Early 20th Century: Expansion and Development
Despite the grip of Jim Crow, Black people in Spartanburg continued to expand and develop their lives in the early 20th-century. The Southside, or Baptist-side and Northside, or Methodist-side neighborhoods grew dramatically. North of Main Street, The Rev. C.C. Scott, Silver Hill’s pastor from about 1888 to 1894, acquired 37 acres north of Wofford’s campus and, in 1907, began selling lots to Black families. Lots sold quickly and the neighborhood grew rapidly over the next several years.
This surge in development added to what was built over the previous thirty years by people who’d bought property from Rev. A.W. Cummings and Arthur Cleveland. The Northside community grew around Silver Hill ME and the Dean Street School in the North Dean Street area and around Wofford, with houses appearing east and north of campus in large numbers. All told, by 1930 about 800 properties, a majority of whom were Black-resided, sat north of Main Street. According to the U.S. Census, residents worked in a wide range of occupations and industries: skilled labor, domestic labor, business owners, teachers, doctors, nurses, pastors, railroad laborers and porters, transportation, and agriculture, to name a few.
While elementary school students were being well educated at the Dean Street School with public tax dollars, those funds were not available for high school aged students. The effort to establish publicly funded secondary education for Black students in Spartanburg was led by Mr. Asa Thompson, a child of the neighborhood who went on to prominence as an educator and activist for the improvement of Black lives. Thompson’s father, Jack, a skilled brick mason, may have been one of the anonymous enslaved builders of Wofford’s central campus building, Old Main, finished in 1854. But his skills as a brick mason, along with his commitment to improving the lives of Black people in his community, led him to co-found Silver Hill Methodist Church, build a house east of Wofford’s campus, and motivate his children to become leaders in the community. Asa took his father’s example to heart and fought his entire adult life for civil rights, which included a more than ten-year effort to persuade city and county officials to support the construction of a high school for Black students. Asa’s campaign was rewarded by the opening of the Cumming Street School in 1926, located just down the road from where Asa grew up.
One of the activist groups in Spartanburg advocating better conditions at Black schools was called the Civic League, and it was led by Dr. J.B. Walker, Asa Thompson, Carrie Perry and C.B. Morrison.
The Civic League worked in multiple ways to improve Black life in the city. In 1936, with the help of Dr. T.K. Gregg’s initiative, the League raised $6,000 to build the first and much-needed recreation center for Black youth in Spartanburg. It opened in 1938 on Evins Street, down the hill from Trinity AME Church and near Cumming Street School, and it was named after Dr. T.K. Gregg to honor his hard work in establishing the center and to memorialize him after his sudden death in 1939.
Hard times came to Spartanburg in 1929. As Dwain Pruitt indicates, most of the capital and business ownership Black people had developed between 1870
1929 were “crushed” by the effects of the Great Depression. By every measure, both in terms of the severity with which the Depression hit and the relative degree to which New Deal programs helped people recover, Black people suffered disproportionately.
As jobs disappeared, Black people lost more ground than anyone in the Upstate. Farmers and sharecroppers were hit the hardest. By 1940, nearly 20% of all Black owned farms were lost. Wages plummeted, debt increased, cotton prices collapsed, and the boll-weevil hit the cotton that had been planted. More than 100,000 Black farmers in the South lost their livelihoods by 1937. When farm workers looked for other work, they were shut out. Black people had long taken the jobs white people refused – garbage collection, delivery, street cleaning, “outside” work at textile mills, hotel jobs, railroad labor – but in the massive rush to the bottom for work, white people took whatever was available.
Skilled Black workers fared only minimally better. By 1930, three to four percent of all Southern black male workers held skilled positions; by 1936, the numbers had fallen to less than one percent. Black men looking for work often faced outright discrimination or worse, including organized violence. Groups of white laborers attacked Black workers and forced them to leave their jobs. The Klan expanded and intensified the violence, organizing around the creed that murder created vacancies. Extralegal violence was augmented by the convict leasing system. Now that industries were barely hanging on and labor costs were often unsustainable, the value of free labor increased. Arrests of Black men accelerated and the numbers at the South Carolina Penitentiary grew rapidly from 1925 to 1941 – 528 imprisoned to 1,310. Seeking relief was also difficult, especially in the first two years of the Depression. Assistance went first to white families and in greater value. Black families received less money from governmental agencies and often were refused by private aid organizations.
While FDR’s New Deal programs helped some, they systematically excluded Black people. The road to recovery for Spartanburg’s Black communities was paved by daily struggle – and community organizers. Black people worked through their churches to pool resources, create relief programs of various kinds, and generally help people as they needed it. Black women especially were crucial to the community’s survival. Their work as domestic laborers provided income and other forms of support that sustained their families and neighbors.
Meaningful recovery finally came after WWII – though the effects of the Depression coupled with the exclusion of Black people from New Deal programs like federal housing assistance and mortgage guarantees last to this day – but the Northside continued to grow, students continued to go to Dean Street and Cumming Street, and neighbors continued to