Dr. Robert H. Greene House

By the close of the 19th century, legislatively mandated Jim Crow segregation imposed a “separate but equal” daily existence for Black and White southerners. That prompted African Americans in Charlotte and elsewhere to relocate, concentrating their communities within specific racially defined locations. Black Charlotteans initially clustered in the center city’s First, Second, and Third Wards before migrating to peripheral areas at the city limits that often centered around African American institutions. In that way, Biddle Institute (now Johnson C. Smith University) and the trolley line gave rise to Biddleville, Washington Heights (Charlotte’s first streetcar suburb developed exclusively for Black Charlotteans), McCrorey Heights (named for its primary developer, Biddle University president Henry L. McCrorey), and other Black communities in the city’s West End. Biddle faculty and Black professionals like Dr. Robert Greene (1901-1990) gravitated toward the school’s cultural offerings and the better quality housing in those outlying neighborhoods.

A graduate of Howard University’s undergraduate and medical school programs, Dr. Greene and his wife Gladys moved to Charlotte around 1929. They settled in Second Ward’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Mrs. Greene taught elementary school while Dr. Greene ran his medical practice from the Mecklenburg Investment Company building, Charlotte’s first office building owned by and leased exclusively to Black professionals. Dr. Greene also served as staff physician at Good Samaritan Hospital, Charlotte’s African American hospital (now the site of Bank of America Stadium). Around 1936, the Greenes purchased property in the new McCrorey Heights neighborhood for their Colonial Revival house.

As an obstetrician and family doctor, Dr. Greene delivered hundreds of babies and provided primary medical care for numerous families throughout the county. A deeply respected physician, he was one of the first African American doctors to gain privileges to Charlotte Memorial Hospital and was named by North Carolina Governors Dan Moore and Robert Scott to the Medical Advisory Council for the State Board of Mental Health. Dr. Greene was also involved in several professional organizations, including the Mecklenburg County Medical Society, the North Carolina Medical Society, and the American Medical Association, and was a member and one-time president of both the Charlotte Medical Society and the Old North State Medical Society. Some of those organizations only admitted Dr. Greene after 1963, near the end of his fifty-year medical career, because Jim Crow laws prevented him for joining White medical organizations. That exclusion also prevented him from treating patients in White hospitals.

Due to the decimation of Second Ward’s black sections during Urban Renewal, all of its historic middle-class and upper-middle-class houses were destroyed. Now, only neighborhoods like McCrorey Heights, Biddleville, and Washington Heights evidence the history of residential development of Charlotte’s African American middle class during the early to mid-twentieth century.