Decline and Demolition: Wofford's Expansion
The neighborhood’s disappearance was at once complicated and simple. As testimony and documents show, Wofford officials wanted to move north since at least the late 1950s and they worked through a combination of planned and opportunistic property acquisition to do so over a period of about 70 years. While college officials did not consistently acquire property based on a specific expansion plan, they were always willing to buy as funds allowed and they consistently conceived of the neighborhood as fertile expansion ground.
Wofford officials took it upon themselves to make the decisions that affected the neighborhood without the input of neighborhood residents – the people whose lives were being directly affected by these decisions. According to former Wofford President, Joe Lesesne, not one task force and planning committee from the 1970s through the 1990s organized to address the expansion of Wofford’s campus included a neighborhood resident or business owner.
When recounting this history today, Wofford officials and college histories emphasize the accidental or opportunistic process by which they acquired property. Wofford officials claim that they did not convene committees and task forces to plan the colonization of the neighborhood. Lesesne said, “Most all the property that I know that was acquired really started piecemeal. Either by gifts from people or there were lots of people in the neighborhood who were getting old and they would come to the college to see if they would buy it. It was getting rough for old people to live back there.” When acquisitions happened, he said, they were generally initiated by homeowners who wanted to leave, or they were gifts from owners who had already left and were tired of paying property taxes, or they were bequests. His reference to the neighborhood’s condition – that it was rough back there – is consistent with another official line Wofford is taking currently. The neighborhood was in decline, a decline that began in the 1950s and accelerated into the 1970s to include plummeting house values, drug and crime problems, and a loss of the community feeling that had tied it together for so long.
The claim Wofford officials make about the land acquisition process in the Back of the College as having been initiated by Black residents is contradicted by their own records and statements. Lesesne noted that prior to his arrival in 1964, the college renovated the central building on campus, Old Main. The renovation was completed in the 1950s and it included a significant revision of the original structure. Prior to the renovation, the building opened onto the center of campus only. Its primary access points faced south. After the renovation, a new portico entrance was built on the north side of the building, which opened it up to what was still East Cleveland Street at the time. Doing so signaled the
college’s intention to expand northward. East Cleveland Street would soon be closed and properties acquired; the DuPre and Shipp residence halls would soon be built and complement the new mall area that filled the space between Old Main and Evins Street, which ran a block north of and parallel to East Cleveland Street. The new residence halls and northward expansion of the 1950s-1960s were the college’s first major development effort after WWII. But as Lesesne also explains, from WWII forward, Roger Milliken, textile magnate and long-time college board member, funded the opportunistic acquisition of properties in the neighborhood, including the purchase of 17 lots along Charlevoix Street in 1966. This pattern of opportunistic expansion plus occasional planned expansion characterized Wofford’s movement into the neighborhood between 1950-2000.
Internal documents show the college actively pursuing the acquisition of new properties north of campus. Two major long-term planning campaigns were organized by college officials in the latter half of the twentieth century. The 1970s plan – called “A Plan for the 70s” – consistently names expansion north of Evins Street as a primary college goal and one of its significant “internal assumptions,” and every planned budget includes a line for “property acquisition North of Evins.” The 1970 Plan claims that “if Wofford is to achieve its objectives,” it must “[a]cquire land north of campus” and budgets $300,000 to do so. In 1982, when the college is between major long-range plans and is doing its best to survive the economic downturns of the late 1970s and the financial hardships many colleges and universities were facing at the time, it nevertheless continues its acquisition and demolition of property when it commits $5,000 from the “depreciation fund” to “tear down 4 houses (3 on East Cleveland Street
Many residents were unhappy with Wofford’s expansion. At least three organized forms of protest occurred between 1981 and 1995. All were civil and expressed the frustration residents felt at losing their homes. The first, in 1981, was organized by Cheryl Harleston, the city’s Human Relations Commission director and long-time advocate of Black heritage and civil rights in town. The protest was more of a community meeting between residents and Wofford officials. Ed Greene represented Wofford. Greene served in Wofford’s Business Office, Development office, or on the President’s cabinet as vice-president for business for 33 years – from 1963-1996. Greene was involved directly in some version of all the college’s finances during his career at Wofford, which places him at the center of anything to do with Wofford’s acquisition of the Back of the College neighborhood. Greene wrote a letter to Spartanburg city manager, William Carstaphen, dated March 4, 1981, in which he reports his conclusions from the meeting organized by Harleston. Greene’s basic position in the letter is that residents “do not understand” the situation they are in. He writes, “1. It was obvious to me that citizens really do not understand what the city can and cannot do [regarding] the use or misuse of private property. 2. Even when programs are understood, citizens do not understand how priorities are set. They do not understand, for example, why they cannot get low-interest loans while homeowners in the Hampton area can.”
The protest in 1991 was led by Nellie Platt and Sylvania Level who are pictured in a Herald-Journal article dated October 16, 1991, standing next to the towering chain-link fence that surrounds the Reeves Tennis Center. The article opens on the root of the matter: “Nellie Platt and Sylvania Level are afraid the expansion of Wofford College threatens the existence of the neighborhood where they grew up.” Platt said, “I think they are trying to close us out of here…. They did this because this is a black community and they think they can run rampant over us.”
During the execution of Urban Renewal policies in the early 1970s, while Back of the College residents watched in increasing anxiety as the Southside was bull-dozed and did what they could to help the area’s displaced residents, Ed Greene and other Wofford officials appealed to City Council in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Urban Renewal to be implemented next door – and for Wofford to be given the chance to acquire properties through the program. Several internal documents show Wofford officials, especially Greene, expressing interest in Urban Renewal. Indeed, in 1972, as the Southside began to be bulldozed, City Council elected Ed Greene to the city’s Planning Commission, a position he held for four years and of which he soon became Chairperson. In the 1981 letter to city manager Carstaphen, in which Greene criticized Black residents for their lack of understanding, he expressed the college’s gratitude to the city for its assistance in helping Wofford acquire property “north of Evins Street.” He then reminded Carstaphen of Wofford’s interest in acquiring property through Urban Renewal: “At a time when the area was scheduled for urban renewal and there was the possibility of building housing elsewhere, Wofford was interested in acquiring a portion of the area. On that basis, the College could have acquired the land at relatively low cost, but, as you know the urban renewal program was closed down before the area was funded.”
In 1973, the city Planning Commission drew a plat for the proposed demolition of the Back of the College and North Dean Street neighborhoods. More than 450 houses were targeted for demolition, among them were established, well cared for houses with owners who’d been in the neighborhood for generations. White owned or occupied houses near Beaumont Mill to the east and along North Church Street to the west were to be spared. The end result would have emptied more than 200 acres around Wofford and in the North Dean Street area of Black owned/resided houses – a result that eventually came to pass forty years later.
and 1 on Jefferson Street) and fill and clean up the lots.” In a 1981 letter to the Spartanburg City Manager, William Carstaphen, Wofford’s vice-president for Business, Ed Greene, writes, “We continue to purchase property as it becomes available at an attractive price.”
Wofford’s expansion accelerated in the 1990s. The second major incursion into the neighborhood, after the construction of the Shipp and DuPre residence halls in the 1960s, was the new tennis center that took multiple houses on and north of Evins Street. But by the time Wofford officials were inking the deal with alum and Carolina Panthers owner, Jerry Richardson, to bring the Panthers to campus for their spring training, the writing on the wall for the neighborhood was clear. Gibbs Stadium was finished in 1995 along with the Richardson Physical Activities Building, both of which claimed substantial acreage. The pocket of houses left between the tennis courts and the football stadium was taken in the early 2000s as the college planned and built its new
senior housing apartment village.
Residents’ displacement was more severe than many whose homes were taken during Urban Renewal in Spartanburg’s Southside. At least during Urban Renewal, some residents received housing vouchers during the time between demolition and renewal, and some were placed into public housing when the process concluded. Back of the College residents who rented their homes – the majority who lived in the neighborhood were renting – were often given 30 days’ notice and no support for securing new housing. One local historian with family ties to the neighborhood, Mr. Luther Norman, arranged with the demolition companies hired by Wofford to walk through them before they were taken down. He describes finding family artifacts in many houses: “And I was able to retrieve a lot of early history, whether it through the churches, military, a lot of African American History. One of the things we were able to retrieve out of an old house was an old baseball poster of the [Spartanburg] Sluggers and it had a lot of water damage.” Mr. Norman understood the situation some residents faced – they had to vacate quickly. His recovery work both saved precious historical artifacts that would have been lost to the bulldozer and illustrates vividly the desperation many experienced when their homes were taken.
What remains of the Back of the College neighborhood today, the first neighborhood built by formerly enslaved Black people in Spartanburg more than 150 years ago, is the Cumming Street School building, long since decommissioned and now owned by Wofford, and the former Trinity AME church building, also owned by Wofford and functioning as a studio arts facility. The Cumming Street School building has recently been designated as a historic preservation site by the city of Spartanburg, which protects its external edifice from any modification but allows for renovation to its interior spaces. The Cummings Street Baptist Church, proudly led by the dynamic and inspiring Rev. James D. Thornton during its heyday, was demolished spring of 2018 and now serves as greenspace for tailgate parking during Wofford football games.
Residents dispersed throughout the city or left town for good. Some hung on for as long as they could. Stacey Whitmire, Hattie Bell Penland, Jeanette Wiggins, Icie Hamilton, Nellie Platt – all had lived their lives Back of the College and they stayed in their homes until their health forced them to go.
What was clear by 1981 was that both of Spartanburg’s founding Black neighborhoods, the Southside – or Baptist side – and the Northside, or Methodist side, were going to exist “only in the historical memory of the people who lived there,” as Carman Harris writes in the “Introduction” to South of Main. It is an unspeakable loss for all concerned that both the Southside and Back of the College neighborhoods no longer exist. No memorial or public acknowledgment will do them justice – although both are desperately needed. But listening to the stories and hearing the voices of the people who lived there may help us honor their memory.
The trauma of such loss is immeasurable. “I didn’t like it at all,” said Cynthia Harris Logan. “They just took our neighborhood away from us. And we got divided. Because when they start taking the neighborhood, people start moving in different directions. They had to move.” Norma Pitts agrees. “They just start separating people. ‘You gotta move. You gotta move,’ you know. ‘We selling out.’ So it was a lot of people they had to uproot. Can you imagine? That’s the way they did the Soutside, they just uprooted it. They just came through and you got to go.” Sherry Willington, who was born and raised on Twitty Street, and who described positive experiences with Wofford students as she encountered them during her childhood, nevertheless said Wofford’s expansion “kind of effectively split that deeply rooted community … [and] it hurt us. It really did. It hurt us really bad.”