What do you think of when you think of Charlotte?

“You’re from Charlotte? Oh.”

I heard that remark a couple of times this past weekend during a trip to Pennsylvania for a wedding. It was my first time leaving Charlotte since the Sept. 20 shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, and the days of unrest that followed.

“What’s it like down there now? Is it so dangerous?”

It’s easy to see why people might think these things — those violent uptown images on CNN from Sept. 21 don’t exactly paint the brightest picture of Charlotte. Those images make a lot of people from Charlotte shudder. Those images are what triggered that #ThisIsNotMyCharlotte hashtag, prompting people on social media to become vexed that such violence could occur in their sparkling city.

Many Charlotteans clung to the narrative that 70 percent of those out protesting during the violent nights were from out of state, a notion that a spokesman for Charlotte’s Fraternal Order of Police later admitted was just speculation. Nearly 80 percent of the people arrested that Wednesday night (Sept. 21) and early Thursday morning were actually from Charlotte, according to an Observer analysis.

My family came to Charlotte when I was 17, but I went away to college, then lived in other cities for about five years before coming back here in January 2015. Charlotte’s my adopted city; I didn’t see it through some of its biggest and most dramatic events that took place during my lifetime, like Hurricane Hugo or the Democratic National Convention.

But Hugh McColl certainly did, and this week he succinctly summed up the state of things: “We’ve been forced to look at ourselves,” said the retired Bank of America CEO, one of the architects of modern Charlotte.

He took the stage at a Charlotte Chamber retreat in Asheville Tuesday with Harvey Gantt, who became Charlotte’s first black mayor in 1983, to talk about how leaders can help heal Charlotte.

Their discussion came exactly two weeks after a Charlotte Mecklenburg police officer fatally shot Scott, a black civilian, sparking days of peaceful and violent protests.

Between the two, phrases like “implicit and overt racism,” “systemic disparities” and “prejudice” prefaced suggestions of more affordable housing and improved access to jobs and education as ways to raise up those who’ve felt left behind Charlotte’s economic recovery.

Not exactly the kind of phrases you’re used to hearing at a corporate retreat.

“Someone asked me yesterday what would I say about Charlotte. I’d say it’s a great place to raise a family. And I’d still say that,” McColl said. “But what we’ve really found out is it’s not been such a great place for some people to raise a family. In particular, black people.”

Gantt described what he saw on TV the night of the shooting as “an outpouring of real pain” among those protesting. “We’ve all encountered some people who have felt they were being left behind (by) the progress being made in the city,” Gantt said.

That pain was pretty evident in the signs and chants from protesters I saw on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights following Scott’s death.

“F*** police brutality” was the message of one little boy who couldn’t have been older than 5.

Many of the folks I talked to emphasized they weren’t just there because of Scott. They were there for Terence Crutcher, for Philando Castile, for Alton Sterling, for Michael Brown, for Eric Garner, for Tamir Rice.

Those were all names, among many others, that were added in chalk Friday to a sidewalk in front of the Omni Hotel, the spot where a young black protester named Justin Carr was fatally shot.

I met a soft-spoken guy named Master Allah at Marshall Park Wednesday night after the shooting. He held a neon sign that read: “If we was truly free we wouldn’t be dealing with this!” I asked him to explain that.

“In the history of America, we have never been seen as free. We wasn’t brought to this country to be equal, and now we’re at a point to where we’re being destroyed,” he said. “We’ve got a real problem.”

In just a few days, our sparkling Southern bank town became part of the national discussion on police brutality, even coming up early in a question during the first presidential debate.

That spotlight, combined with the recent fallout from House Bill 2? City leaders I’ve talked to aren’t proud of it. But they’re certainly talking.

Now, uptown businesses are trying to recover from the hit they took when violence spooked would-be customers. The clusters of National Guardsmen on every other uptown corner are long gone. The boarded up windows on uptown storefronts are finally starting to be replaced. And some of Charlotte’s most powerful people are talking about healing.

Photo: Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer; Katie Peralta

This story was originally published October 6, 2016 at 1:02 AM with the headline "What do you think of when you think of Charlotte?."