There’s a popular t-shirt geared to Black Americans that displays a quote reading, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” When The Mecklenburg Investment Company (MIC) was constructed in Charlotte’s Brooklyn neighborhood in 1922, few would have imagined that it would be one of the only buildings to survive the tragic razing of the historically Black neighborhood that would take place during the 1960s.
In the late 1800s, the area now known as Second Ward in Uptown was a place where some of the area’s newly emancipated slaves came to do something they had never done before: live life as free men, women, and children. Originally known as Logtown, the neighborhood took on the name Brooklyn sometime around 1917 and became a thriving Black business center.
Nearly a century after The Mecklenburg Investment Co.’s founding, amid great racial injustice and a global pandemic, The…
