Spaces disappear over the years
Pryce still carries a healthy dose of pride as a 1966 graduate of Carver High School.
Shortly before touring Old City Cemetery, Pryce sifts through memories of Carver High in the library room at C.C. Woodson Community Center. The facility is named after the principal of Carver High, who served the school for most of its 32 years. Pryce shares a yearbook from 1948, Carver class rings, and enlarged, laminated photos of moments in the past.
The candid pictures of children studying and formal class portraits capture in memory how vital education and Carver were to the Southside community.
Children from the Cummings Street school, located at the back of present Wofford College, enrolled in Carver, which opened in 1938. Pryce said that many Carver teachers lived at the “back of the college” on Cummings and Evins streets, now an expansion of the college.
While many things Pryce remembers of the Southside are gone, only a shadow of Carver remains. After integration in 1970, the high school served only 8th-grade students and younger. The building for the current Carver Middle School was built in 2001 after the old school was demolished.
But to some, the decision to integrate and the subsequent development around the school didn’t seem incidental at the time.
“Many Southside residents felt it was no coincidence that in a year when integration brought several hundred white teenagers into their neighborhood to attend Carver, a wide swath of land was being cleared around the school grounds,” according to an excerpt from South of Main.
Despite some pushback, in 2022 the old Mary H. Wright Elementary
School on Caulder Avenue was turned into apartments, some of which are considered affordable. The location has been on the National Historic Registry since 2007. The new Mary H. Wright Elementary School shares a campus with the new Carver Middle School off South Church Street.
While Carver Middle School carries on the name, other parts of the old Southside are lost to history.
Tobe Hartwell Courts, Spartanburg’s oldest public housing complex where Pryce grew up, was destroyed near the end of the millennium. Many of the residential homes from Pryce’s time as a child were gone well before that.
She recalls a tight-knit community where everybody knew everybody and where social events were self-contained
because there was no other option.
“We had no reason to go downtown because they wouldn’t let us sit at the lunch counters anyway,” Pryce said.
Businesses residents frequented, such as barbershops, beauty shops, and florists, were centralized along South Liberty Street. Social spots, like the Southside Cafe, were another part of the business district that gradually disappeared.
Churches were another critical part of life in the Southside, both for religious practice and often social spaces. In the antebellum years, enslaved people had to congregate in secret if they wished to worship outside of the white-run churches. Post-Civil War, Black citizens were not legally prohibited from worshipping separately, but the churches they organized still held strong cultural significance.
But even those spaces would not survive the phenomenon of urban renewal unscathed. Though many of the names of historic churches remain, most of the buildings do not.
The old sanctuary for Mount Moriah Baptist from 1914 was torn down during urban renewal, and a new one was constructed in 1977. Similarly, Macedonia Baptist moved its sanctuary from West Henry Street to Daniel Morgan Avenue due to urban renewal. Majority Baptist’s building initially survived, but the church later built a new sanctuary on Hudson Barksdale Boulevard around the end of the millennium.
Episcopal Epiphany Mission still stands in its burnt red shade, a rare relic of the old Southside. Along with being a place of worship, it also served the community as a private school for Black children for 30 years beginning in 1893.
“You’ll see, as we drive around Spartanburg, (urban renewal) wiped us out. We had a very strong Black community,” Pryce said.
Transformed by urban renewal
Between the 1950s and 1970s, urban renewal, where federal dollars were funneled into local communities to improve housing and infrastructure, swept across the nation as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.”
Spartanburg was one city touched by the initiative, which ultimately never delivered the resources it promised to the Southside. Beginning in the earlier half of the 1960s, many of the historic parts of the area were destroyed as land was cleared.
The friendship of then-Spartanburg Mayor Robert Stoddard and U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond poised Spartanburg to receive federal funding for what would be the first urban renewal project in the state.
Spartanburg entered the federal “Model Cities” program in late 1968, which was another harbinger of what was in store for the Southside community. The program brought about financial benefits for only 150 cities nationwide. Spartanburg received $8 million from the federal government in 1969 alone.
Some projects predated the ones that decimated the Southside, including the working class “Gas Bottom” area between modern-day North Pine Street and Daniel Morgan Avenue and the Highlands neighborhood.
“As Highlands was being bulldozed, Spartanburg city officials eyed what they considered an even larger prize: the urban renewal of the Southside and federal designation as an official ‘Model City,’ which would bring Spartanburg millions of dollars for both land clearance and new social programs to help people rise from poverty,” an excerpt of South of Main said.
The $8 million Cemetery St. Urban Renewal Project was the largest such project in South Carolina to date. It included 985 residential, public, and commercial buildings within a 300-acre territory. Around 2,000 people, 92% of them Black, worked in the pocket of the Southside the project impacted.
Pryce remembers when urban renewal began to take place in the 1960s. At the time, she was in her early 20s and worked at a knitting mill. Her family owned a home on South Liberty Street. She recalls her parents attending meetings where some people tried to put a “pretty-pictured face” on urban renewal, purporting that it would be a good thing for the Black community.
Even some residents were initially on board with urban renewal, according to South of Main. The allure of home ownership, especially for those living in substandard, aging housing, was strong. But instead of new homes being built in their community as promised, Black families eventually moved into public housing or to the eastern part of the Southside. The white people who had lived there moved to neighborhoods like Converse Heights.
“They didn’t build a new community, (Black families) bought homes from white families,” Pryce said.
In South of Main, Pryce and co-author Beatrice Hill write about accounts from residents who said that razing the neighborhoods was not a productive solution.
While city officials said rehabilitation would be a priority, ultimately, they didn’t deliver. Of over 900 residential buildings, two-thirds were to be cleared, 110 rehabilitated and the rest retained “without treatment.” The commercial buildings in the area suffered a similar fate, and residents realized most of their community as they knew it would disappear, the book says.
By 1978, the area between South Church Street and South Liberty Street had been mostly leveled. Five years prior, the minds of local and national leaders began to change and Model Cities were discontinued.
The displacement had a detrimental impact on many in the community, including Pryce’s grandmother. She gave up her beloved home with a wraparound porch and bought a house across from where Pryce still lives on Alexander Ave.
“She was never the same,” Pryce said about her grandmother. “Shortly after that she passed away, her heart just bleeding because she was uprooted
from everything that she knew. And she was just one person. A good many of the women back then were the same way.”
Brenda Lee Pryce recalls her past and looks forward to future
While her neighbors have changed, some things remain the same – Pryce says she still knows most people on her block personally.
There is still a community, but it’s not like it was, at least not for Pryce.
Along with her mother, who worked as a maid, Pryce said educators played a formative role in her early life.
This included Ann Lewis, her 5thgrade teacher, whom she called a “second mother.” Lewis spent time mentoring Pryce both at home and in school. Pryce also credits her 7th-grade teacher Janie B. Cooper for setting her up for professional accomplishments.
“Ms. Cooper is responsible for my reading, writing, and research, and me becoming the author I am today,” Pryce said.
Pryce’s education led to a stint in politics. She served District 31 in Spartanburg which covered parts of the Southside in the state legislature. The role was a catalyst for South of Main.
“What made (South of Main) important to me is when I went to Columbia in 1995 to serve in the (state) House of Representatives,” Pryce said. “I started listening to the other representatives who were there that represent other Black communities. I thought, ‘Why don’t I have any history and information like that, that I can go to at home, in my library?’ So, then I started collecting and writing and sharing.”
Other notable people in South Carolina have ties to the Southside. Federal Judge Matthew Perry opened a law practice on South Liberty Street for about a decade after graduating from law school. Pryce said Perry also resided nearby.
South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice and Carver graduate Don Beatty called the Southside home.
Pryce graduated from Carver a few years before James Beard award-winner chef and singer Alexander Smalls. Last year, Smalls and Pryce received honorary degrees from Wofford College.
Today, Pryce refers to the area as “land-locked” because there is limited space to build anything new. She calls the community a “food desert.” Last year, the only grocery store on the Southside, a Piggly Wiggly, closed its doors one year after it opened.
But Pryce acknowledges some positive changes have been made. She approves of Spartanburg’s expanding network of trails and said it increases accessibility and opportunities to educate newcomers about different parts of the city, including the Southside.
Still, housing is Pryce’s main, persistent gripe with the city. While some are concerned Spartanburg is developing too fast, Pryce said change happens too slowly in her community. Affordable homes are not prioritized in the Southside and public housing programs are disappearing, she said.
“That was all they were supposed to do with urban renewal, it was about housing. People are still living in homes that if the city really knew what was going on and how those homes look, they will probably see they’re not worth living (in), but (residents) have no choice,” Pryce said.
A monument at the trailhead of the Mary H. Wright Greenway, sandwiched between South Converse Street and Hudson Barksdale Boulevard, will be unveiled in upcoming months to display 35 panels commemorating the culture of the Southside and the effects of urban renewal. There is a red-carpet gala event on Thursday, Feb. 29 at the Spartanburg Marriott, which Pryce plans to attend.
Pryce has big things in the works for 2024 – the Southside isn’t the only part of town where she has seen the decay of vibrant Black communities.
Later this year, she plans to publish North of Main. The book, co-authored with Hub City Writer’s Project founder Betsy Wakefield Teter and Wofford professor Jim Neighbors, will take a similar historical research approach to Spartanburg’s Northside including North Dean Street, Gas Bottom, and the “back of the college.”
Chalmers Rogland covers public safety for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and USA Today Network. Reach him via email at crogland@gannett.com.