How did Hidden Valley evolve into a mostly Black community? A brief history.
The late 1960s urban renewal movement spread over Charlotte like a fog, its vapors settling around many dense city neighborhoods.
City officials overseeing renewal efforts tapped Brooklyn, a predominantly Black neighborhood in the Second Ward, as its pilot. The homes there, some built in the early 20th century, when Brooklyn was a “thriving Black business center,” one by one were leveled.
Urban renewal promised to bring redevelopment, revival and equity to many communities, especially during the civil rights era. It also resulted in displacing thousands of Black families. They were forced to look elsewhere, with some eyeing an idyllic neighborhood northeast of Charlotte’s center called Hidden Valley.
During the early 1970 families started moving there in earnest. Hidden Valley’s evolution from a historically white neighborhood to the mostly Black community today can be traced to Charlotte’s urban renewal push, historians say. But there were many factors for the shift.
While there were other affluent neighborhoods in west Charlotte where Black families lived, such as Hyde Park or McCory Heights along the Beatties Ford Road corridor, there weren’t very many low- to middle-income neighborhoods for Black residents, says Willie Griffin, a professor at University of North Carolina Charlotte who studies local African American history.
Hidden Valley was affordable.
Changes in national school integration laws, ushered in by the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education that ruled segregation in public education unconstitutional, trickled down to Charlotte.
“(It’s) what I would call the school crisis, the issue with integration happening in Charlotte, the busing case,” Griffin said.
Griffin is referring to the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education case, another sweeping decision on April 20, 1971 that upheld school integration in Charlotte and mandated busing for the Queen City.
With that door open, more Black families moved into Hidden Valley. Simultaneously, more white families moved out eventually leading to what became known as “white flight.”
“Many of these residents of Hidden Valley were upset by, you know, the influx of African Americans coming into this neighborhood they had lived in for just a little over a decade, and they had enjoyed their own elementary schools that had been a sort of a walk (to) school and neighborhood,” Griffin said.
In 1970, Hidden Valley had perhaps three Black students, but after the busing decision in 1971 it ticked up to 33, and by 1973 it was almost 90% African American, Griffin said.
Real estate agents also played a part and took advantage of the social developments taking place around Charlotte, and other events happening around the nation, he added.
The Board of Realtors really didn’t try to stop local real estate agents from steering Blacks into the community and whites out of the community, Griffin said. Blockbusting was a technique used to scare white homeowners as African Americans would move into the neighborhood.
“White residents in fear of their neighborhood becoming more Black and the schools becoming integrated, decided to move,” he said. “This left the community wide open, just an opportunity for African Americans.”
‘The Valley’
While dozens of Charlotte housing communities sprung up in the immediate post-war period, Hidden Valley came a little later.
George Goodyear, the developer, already successfully planned several communities and built thousands of homes along the Montford Drive and Park Road Shopping Center areas, and Selwyn Farms.
“At that point there were no neighborhoods being built as intentionally integrated,” local historian Tom Hanchett said.
Goodyear envisioned the subdivision, which sprouted toward the end of the 1950s. Tucked away, and living up to its name, the community was a stone’s throw from the burgeoning University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Its streets had been named with phrases borrowed from Eurocentric folk tales.
“They used names like Cinderella Lane, Candystick Lane, Log Cabin, Fireside, Snow White. This was a fairy tale community for white residents,” Griffin told The Charlotte Observer. “I don’t think when these builders built it, they had African Americans in mind.”
For at least a decade afterward, Hidden Valley had been largely white middle class. Meanwhile the Fair Housing Act had yet to be crafted, but ultimately was conceived as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
By 1971, many Black families, mainly young people with professional degrees and those of those of notable rep, began looking to Hidden Valley for its affordable homes, charming vibe, quiet streets and amenities that included a neighborhood pool and schools.
Raleigh Byrum, an optometrist, made headlines as the first Black person to purchase a home in Hidden Valley, Hanchett wrote in an article published on his History South website.
Karen Jones, now 77, heard about Hidden Valley from a pastor and a real estate agent she knew. Back then, Jones was a burgeoning school teacher.
“It wasn’t so expensive that you could not live here on a teacher’s salary,” she told The Charlotte Observer.
Jones moved there with her then-husband and young child, but also remembers the not so pleasant days.
“You couldn’t complain because you were too busy working, you (were) too busy raising a family,” she said. “We realized that white people who lived around here, they were running like they were afraid to be near Blacks.”
Former Charlotte Mayor, Harvey Gantt, then a young architect, also moved to Hidden Valley.
Gantt had returned to Charlotte in 1971 after earning a graduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With plans to set up a business, he found a home for his growing family, including his wife and two children.
“Lots of people were looking at homes in that area, lots of African Americans who were probably in my cycle of life ... young, starting a career, young family,” Gantt told the Observer.
“Hidden Valley had become a neighborhood where white flight was gradually occurring — of course, we didn’t quite call it white flight. But certain of these homes were made available on the market. And the realtor simply showed us those homes, the neighborhood was predominantly white.”
Gantt added as the years passed, the neighborhood became increasingly became African American, although where his family lived, his immediate neighbors were white.
Otherwise, Gantt recalls a community that was safe, mostly integrated, affordable and family-oriented. Gantt recalls easy Saturday mornings cutting his grass, other mornings going for a worry-free run, and trips to the Stop & Shop.
“I don’t recall ... any negative feelings or negative vibrations coming from the white families that we encountered in that neighborhood,” Gantt shared. “I don’t remember any hostility. There may be other families that have experienced that.”
Gantt continued to live in what was called “The Valley” even after he pivoted into politics and a successful run in 1975 for Charlotte City Council. He ultimately moved to uptown Charlotte in 1981, renting his Hidden Valley home out, before winning the mayor’s seat in 1983.
By the 1990s, Hidden Valley had transformed into a mostly Black middle class community, with other ethnic groups also moving into the vicinity. Jones says interest in Hidden Valley has piqued because the university has expanded and the light rail is close by.
“It was a quiet, easy-going city at that time, but it has changed tremendously,” Jones said. “I watched it change from white to Black and white, to Black, and now Black and Hispanic.
“And now we see white residents trying to move in,” she said. “Every time we turn around, we get somebody who wants to buy our property.”
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This story was originally published January 13, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
