Uptown street among the last 2 to be renamed in honor of Charlotte’s Black history
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Name changes in Charlotte
Righting past wrongs and honoring civil rights heroes: Increasingly, local leaders are examining the history of Charlotte and choosing to rename some streets and buildings, including schools.
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Two Charlotte streets with racist ties will soon be renamed, the city announced Wednesday.
Stonewall Street in uptown, currently named after Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, will be renamed Brooklyn Village Avenue, a callback to the rich history of Charlotte’s historic Brooklyn community in Second Ward. The change will become effective June 30.
Brooklyn was a thriving hub of Black life in Charlotte for decades — until it was razed in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of urban renewal. In August 2020, Mayor Vi Lyles apologized for the city’s role in displacing thousands of residents and destroying the community.
Barringer Drive, located in west Charlotte, will be renamed Revolution Park Drive on May 23, honoring the legacy of the nearby park and the Dr. Charles L. Sifford Golf Course. It’s currently named after Osmond Barringer, according to the city’s website, who was a white supremacist.
The Barringer family donated the land the park sits on to the city in 1929 for recreational use by white people only. In 1951, a Black police officer named Ray Booton was denied the right to play on the golf course. Five years later, a lawsuit finally desegregated the course.
The two streets are the last to be renamed, after the work of the Legacy Commission found that several streets in Charlotte had ties to white supremacist leaders and other vestiges of the Confederacy.
‘Brings joy to my heart’
Arthur Griffin Jr. called the renaming of Stonewall Street in honor of the neighborhood where he grew up “fantastic.”
“My heart and soul is in Brooklyn,” Griffin told The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday.
Griffin said Second Ward High School, Pearl Street Park, the parades, his friends and stores he frequented were all in Brooklyn.
“That’s where everything was,” he said.
Brooklyn was like a “shield” to a lot of Black people in the area because during a time of segregation, they could drop their guard and feel safe when entering the neighborhood, he said.
“It wasn’t an environment where you had to look over your shoulder,” he said. “Having any remembrance of those experiences brings joy to my heart. It meant so much to all of us growing up.”
The renaming to Brooklyn Village Avenue is more reflective of the community, the cross-section of cultures that travel this area, and of modern-era Charlotte, according to David Taylor, president and CEO of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture.
“It pays homage to the thriving Brooklyn neighborhood in Second Ward, which was a self-sustainable, predominantly Black community,” Taylor said. “Brooklyn Village Avenue pays tribute to the legacy of this community and helps to acknowledge its contributions to Charlotte.”
Charlotte streets renamed
Lyles formed the Legacy Commission, comprised of community members and historians, after protests in summer 2020 that called for a racial reckoning. The commission evaluated monuments and street names associated with “slavery, Confederate veterans, white supremacy or ‘romanticized notions of the antebellum South.’”
The group found that nearly every street named after a person in Charlotte before the late 1800s honors a slave-holding family — a statistic that the Southern Poverty Law Center says holds true throughout the South, where streets that invoke Confederate symbolism outnumber Black leaders.
The first street to be renamed was the former Jefferson Davis Street, now known as Druid Hills Way, in September. Residents of the neighborhood voted on the change. In the past six months, six other streets have been renamed:
▪ Phifer Avenue became Montford Point Street in October;
▪ Jackson Avenue became Cross Trail Drive in January;
▪ Zebulon Avenue became part of Yellowstone Drive in January;
▪ Aycock Lane became Wall Street in January;
▪ West Hill Street became Westmere Avenue in March;
▪ Morrison Boulevard became Carnegie Boulevard in March.
For more information, visit the city’s Legacy Commission website, call 311 or email legacy@charlottenc.gov.
This story was originally published April 20, 2022 at 12:31 PM.
