Enlarge Tour guide Juan Whipple shows visitors a grave stone at the McCoy Plantation in Huntersville.

Posted: February 23rd, 2011 Lashawnda Becoats

On Saturday, Feb. 18, I took the Charlotte Black/African-American Heritage Tour, hoping to learn more about Charlotte’s African American history.

As a resident of Charlotte for the past 16 years, I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about the history of the city. I knew about Queen Charlotte’s African heritage, the famous artist Romare Bearden and the old Brooklyn neighborhood. But, sadly, that was about it.

A small group met tour guide Juan “Jay” Whipple, director and founder of Queen City Tours, at the Seventh Street Station, where we boarded a minivan. 

Whipple was inspired to start the tours in 1998 when the group Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage came to Charlotte that same year. The group was a mix of ethnicities and religions that walked from Massachusetts to Louisiana, retracing the route of the slave trades as a way to pray for racial healing and atone for the institution of slavery.

Queen City Tours runs several Charlotte-area tours year-round. But he offers the Black/African-American Heritage Tour only during Black History Month. The $30 tour covers more than 75 sites, 3 cemeteries and African American history in Charlotte from the 1500s through the present.

Whipple does his tour because he feels it’s still important to educate all people about the past. “If you don’t talk about it and you’re are not familiar with it, you’d think slavery was never here,” he said.

As we began the three-hour journey in the second of the four wards that make up uptown, I began to get excited. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. 

As we drove down familiar streets like Trade St., we discussed the historic buildings, public artwork, and neighborhoods. We learned about Brooklyn, the predominately black neighborhood that was the center of African American life before urban renewal erased it in the 1960s.

Whipple’s narrative and visuals, documents and video, helped me understand how much African Americans contributed to this city. For example, did you know that African American Harvey H. Boyd created the Mecklenburg County seal as a part of a contest in the '60s?

When we made it to Old Settlers' Cemetery, on West Fifth Street between Poplar and Church streets, the first of three cemeteries on the tour, we learned about the prominent white families buried there and their slaves, buried in unmarked graves.

Colby Williams, 12, was on the tour with his mother, aunt and cousin. “It was a good lesson to learn about black people and what we had to go through,” Colby said. “Most kids 13 and 14 would probably laugh at us (for taking the tour), but it’s important to know how we were treated and how we need to carry ourselves today.”

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