On June 6, 2020, I wrote a Storied Charlotte blog post titled “T.J. Reddy: Charlotte’s Own Civil Rights Activist, Poet, and Artist.” In this post, I wrote about how the late T.J. Reddy drew on his background as a civil rights activist in both his poetry and his paintings. I also commented on his role in the famous 1972 Charlotte Three Case, which was one of Charlotte’s most important civil rights cases. I remember thinking at the time that I was doing the research for this blog post that somebody should write a book about the Charlotte Three Case. Well, I am pleased to report that historian J. Christopher Schutz has done just that. Titled Going to Hell to Get to the Devil: The 1972 Charlotte Three Case and the Freedom Struggle in a Sunbelt City, this book was published by the Louisiana State University Press a few months ago. For more information about the book, please click on this link: https://lsupress.org/9780807181751/going-to-hell-to-get-the-devil/
Schutz is currently the Chair of the History Department at Tennessee Wesleyan University, but in the 1990s he was a graduate student in the history program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His interest in the Charlotte Three Case dates back to his years at UNC Charlotte. I recently contacted him and asked how he came to write a book about the Charlotte Three Case. Here is what he sent to me:
I first moved to Charlotte in 1992 with my wife and one-year-old son, leaving behind seven years of work in non-profit agencies in California– the last five as a lay chaplain to the Juvenile Halls of Oakland. That work had kindled my interest in the later fate of the African America Freedom Struggle as I had been witnessing the disproportionate number of kids of color wedging their increasingly hopeless lives into the dead end of poverty and the drug trade. I became increasingly desperate to understand why they seemed so tragically left behind by the advancements of the prior decades, and thus appeared unable to channel their energies and anger against the economic and racial injustices they so obviously confronted.
Having pondered those questions in my work, I was now interested in pursuing that subject by returning to formal education as a Master’s student in History at UNCC. Two professors became key in exploring the subject of my book, Going to Hell to Get the Devil: The 1972 Charlotte Three Case and the Freedom Struggle in a Sunbelt City. My first semester included a seminar on the Civil Rights Movement with David Goldfield. He became a key adviser for me quickly in exploring the issue. Secondly, Lyman Johnson, a specialist in Latin American history and the graduate program coordinator at the time– knowing my interest in pursuing a Freedom Struggle subject for my master’s thesis– mentioned to me the local Charlotte Three case with which he was familiar. The conversation sent me to UNC Charlotte’s Special Collections where I found a collection associated with the case. That master’s thesis became the root of this now published book a number of years late
As I looked into the case, two aspects particularly intrigued me. First, it provided a window to explore the seeming stalling out of the profound promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the decades after the 1960s. Secondly, the city of Charlotte offered an especially interesting template as a prideful Sunbelt city which had enjoyed explosive economic growth while simultaneously eschewing the call of its 1960s activists to share those fruits with its poorer populations of color. My book, in fact, highlights the ways that Charlotte’s civic leadership in tandem with its business leaders, sought to carefully control the trajectory of its growth by constraining local Black Power and New Left activists from playing a role in charting the city’s development. The Charlotte Three case provides a fascinating prism to view those issues.
Schutz’s book deals with an important court case in Charlotte history, but that is not the book’s only connection to Charlotte. The book is part of Louisiana State University’s Making the Modern South series, which is edited by David Goldfield, the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at UNC Charlotte. As Schutz mentions above, he studied with Goldfield during his years as a graduate student at UNC Charlotte. It seems fitting to me that the editor of Schutz’s new book is his former professor. In a sense, the long-standing connections between Schutz and Goldfield are like threads in a web—a Storied Charlotte web.