On Nov. 10, 1910, Booker T. Washington said that of all the Southern cities he visited, he saw the sanest attitude of white people toward the Black community in Durham. He said that he never had seen a city with so many prosperous, “working negros.”
Washington was likely referring to Durham's Black Wall Street.
The existence and destruction of Black Wall Streets across the country are no secret. Tulsa, Okla., a once progressive and wealthy community was devastated due to an assault claim and an ensuing mass hysteria-fueled mob in 1921. Even more than a century's worth of work in Tulsa has not been able to fully rebuild what once was.
In Durham, though, some remains of these communities can be found nestled downtown on Parrish Street. The street was home to many Black-owned businesses that represented the entrepreneurial successes of the greater district and the now historic neighborhoods within it.
Angela Lee, executive director of the Hayti Heritage Center, said the reason this area was even able to thrive largely traces back to emancipation in the South and the newly freed slaves who decided to settle there.
“Stagville Plantation in Durham, at emancipation, it had the largest number, I think, of enslaved people on their grounds [in North Carolina],” she said. “When emancipation came, all of those men, women [and] children just had to decide or figure out where they would go. And a lot of them settled here and formed what became the Hayti community.”
The Hayti district largely made up the area known as Durham's Black Wall Street. It included two major churches on Fayetteville Road — St. Joseph AME and White Rock Baptist, established in 1869 and 1873, respectively.
Lee said that, unlike many Black Wall Streets at the time, Durham's was 100 percent self-sustained, complete with everything from a Black-owned hospital, bank and funeral home.
