"Historic Bookmarks"
The Official Book Club of the Mecklenburg County Historic Landmarks Department – February 13, 2025
It’s time for another meeting of the Historic Bookmarks book club, our official book club!
In connection with Black History Month in February, local author Greg Jarrell will discuss his recent book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods. This compelling story about today’s Charlotte cityscape tracks the entanglement of one local Black family and one white church over a century.
We hope you can join us for this event at Second Ward High School Gymnasium, a designated historic landmark in what was once the historically Black neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Author Bio
Rev. Greg Jarrell is an author and community organizer in Charlotte, NC. His recent book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods examines the influence of white churches and Christians in planning, executing, and profiting from the federal Urban Renewal projects of the 1950s and 60s, in Charlotte and beyond.
Greg is Senior Campaign Organizer for The Redress Movement, a national nonprofit organizing local communities for housing justice. Greg is based in west Charlotte’s Enderly Park neighborhood, where he has lived and worked on equitable housing issues since 2005. He is one of the co-founders of QC Family Tree, a cultural organizing group in his neighborhood, and a founding organizer of Charlotte’s West Side Community Land Trust.
He and his spouse Helms are both ordained ministers and are parents to two teens.
Book Synopsis
Our Trespasses uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What responsibilities do we bear toward those who have been harmed, not just by individuals but by our structures and collective ways of being in the world?
Abram and Annie North, both born enslaved, purchased a home in the historically Black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the years following the Civil War. Today, the site of that home stands tucked beneath a corner of the First Baptist Church property on a site purchased under the favorable terms of Urban Renewal campaigns in the mid-1960s. How did FBC wind up in what used to be Brooklyn--a neighborhood that no longer exists? What happened to the Norths? How might we heal these hauntings?
This is an American story with implications far beyond Brooklyn, Charlotte, or even the South. By carefully tracing the intertwined fortunes of First Baptist Church and the formerly enslaved North family, Jarrell opens our eyes to uncomfortable truths with which we all must reckon.