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Part 1: The ‘60s and ‘70s, A Look Back
Race has played as critical a role in the course of US history as any other single issue. Consequently, as is the case for most American cities, one cannot adequately chronicle Spartanburg’s past without addressing the subject.
Both Brenda Lee and Norman Dawkins came of age on the city’s Southside at the height of segregation. Her stepfather worked in a mill. His father owned and operated a black mortuary on Liberty Street.
What today’s generation usually fails to grasp or fathom is that Spartanburg’s African-American community thrived during the ‘50s and ‘60s — and South Liberty St. was its economic and spiritual heart. That stretch of road boasted churches, markets, cab stations, restaurants, doctors’ offices and funeral parlors, all owned and operated exclusively by blacks. With all the African-American homes and businesses centered in that one area, Lee and Dawkins recall the Southside as a prosperous, tightly knit community.
“It was very spirited, very loving, and all the adults were very caring,” recalls Lee, co-author of the book, “South of Main,” published by Hub City in 2005. “Everybody looked after one another and children were free to walk back and forth to school.”
“The interesting thing is that, with all the segregation, we had a community,” explains Dawkins, who has owned the Community Mortuary on Marion Avenue since 1993. “People had each other and shared with each other. It doesn’t take a lot of material things if you have that sort of bond there. That’s really more important than anything else - people knew each other; whereas, nowadays, people are scattered about.”
Today it certainly seems ironic that desegregation, of all things, would hearken the demise of Spartanburg’s flourishing, self-supporting African-American community. Yet, that is exactly what Dawkins believes took place in the mid-’60s.
“What happened in 1965 was another form of disenfranchisement of black people,” Dawkins says in Lee’s book. “Under the guise of urban renewal they effectively put the blacks out of business.”
In 1970, Spartanburg City Council voted to go through with an $8 million-dollar federally funded Urban Renewal Project, alleging it would beautify the Southside by renovating and demolishing struggling buildings. As Dawkins asserts, what urban renewal did instead was utterly dismantle the African American business structure.
From 1970 -1975, 90 black businesses and some 2,000 residents were forced out of the Liberty Street area, their houses, churches, stores and offices torn or burned to the ground. City officials paid natives some compensation to relocate, but it was not enough to find comfortable housing or reopen their businesses. Despite cries of opposition and concern, project officials turned a deaf ear to the black voice.
“Sure they had to sign off on [the project],” Lee says of those displaced from the Southside. “But you get to a point where, if it’s going to be forced on you, what do you do?”
Dawkins believes a racially ingrained element of fear made the community an easy target for city officials.
“You still had killings and lynchings going on in numerous places,” he explains. “They didn’t happen as frequently as they did in the past, but you still had instances of it. . . . The role that racism plays has to do with the way that people were conditioned and forced to submit and deny themselves.”
“South of Main,” which Lee co-authored with Beatrice Hill, uses firsthand accounts to detail the history and ultimate dissolution of the Southside.
“Urban renewal was a very sad time for me, and it hurts my heart when I think of the momentum we lost as a community,” she writes in the book. “If we still had that momentum today, it would be a totally different situation in Spartanburg, as far as economic development and families are concerned in the black community.”
Dawkins, meanwhile, believes the project literally killed his father. The old mortuary was one of the last businesses to crumble, hanging on until November,1976. Two months after he finally closed the doors, the man who had co-owned the business since 1948 was dead.
“What happened on the Southside was by design,” Dawkins says in “South of Main.” “It didn’t happen overnight. It had been planned with a purpose in mind, and they pretty well accomplished it. Homes that were livable were destroyed, and people had to go in debt again. Urban renewal tore down the community, section by section.”
Next week, part 2 of this series will showcase how these two African American leaders view Spartanburg’s black community and modern-day race relations.
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