Blackberry Memories of Charlotte’s Old Brooklyn

By Tom Hanchett

On a short dead-end street off Stonewall Street behind Actors Theater, a green thicket yields an edible memory. Blackberries. The sweet fruit, ripening every June, almost certainly dates back to Charlotte’s vanished Brooklyn district.

Once upon a time Brooklyn thrived as the Queen City’s premier African American neighborhood. Black-owned businesses lined what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard and turned the corner onto Brevard Street. More than a dozen leading churches, including Friendship Baptist and the United House of Prayer for All People, mingled with poor families’ cottages and gracious homes of the well to do.

“Blackberry bushes and plum thickets grew abundantly,” Rose Leary Love recalled in her fond memoir of the neighborhood. A watercolor of her childhood home with its neat white picket fence – located near where the blackberry brambles grow today – adorns Plum Thickets and Field Daisies (1996), available on-line or in hard-copy from the Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

Rose’s father John S. Leary ranked among the black elite at the turn of the 20th century, an attorney who served in the North Carolina legislature. Charlotte’s African American lawyers association today is named the Leary Bar in his honor.

In the 1960s the Leary house and nearly every other building in Brooklyn fell to federally funded “slum clearance.” To be sure, Brooklyn included poverty and substandard housing. But in that racially segregated era, the white officials who targeted black neighborhoods failed to see their strengths, failed to understand the love they held.

Today you can see a fragment of lost Brooklyn a few blocks away on Brevard Street: the proud brick 1902 Grace AME Zion Church and the 1922 Mecklenburg Investment Company office building for African American professionals.

Or wander along the blackberry thicket and taste the love that someone planted so long ago.

Blackberry thicket
One-block street has no sign, but plug “776 S. Alexander Street” into GPS. Bushes are on public land bordering I277. Berries are there for the picking until they are gone.