Go to almost any city in America, and if you want to find the neighborhood that was urban renewed out of existence, look for Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Bingo.
So you guessed it! The Charlotte street some people want to rename MLK Drive runs smack through what used to be the historic black neighborhood called Brooklyn. It was mostly urban renewed out of existence. It was further plundered when I-277 was built along one side.
Now that part of downtown is a rather desolate sector of government buildings, parking lots and an underused (except by Canada geese) park.
Here’s another funny thing. A bunch of Southern traditionalist types are pouting because they say the street, named Stonewall, honors a Confederate War hero. However, there’s no evidence that it does or doesn’t. More on that below.
One more funny thing. A big chunk of Stonewall Street years back (my guess is 1950s) was renamed Independence Boulevard. Wonder if the same folks kicked up a fuss then. When I moved here in 1978, Independence ran along Stonewall Street. It came past CPCC, as now, past Charlottetown Mall, and then shot up toward the Observer building, but at some point (I can’t quite remember where) it curved left, then right again and went down what’s now called Carson Boulevard. Somewhere around there Independence magically changed names – this IS Charlotte, after all – into Wilkinson Boulevard. The coming of I-277 rerouted that section of then-Independence and the city restored its older name: Stonewall.
Back to Stonewall. Dan Morrill, local historian, says it’s his “reasoned judgment” the street wasn’t named for Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whose widow, Anna Morrison Jackson, was from Charlotte and lived here for years. “The street name is old,” Morrill says. “I looked at two maps, one dating from 1890-something and the other 1877.” Both maps showed it named Stonewall Street, he says.
What makes him think it wasn’t named for Stonewall Jackson is that, as he says, “I would have thought that in all of my meanderings about Charlotte that I would have heard that that was what it was named for. … I read every edition of the Charlotte Observer from 1890 to 1925, and I never saw any reference to that.” He also thinks that if it had been named for Stonewall Jackson, it wouldn’t have been called just Stonewall Street, but would have been Thomas Jackson Street or something.
“I’ve got a feeling, “ he says, “that if somebody wants to go down there [the Carolina Room at the main library] and spend a week cranking microfilm, they might find something.”
Tom Hanchett, historian for the Levine Museum of the New South, who’s done a lot of research into old Charlotte neighborhoods, also isn’t sure. “It’s a strange street to pick for that name,” he says. He also mentions: “It’s a sucky street to name after King. Can’t we do better than that?”