduated its first four-year college class in 1929. In 1939, the North Carolina General Assembly authorized the establishment of graduate work in liberal arts. In 1940, the Law School began operation, followed by the School of Library Science in 1941. The institution cultivated leadership, producing men and women who filled positions of importance to many businesses in the Hayti community and on “Black Wall Street.”

Durham’s Black businesses thrived due to self-initiative and segregation that relegated African Americans to select markets patronized by Blacks and owned by Blacks. These businesses were situated along the railroad tracks, the dividing line that left them segregated. Ironically, as a result of Jim Crow laws, African Americans were forced to create their own institutions, making them producers, as well as consumers, of goods and services. These factors helped to establish an economic community owned and patronized by Blacks and some Whites. These economic advantages this afforded the community gave rise to other Black businesses and led to the founding of numerous civic, social, fraternal, and philanthropic organizations.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a modest Black middle class had formed and taken root in Durham. Although Hayti remained the major residential center of African American life, such communities as the West End, East End, Hickstown and Crest Street, Pearsontown, the Bottoms, and College View, and other African American communities blossomed and grew during segregation and have provided safe spaces for families and small business owners for generations. While some African Americans occupied positions as executives on Black Wall Street, they were supported by African Americans who were employed as domestics, tobacco factory workers, educators, morticians, physicians, grocery store owners, bricklayers, insurance agents, and lawyers. Others operated beauty salons, barber shops, restaurants, contractor companies, and countless grocery stores. Notably, there are but four institutions that have survived and even thrived during segregation and postdesegregation: the Black family, Black barbershops and beauty salons, Black churches, Black and funeral homes.

While African Americans living in Durham enjoyed a strong and independent social, economic, and cultural life, they could not escape from “Jim (and Jane) Crow.” Outside of their communities, Blacks were still treated as inferiors and second-class citizens. African Americans confronted their oppression and looked inward and unto themselves with regard to augmenting their communities and uplifting for the race.

All of that began to change in 1909 with the establishment of the citywide Civic League that was established “for the cultivation of higher ideals of civic life and beauty in Durham.” Its main projects included a cleanup of public buildings, railroad station, and vacant lots and the founding of clinics for the treatment of Black infants. Later, in 1935, during the “Great Depression,” the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs was founded in the Algonquin Tennis Club on Fayetteville Street (the present site of W. D. Hill Recreation Center) by Shepard, Spaulding and other leading businessmen, including William J. Kennedy, Jr.,

MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF MECHANICS AND FARMERS BANK

John H. Wheeler, Louis Austin, Rencher N. Harris, James T. Taylor, Richard L. McDougald and W. D. Hill. The purpose of the Durham Committee was the pursuit of social and economic equity for African Americans. Its strategies of civic engagement, voter registration, and court battles helped to usher in the non-violent civil and human rights movements.

Some Durham African Americans criticized the Durham Committee for being too conservative. As a result, in the mid-1950s and 1960s, they began joining local chapters of more progressive groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Still, the Durham Committee continued to follow a course that proved productive in promoting interracial communication.

In 1938 the Durham Business and Professional Chain (also known as “the Chain” or the DBPC) Square, was organized as a member of the National Business League. With the slogan, “In union there is strength,” the Chain’s mission was to promote the growth and development of Black business leaders and professionals through “cooperative effort and unselfish service” to the African American community. It also served as a networking agency that sponsored courses, workshops and Trade Week, which highlighted the hundreds of minority-owned firms throughout the region.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, this progress was arrested as the business district began to decline and the walls of segregation began to come down with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 and the repeal of other segregation laws. The coming Urban Removal, referred to as “Negro Removal,” was the final blow as the Durham Redevelopment Commission proposed the demolition of nearly 80 acres in the Hayti community to make way for the Durham Freeway for the purpose of creating an easier route connecting downtown Durham to the newly established Research Triangle Park.

Promises were made by the Redevelopment Commission to relocate the over 120 Black businesses in “Tin City,” a brand new 15-acre shopping center on Old Fayetteville Street. Many of those commitments were not fulfilled and, as a result, those Black businesses and over 500 families were displaced. Only a portion of the land was ever used until the erection of developments that dot the sky line today at the intersection of both Fayetteville and Pettigrew Streets. The remnants of “Tin City” include “Phoenix Square,” the former “Heritage Square” shopping centers, and the 19-acre former Rolling Hills site on Lakewood Avenue in southeastern Durham. Rolling Hills was formed in as a nonprofit townhouse community development company founded in 1986 by North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company that went bankrupt after erecting only 30 townhouses and 13 patio apartments out of a proposed 250 units that never came to fruition.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the DBPC was the primary sponsor of the federal government’s effort to assist minority businesses through the creation of Minority Development Centers. It enjoyed a high level of recognition for its past performance, which made Durham the center of this work in the Raleigh-Durham area and in eastern and central North Carolina. These programs provided programs and assistance to minority-controlled firms and resulted in increased loans, contracts and opportunities for minority businesses.

The “Upbuilders” were those with relationships with Hayti and Black Wall Street and who had ties to the Law School Attorneys John Hervey Wheeler and James Joseph “J.J.” Sansom, Jr. both served as presidents of the venerable Mechanics and Farmers Bank. Without a doubt, their admission and attendance were definitive in allowing the Law School to remain viable since they were professionals who could work by day and still attend law school. Both Atlanta natives, Wheeler and Sansom both graduated Atlanta’s all-male, private Morehouse. While enrolled in law school, they were under the guidance of the esteemed Dean Albert L. Turner, who served from the beginning of the Jim Crow era in 1943 through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, guiding two generations of African American lawyers to positions of influence in the legal and business communities.

Born in 1908 on the campus of Kittrell College in Kittrell, North Carolina, where his father was president, Wheeler had grown up in Atlanta where his father later worked as manager of the Atlanta District of Mutual. Considered a “Renaissance man,” Wheeler was an accomplished violinist, tennis player, scholar, intellectual, political activist and advisor to presidents and governors who was actively affiliated with civic, political, academic, and business organizations.

Having learned from Dean Turner to challenge the status quo in the racial environment in Durham and North Carolina, Wheeler became a legal giant who initiated the

earliest litigation that brought about the desegregation of the Durham city schools. Through the DCABP’s education committee, Wheeler led a legal challenge, beginning with Blue v. Durham Public School Dist., 95 F. Supp. 441 (M.D.N.C. 1951)) toward school equalization in Durham and other cities across North Carolina. Later, in 1956, together with fellow, Law School alums graduates Floyd B. McKissick, Sr. and William A. “Billy” Marsh, Jr., and several other Durham attorneys, including Conrad O. Pearson, won the U.S. Supreme Court case, Frasier v. Board of Trustees, 134 F. Supp. 589 (M.D.N.C. 1955), which led to the first three Black undergraduates gaining admission to the state’s oldest public institution.

In 1952, following Spaulding’s death, Wheeler was appointed to the presidency of Mechanics and Farmers Bank where he served for a total of 25 years. He was best known as the chairman of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, an influential organization founded to serve as a representative body of the African American citizenry of Durham. The organization, which he helmed from 1958 to 1971 promoted the general welfare of African American citizens in political, educational, economic, civic, cultural and community affairs. Under his leadership, “The Committee” was the nation’s most effective and powerful political organizations. He was a force and voting bloc in Durham North Carolina. Over the 50 years Williams spent as a banker, civic leader and civic, civil rights and human rights activist he coined the slogan, “The battle for freedom begins every morning.”

At the national and international levels, Wheeler served in many capacities, having been appointed by numerous presidents of the United States. He was the first African American selected to lead the prestigious Southern Regional Council. He was a member of the Commission on Race and Housing, the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the President’s Committee on Urban Housing and the Governor’s Council for Economic Development.

In 1964, Wheeler was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to a team of Americans sent to the Republic of Germany to review the progress under the Marshall Plan. During that administration, he was a consultant and lecturer for the State Department in Egypt and Syria, and was the chair of a White House Conference Work Session entitled, “To Fulfill These Rights.”

In addition to serving on board of directors of several organizations, including the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, Mechanics and Farmers Bank, Mutual Savings and Loan Association, the Mutual Real Estate Investment Trust in New York and the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships, Williams was an active member of St. Joseph’s A.M.E. Church, a 32nd degree Mason and a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. He was also chairman of the Durham County Library and Lincoln Hospital. He served on the board of Atlanta University and was a member of the board of trustees of Morehouse College, the latter of which awarded him an honorary degree. He also received honorary degrees from Duke, Shaw, Johnson C. Smith, and North Carolina Central Universities.

In recognition of Williams’ long service of as a pioneer of civic and economic justice, the John Hervey Wheeler United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina was dedicated in his honor on October 15, 2019.

Williams’ colleague Sansom had begun his association with Mechanics and Farmers Bank in 1939 with his first assignment as assistant cashier at Mechanics and Farmers Bank from 1942 to 1947 where he earned two dollars a day. By 1947, he was working as an associate law professor at the Law School, after which time he left in 1952 to become the first African American manager at the Third Street Office of Wachovia Bank and Trust Company in Winston-Salem.

Later, in 1958, he returned to Raleigh and accepted a position at Raleigh’s Mechanics and Farmers Bank rose quickly through the ranks and was appointed vice-

THE NCCU SCHOOL OF LAW CLASS OF 1947 SAVED THE LAW SCHOOL. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, (JOHN W. LANGFORD, JOHN H. WHEELER, WILFRED A. KENNEY, JAMES JOSEPH SANSOM, JR., AND THOMAS DAVID PARHAM ON JUNE 2ND, 1947 OUTSIDE OF B. N. DUKE AUDITORIUM)

president-manager and then, in 1967, senior vice president. In 1978, he became president and continued to serve in that capacity until 1983, when he was named chairman of the board of directors. When he retired in 1987, he was named chairman emeritus.

The impact of Sansom’s life work in the banking industry at the Mechanics and Farmers Bank after 37 years of service was enormous. The bank was listed as one the top 10 largest Blackowned and -managed banks in the country with total assets of $72 million dollars. It was instrumental in enabling minorityowned firms and businesses to gain capital and helped African Americans gain loans to purchase homes and establish financial stability at a rate unseen in other communities.

Like Williams, Sansom was also actively involved in civic and public life in both Raleigh and Durham. In the 1960s, he led efforts to register African Americans to vote in Wake County and served as chairman of the Wake County Board of Elections. In Durham, he served as a director of Union Insurance & Realty Company and Glenview Memorial Park, Inc. and in Raleigh, he worked on the boards of South Gate Plaza Shopping Center and Biltmore Hills Apt., Inc. He was an active member of the North Carolina State Bar Association, a life member of the NAACP and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., as well as founder of the Meadowbrook Country Club, Inc. He was awarded an honorary degree from St. Augustine’s College in (Raleigh) and received the National Bar Association’s highest honor in 1987 when he was inducted into its Hall of Fame.

An examination of the history of the Black presence on Parrish Street, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and the life’s work of John Hervey Wheeler and Joseph J. Sansom, Jr., is a study of the distinguished contributions of African Americans in Durham as contributors to the physical and financial development, or “upbuilding,” of the district. In the face of Jim Crow, “The Black Wall Street” of America flourished and became a remarkable symbol of race pride, financial capital, and a testament to the ingenuity of the generation.

THE OFFICIAL PORTRAIT OF JOHN HERVEY WHEELER

THE BOARD OF MECHANICS AND FARMERS BANK, WITH WHEELER AND SANSOM ON THE BACK ROW.