It wasn’t just race that fascinated Harry Golden

“Two aspects of life in Charlotte intrigued [Harry] Golden from the minute he arrived in the early 1940s: hookers and segregation.

” ‘All the whores frequented the post office,’ he wrote. ‘On a weekday evening, dozens of salesmen repaired to the Charlotte post office to send in their reports to home offices in Cincinnati or New York or Chicago. The minute a man dropped that brown envelope in the brass out-of-town slot, the women watching knew he wasn’t a cop and he was probably lonely.’

“He added, ‘The cheap night rates for [telephone] long distance did more to subdue prostitution that all the vice crusades ever mounted.’ “

— From “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett (2015)

 

Choosing cheerleaders: It was about race, but more

“While the integration of white and black athletes in the 1960s and ‘70s took place with relatively few problems, cheerleading squads were more problematic.

Pamela Grundy, a [Charlotte] sports historian, told a crowd at the county library [in Brevard] that ‘Either you can hit the basket or you can’t…. It’s clear who’s good…. Cheerleading was very different from sports.’

“Since blacks were often in the minority, they rarely were selected by the student body to be on the squad. When it came to committees or the cheerleading coaches, they too were mostly white and selected white cheerleaders.

“Grundy said selections were based more on style and culture, not necessarily race.

“A photo of the Myers Park (a top-tier all-white school in Charlotte) cheerleading squad revealed girls with similar hairstyles standing very straight with limbs in the same position….

“Another photo showed cheerleaders from the same year at West Charlotte (the black equivalent of Myers Park). They had different hairstyles and different poses. Grundy said they used their legs and hips more than their arms.

“And [black] cheerleaders involved the crowds, often in a ‘call and response’ format whose precursors were African chants.  ‘Foot stomping was turned into an art,’ said Grundy.

“When black girls were excluded from cheerleading [at predominantly white schools], students protested. In 1969 in Burlington, violence erupted when Walter Williams High selected all-white cheerleaders. One man was shot to death.

“Grundy said that once those who selected the cheerleading squad realized what a huge issue it was and that blacks were being excluded, either intentionally or not, things began to change….”

— From “Historian: Integration Of Cheerleaders Was Difficult To Achieve” by John Lanier in the Transylvania Times (Oct. 8)

 

At Arthur Smith Studios, James Brown birthed ‘funk’

“On February 1 [1965, James] Brown and his band stopped by Arthur Smith Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, en route to a show, and laid down ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ in a hour…. They did it in one take. It was suppose to be a run-through, but Brown knew he had to leave it as is — because everyone in the studio was dancing to the playback. He writes in his memoir [“I Feel Good,” 2005] that even though he was a soul singer, it was on this night that he started going off in his own unique direction.

” ‘I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. I had found out how to make it happen. On playbacks, when I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance….Later on they said it was the beginning of funk.’

“The lyrics of ‘New Bag’ are simple — just Brown trying to get a ‘new breed’ babe to dance with him by showing that he can do the Jerk, the Fly, the Monkey, the Mashed Potato, the Twist and the Boomerang. But the phrase ‘new bag’ came to symbolize the new Black Power approach many activists were embracing, along with a new way to deconstruct the blues for the next generation of musicians. With the song, as music critic Dave Marsh wrote, ‘Brown invented the rhythmic future we live in today.’ ”

— From 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music” by Andrew Grant Jackson (2015)

 

N.C. turns away federal dollars for poor (1933 version)

“North Carolina’s Senator Josiah Bailey, who voted against the Federal Emergency Relief Act and the National Recovery Administration in 1933, publicly worried about the burden on his poor state to meet the act’s one-third matching funds requirement….

“When the act passed, $40 million was distributed over three years in the state for public projects and relief, including direct aid to blacks from the federal government for the first time since Reconstruction — another thorn in the side of Southern politicians. The state’s contribution of $700,000, far below the required match, and its stalling with on complying with various other conditions denied North Carolinians the full benefit of the programs….”

— From “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett (2015)

 

Charlotte welcomes ‘intrepid air flier of the night skies’

On this day in 1930: A throng estimated at 30,000 to 50,000 is on hand for Charlotte’s first air mail delivery. The carrier is Eastern Air Transport, later to be Eastern Air Lines.

The story in the next day’s Observer begins: “Roaring out of the darkness of the south, Gene Brown, intrepid air flier of the night skies. . . . “

 

James Baldwin, Dorothy Counts — and Brian Williams?

The story is often told (by me, among others) that it was a news photo of Dorothy Counts desegregating Harding High School that motivated James Baldwin to return to the U.S. from Paris.

In fact, that’s what Baldwin himself wrote. Impossible, says Douglas Field in “A Historical Guide to James Baldwin” (2009):

“After living in France for nine years, Baldwin decided to return to the United States in 1957…. By the time Baldwin wrote ‘No Name in the Street’ (1972), he would trace this decision to a moment in the fall of 1956 when he was covering the first International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, at the Sorbonne, in Paris for Encounter. On the way to lunch with Richard Wright and other black writers from the conference, Baldwin writes that they were faced with newspaper images of ‘fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina.’

“In fact, this recollection is historically inaccurate, because Dorothy Counts would not be reviled and spat upon for another year, not long before Baldwin arrived in Charlotte to cover the desegregation struggle….”

Although the Brian Williams affair has cast a spotlight on the unreliability of memory, conflation is obviously not a new phenomenon.

 

It’s not easy being Gastonia (or Garner, Leicester….)

“Don’t feel bad, Gastonia. Every town has a little sister to pick on.

“In Raleigh they poke fun at….”

— From “Does Gaston County have an image problem?” by Adam Orr in the Gaston Gazette, Jan. 24 (h/t, John L. Robinson)

 

When Marines rejected Japanese-Americans

“Beside refusing enlistment to Negroes [at the beginning of World War II], the Marines also refused enlistment to all non-Caucasians. At the end of December 1941, George Keshi, a Japanese-American juggler with the Wallace Brothers Circus, tried to enlist at the Charlotte recruiting station, but he was informed by Sgt. Homer E. Tinklepaugh, ‘So sorry — the Marines no acceptee any Japs for enlistee rightee now.’

“Undaunted, Keshi joined the Navy.”

— From “The Queen City at War” by Stephen Herman Dew (2001)

 

‘Murder, Inc.’ jacket fed Nazi propaganda mill

“The most famous (or infamous) Charlotte draftee in Germany [during World War II] was probably Lt. Kenneth D. Williams. Williams was the bombardier on a Flying Fortress named Murder, Inc. that was shot down over Bremen in December 1943. The Goebbels propaganda ministry photographed Williams in his flight jacket with ‘Murder, Inc.’ emblazoned across the back….

“One Nazi broadcaster in a ‘howling rage’ reportedly declared: ‘Gangster Williams is now in our hands…. He belongs to America’s secret weapon — a mass murder league — which has been set loose against us.’

“Williams’ mother, inspired no doubt by her son’s situation, would later win an award for selling the most bonds during a local War Bond campaign.”

— From “The Queen City at War” by Stephen Herman Dew (2001)

Actually, engine trouble had grounded Murder, Inc. that day, putting its crew in a backup B-17 nicknamed Aristocrap. Lt. Williams didn’t switch jackets, of course.

Williams returned home in 1945 after 17 months in a German POW camp. In 1956 he was named Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s civil defense director, and he retired in 1983 as county emergency management director. He died in 2003.

His “Murder, Inc.” jacket hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Here’s Williams’ first-person account of being shot down, captured and depicted by German officials as a gangster recruited from Alcatraz.

 

Charlotteans quick to defend ‘respected young ladies’

“Townsmen did not take lightly affronts to their virgins. In Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1845, for instance, three young men had made up enormous posters directing obscenities against ‘some of the respected young ladies of the community,’ the local editor said, and had nailed the signs to the courthouse door.

“Early the next morning the villagers were highly agitated. The town’s young men found the culprit out, gained confessions and rode all three on a rail, each covered in the customary feathery garb. The newspaper piously denounced the rough work, but excused it on the grounds that all townsfolk had agreed about the imperative for ‘summary punishment.'”

— From “Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South” by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (2007)