|
Mar. 07, 2006
IN MY
OPINION / DANNYE ROMINE POWELL
Behind a name, a bit of lore
DANNYE ROMINE POWELL
If I were in fourth grade, I'd be waving my hand
around, dying to tell you what I found out.
The county commissioners were scheduled to vote this
Wednesday to rename a park in a predominantly African American
neighborhood.
The residents of Cherry, in central Charlotte, want
Morgan Street Park, between Torrence and Baxter streets, to become Cherry
Neighborhood Park.
Whoa. Not so fast.
For once, commissioner Bill James and I agree.
If the park is named for a person, he reasoned,
better to find out who that person is before renaming it.
Absolutely.
So the renaming is pulled from the agenda until Park
and Rec Director Wayne Weston can do some research.
Well, Wayne, I got lucky.
Neighborhood history
Morgan Street Park is named for Morgan Street
School, a red brick building at 510 S. Torrence, across from the park. The
school was built in 1925 and designed by Charlotte architect Louis
Asbury.Morgan Street School opened in 1927 in the Cherry community, where
60 percent of the residents owned their own homes. It closed as an
elementary school in 1968.
As I drove through the neighborhood, I wondered if
any of the street names had changed since John Springs Myers platted the
community in 1891, specifically for African Americans, in a hollow on his
1,000-acre cotton farm.
(Myers, by the way, would later develop and give his
name to nearby Myers Park.)
Rosemary Lands at the Main Library checked the 1925
city directory. Bingo. Morgan Street ran from Baxter to east of Cherry. By
1927, it became Baldwin Avenue.
So now: Who was Morgan?
The mysterious Morgan
I hoped, of course, that Morgan was an early African
American community leader. A man so esteemed that John Myers, who was
known to be concerned with the welfare of blacks, wanted to immortalize
him.
Bill James, it seems, had fantasies of his own.
At last week's meeting, he wondered if this Morgan
might've been "a Confederate general, a developer, a neighborhood
activist, black, white, man, woman, an abolitionist?"
James said he knew of one Confederate general named
Morgan.
"Gen. John Hunt Morgan actually murdered my
great-great-great grandfather," said James, "because he (my
ancestor) led the Union forces in opposition to slavery."
According to Tom Hanchett's survey of Cherry, Morgan
was, in fact, a name in John Springs Myers' family.
I Googled "John Springs Myers" and
"Morgan."
And there in a thicket of Springs and Raefords and
Picketts is Myers' wife -- Mary Morgan Rawlinson, born Oct. 10, 1857, in
South Carolina.
If the park is renamed, I hope there will be a
plaque to let people know that for more than 80 years, the park honored
the relative of a man who wanted -- and achieved -- a better life for
African Americans.
|
