Anisa Khalifa

You are Taking a Walk on the Broadside. Welcome! I am Anisa Khalifa. This tour is brought to you by The Broadside, a podcast about our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South. It's a weekly program from WUNC, Durham's Public Radio Station. You're at stop number four of five stops around downtown.

Check all of them out on the map right below this audio player on your phone. This story takes us back a century ago to the city's renowned Black Wall Street:

Kamaya Truitt

I want you to look down at your feet. Now take a look up and down this block. This whole street was built on decades of Black wealth.

Kimberly Moore

It was this entire block. I mean, the entire block of Parrish Street was where people would, you know, point to and say, “oh, that is where Black Wall Street is.”

Kamaya Truitt

In the first half of the 1900s, where you're standing was known as something exceptional.A financial beacon for Black folks. North Carolina's own Black Wall Street.

Kimberly Moore

There were diners, there were places to get clothes.

Kamaya Truitt

Kimberly Moore is a Durham resident and former employee of North Carolina Mutual, a life insurance company that was a longstanding pillar of Black Wall Street.

Kimberly Moore

Literally what you would've seen on this street when it was time for people to come to work, was African American men and women dressed to the nines every day. Hats, gloves, full suit, you know, handkerchief in the pocket.

Kamaya Truitt

Black owned businesses lined Parrish Street, and as a result, a strong Black middle class thrived in the city.

So how'd it happen? How did Black Wall Street help put Durham on the map?

Andre Vann

We had a lot of institutions working together to kind of pull those resources, um, and working for the uplift.

Kamaya Truitt

Andre Vann is the archivist at North Carolina Central University in Durham. He says the city was full of Black-owned small businesses.

I'm talking tailors, doctors, lawyers. But, there were two big financial institutions that served as the bedrock of it all. The first was North Carolina Mutual. It helped Black families to build and maintain wealth through their insurance policies. The second, well, it's right in front of you, Mechanics and Farmers Bank.

Andre Vann

It offered an opportunity for the rise and increase in resources for African Americans to have a place to go and bank your money.

Kamaya Truitt

Mechanics and Farmers Bank and NC Mutual were crucial for helping the whole city grow. By the 1920s, Durham was seeing an influx of people, specifically Black folks who were coming to work in the tobacco factories.

Andre Vann

If you hear me kind of over-emphasizing that, that's because it's important because Durham was a tobacco town. I don't care what anyone tells you. Um, that's what it was.

Kamaya Truitt

And these were decent paying jobs for the time.

Andre Vann

Those who worked in tobacco factories sometimes made as much as those who worked in the, um, business sector.

Kamaya Truitt

As this burgeoning Black middle class flourished, so did Durham's reputation.

Archival Tape

In North Carolina, down in the heart of a great tobacco vicinity, there's a young and progressive city named Durham.

Kamaya Truitt

But, this wasn't some racial utopia. This was still the Jim Crow South. And that was clear in the early 1920s, when NC Mutual moved into a new building on Parrish Street.

Andre Vann

They had to live by the racial etiquette of the time, which required that they not build a building taller than any other white business in downtown Durham. So that's a clear understanding of the racial environment in which you live.

Kamaya Truitt

Nevertheless, Black Wall Street remained a stalwart of economic success until things started to shift mid-century. Desegregation radically changed the South. And with it, NC Mutual's clientele started to leave for competitors that were previously whites-only. And other Black-owned businesses had to adjust to this new cultural landscape.

Andre Vann

You do see a sense of departure.

Kamaya Truitt

But Black Wall Street's legacy is still coursing through Durham. NC Mutual is no longer in operation, but Mechanics and Farmers Bank is still rolling strong. Meanwhile, today the city is home to 200 Black-owned businesses.

Andre Vann

I try to patronize at least, uh, two African American businesses in Durham at least a week.

Kamaya Truitt

And it's hard to imagine this network of modern-day entrepreneurs without the determination a century ago from a group of Black pioneers on Parrish Street.

Andre Vann

To see that the same progress, ingenuity and also um, vision that the founders had, has been transmitted and passed on to other generations. And as long as you know, people have the imagination to believe, to look beyond where they are, you have success and you have progress.

Anisa Khalifa

This story was made by Kamaya Truitt and Charlie Shelton-Ormond, regular voices on The Broadside, a podcast from WUNC about the culture, history, and interesting quirks of North Carolina. You can listen to our weekly episodes anywhere you listen to podcasts.

This project is made possible thanks to the support of Discover Durham.

You can check out more at wunc.org/walking.