THE AUTOMOBILE’s arrival in Chapel Hill signaled that much was about to change, even as much would remain the same. Chapel Hill’s first car rode into town in 1901. By 1914, there was an automobile dealership, the Strowd Motor Co., a seller and servicer of Fords. Pretty soon, car ownership spread, and thus so did the village.
One major change would connect Chapel Hill to the modern world as Franklin Street got paved for the first time, with concrete. Since about the time of that first car’s arrival, the town government had crushed rock and spread gravel on streets, but come 1919 it was decided that would no longer do, at least for Franklin Street. The State Highway Commission offered to install a hard surface from the downtown post office to the Durham County line. The rest of East Franklin, plus the block from Columbia Street to Cameron Avenue, soon became a part of the project.
The next year, 1920, Chapel Hill’s Board of Aldermen decided the paving would be extended down the remainder of Franklin Street. That began a saga of more than 20 years of mismanagement, manipulation, and exploitation of Black residents who owned property along West Franklin Street.
THE STORY is full of confusing details, numbers, documents, and bureaucracy, likely not by accident. So I’ll keep to the highlights here after reading about it in two separate master’s theses and the minutes of Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen meetings from the period, especially a 20-page report of a town investigation into the financial controversy, published in 1939.
I first heard of the paving scandal in Yonni Chapman’s 1995 master’s thesis, “Second Generation: Black Youth and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill, N.C., 1937-1963.”1 Chapman wrote: “The most outstanding evidence of the way racism played a part in the erosion of black economic gains concerns a controversy over the paving of streets in Chapel Hill. Just as colonial settlers took land from Native Americans ‘legally,’ some properties owned by African Americans on West Franklin Street apparently passed into white hands through a process of legal extortion.”
In a brief section on the topic, Chapman leaned heavily upon another thesis done at UNC, from 1944, Charles Freeman’s “Growth and Plan for a Community: A Study of Negro Life in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina.” You might have seen before the below map Freeman created. The original is folded into the appendix of his thesis.
Freeman’s thesis adviser was the sociologist Howard Odum, one of the early forebearers of UNC’s liberal reputation; he suggested the thesis topic and his signature appears on the title page. Odum and the playwright Paul Green, another liberal torch bearer, had actually sat on a wall watching the chain gangs who originally paved Franklin Street in the 1920s. Spectating the hard labor of the manacled, largely Black prisoners grading the road with picks was a pastime of white townspeople.
Freeman wrote at length about the paving sequence of events in his thesis, and his citations led me to the minutes of various Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen meetings from 1927-1941. Here’s what happened:
The West Franklin paving didn’t get underway until the late 1920s, but what went down in the early part of the decade with the East Franklin Street portion made clear that the inequity pervasive in town would also apply to something as broadly beneficial to the community as paving the main thoroughfare. (In a way, it brought to mind the improved sidewalks, curbs, and crosswalks recently installed on North Graham Street and at the intersection at the end of West Franklin after businesses frequented by white people took root. The story also connects to persistent struggles of Black families to build wealth, and present issues with the devaluation of properties in Black neighborhoods and racist home appraisals.)
Undertaking road improvements like paving and the accompanying gutters and curbs required a cost-sharing agreement, via petition, between town government and adjacent private property owners. But when a petition was circulated among the white property owners along East Franklin Street, they refused to sign. The road was paved anyway, at no cost to those white property owners.
That’s far from how things played out for West Franklin, where many of the property owners were Black. The project was complicated at the start by a change in plans; an initial agreement for a median of shrubs and grass down the center of the road was abandoned. Another complication was that Franklin Street ended abruptly at Merritt Mill Road, the town line. One had to make a hard right, go a block, and then turn left onto Main Street to continue through Carrboro and on to Calvander. The state insisted Franklin Street and Main Street be connected more directly, meaning some homes had to be razed and a new section of road had to be excavated.
Chapel Hill’s plans for the West Franklin project also ended up getting split into two parts: from Columbia Street to Church Street, and from Church Street to Merritt Mill Road. In all, four different petitions ending up being circulated among West Franklin Street property owners for the project. All four were certified by the town in 1926 and 1927, and the paving went forward. West Franklin property owners were on the hook for $45,090.94, to be paid with interest in annual installments over the next 10 years. Shortly thereafter, the Great Depression hit.
IN 1937, as the balances were soon coming due, an uproar arose from Black property owners who’d been convinced to pay for paving. They were backed by an attorney and the founding editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly newspaper, Louis Graves, who published a series titled, “Outrage of West Franklin Street.”
Public complaints of unscrupulous methods had existed right from the project’s start though. Just after early approvals, the minutes of the September 26, 1927 Board of Aldermen meeting recorded the following:
At this time, several of the property owners on West Franklin Street were present, among whom are Messrs. Eugene Andrews and M.W. Uzzell. The gentlemen stated that they were opposed to to [sic] additional pavement that had been authorized on West Franklin Street and desired that the improvement on this street be carried forward in accordance with the first plan of the Board which provided for the construction of a planting space down the center of the street. The gentlemen further stated that the petition which had been signed by the property owners had been obtained by misrepresenting the situation and by dishonest methods… . [emphasis mine]
Ten years later when the complaints resurfaced, the town attorney at first said that “little could be done to relieve the property owners” essentially because it could be seen as unfair by property owners paying toward improvements in other parts of town who might balk at their own bills. Eventually the town was convinced to assign a committee of two aldermen to investigate. In 1939, they submitted their report. The original $45,000 debt had become $58,000. Nearly $25,000 of that had gone unpaid to that point. Of that outstanding debt, more than $19,000 belonged to Black property owners.
The report did not mince words about the origins of that debt. It stated that “much confusion seemed to exist” among property owners about what they’d agreed to and that their recollections of what they’d been told to get their signatures varied widely. The actual cost ended up being several times higher than anyone expected, roughly five times as much. The state had also funded part of the paving, and yet the town billed the West Franklin owners for those costs anyway, an outright theft. The report said it would be “highly unjust and unlawful” to make them pay for those portions and called the over-charging “confiscatory.” It also said one element of the town’s practices “violates the basic principle upon which a local assessment can be made” because such agreements relied upon an assumption that the improvements would increase adjacent property values. While that was the case on East Franklin, at no expense to those owners whose real estate was much more valuable, on West Franklin the paving “did not materially enhance the value of property belonging to colored persons” even though “West Franklin is one of the most heavily used streets in Chapel Hill… .”
The investigation also showed that of the four petitions green-lighting the West Franklin paving project, the only petition that turned out to be valid was the one for the stretch from Columbia to Church. The other three petitions were insufficient yet had been approved by the Board of Aldermen.
Some of the properties had been owned by estates. Legally, all heirs of each estate should’ve been counted as individual owners. Yet a single heir was approached to sign on behalf of entire estates when no such legal authority existed. In other cases, properties owned by trusts for churches and a lodge were represented by the signature of a single trustee without authority to pledge the entire property. In the end, those three petitions had only been signed by 22 of 72 owners, 22 of 71 owners, and 21 of 72 owners. For approval of any of the costs to have been assessed to the owners, the law required a majority of owners to sign representing a majority of the linear feet of frontage. All three petitions regarding work past Church Street fell well short.
Also, none of the petitions had stated in writing what the cost of the projects would be, how much the property owners would be responsible for, nor a limit for costs that could be charged. Improper accounting practices were also discovered. Property owners had been charged for some work done over the line in Carrboro and there were more duplicate expenses beyond the substantial work that the state had already paid for. The prior arrangement was recommended thrown out due to “omissions, error and lack of jurisdiction.”
The report called for refunds in the total amount of about $20,000 to be issued. Adjusted for inflation from 1939, that would be the equivalent of $374,000 today. “The Town does not have this money,” the report stated. “It will be necessary to raise it by a bond issue or by an extremely heavy increase in the tax rate.” Two more years later, in 1941, the Board of Aldermen passed a bond for less than half that amount, $8,500, payable by interest-gaining coupons over 19 years so as not to be “unduly burdensome upon the tax payers.” An annual tax was levied to pay the debt. Presumably, those tax payers included the very people owed.
Chapman, having gone through the old newspaper accounts, asserted in his thesis: “As a result of the high costs and the inability of most blacks to pay, African Americans stood to be swindled out of a great deal of valuable real estate. Through their own protests and the support of Lewis [sic] Graves, the newspaper editor, black property owners found some relief. A good deal of land was still lost, however.”2
ONE GOOD THING: North Carolina’s COVID hospitalizations have dropped by half since a month ago.
SOURCES & CREDITS:
Chapel Hill 200 Years: “Close to Magic” by the Chapel Hill Bicentennial Commission, Town of Chapel Hill (1994)
“100 W. Franklin St. / Strowd Motor Company”: Open Orange
“Second Generation: Black Youth and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill, N.C., 1937-1963,” master’s thesis by John K. (Yonni) Chapman (1995): UNC Libraries
“Growth and Plan for a Community: A Study of Negro Life in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina,” master’s thesis by Charles Maddry Freeman (1944): UNC Libraries
“Police problems, Part II: An incomplete historical list” by Mike Ogle: Stone Walls
Paul Green’s Wordbook: An Alphabet of Reminiscence, Volume I by Paul Green
Bill Prouty’s Chapel Hill by William W. Prouty
Chapel Hill Town Council (formerly Board of Aldermen) Meeting Minutes: Town of Chapel Hill archive
Muddy street photo: North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives
Bruce Strowd photo: North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives
Freeman thesis photos: Mike Ogle
Strowd Motor Company photos: Open Orange
Image of 1941 bond ordinance newspaper notice: Town of Chapel Hill Council Meeting Minutes archive
Yonni Chapman’s thesis on the first half of the 20th century is not as well known as his dissertation and has not been digitized at UNC, but you can write me at stonewalls1793[at]gmail.com if interested in reading a copy.
I didn’t get to read the newspaper articles nor go through property records, but in the materials I saw, these were the property owners mentioned by name: Hill Point Lodge (seven trustees, Bill McDade signed), “Methodist Church” (5 trustees), “Baptist Church” (3 trustees), “Colored Baptist Church” (5 trustees), Wilson Caldwell estate (10 heirs), Luther H. Edwards estate (3 heirs), I.H. Emerson estate (number of heirs unknown, M.L.S. Noble signed), W.R. Lloyd estate (3 heirs, Luico Lloyd signed), Eugene Andrews, Louis Booth, J.T. Harris, A.W. Hobbs, Green McDade, Minnie Merritt (husband J.K. Merritt improperly signed), Alice Neal, Ida Smith, Rick Taylor, M.W. Uzzell