LS - Teague, Laura

Laura B. Teague was born on August 21, 1872, in Winnsboro, South Carolina, to Austin Hill (or Hall) and Susie James. Born just a decade after Emancipation, Laura’s childhood was likely shaped by the Reconstruction of the deep South, which likely led her family to relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, when she was just a little girl and join the vibrant, bustling Black community building rich lives in the segregated city. Her childhood was marked by fiery independence, the kind that one day took her, so former African American local newspaper “The Charlotte News” has it, to a close call outside the Brevard Street streetcar tracks. At the ripe age of nine, a Highland Park streetcar ran into Laura as she and other kids played wildly near the tracks. She was bruised but survived, a sure testament to her resilience and tenacity.

Laura made a humble but honorable life as an adult in Charlotte’s Brooklyn neighborhood, a thriving center of Black life within the Second Ward of the city. Well known for its tight-knit community, churches, schools, and Black-owned businesses, Brooklyn offered unprecedented autonomy in a segregated world. Laura married Jonas (or James) Teague on June 1, 1910, in Mecklenburg County. She was nearing 38, her life already marked by hardship and resilience. The couple lived happily in a small home at 315 S. Long Street. There, Laura worked as a domestic, presumably performing household chores for white households in Charlotte, one of the few available jobs that Black women could get during the early part of the 20th century.

Laura and Jonas had no known kids, but her house was likely alive, either with neighbors bringing baskets of greens or the sound of spirituals carried on through the windows late on summer afternoons.

Laura suffered a stroke on June 14, 1938, her death certificate citing a cerebral hemorrhage. She was kept comfortable by her husband in their S. Long Street residence, where a Dr. N.B. Houser nursed her until she passed away on June 20. She lies at rest, under a beautifully maintained headstone, in Cedar Grove Cemetery, a historically Black cemetery where many residents of Brooklyn found their final peace.

After her death, Laura’s neighborhood would not remain the same. The vibrant neighborhood of Brooklyn, filled with thriving institutions like the Grace A.M.E. Zion church and Second Ward High School (the first African American public high school), has been disrupted by the urban renewal of the 1960s and 1970s. The urban renewal process, or “slum clearance,” initially led to the demolition of over 1,480 buildings in the Second Ward, displacing about 1,000 African American families, including those in homes on S. Long Street. Residents had little say in the process, and guarantees of better housing rarely materialized for them, specifically. What filled much of the space that once was Brooklyn was government buildings, parking lots, and office parks.

As described by city historian Dr. Thomas Hanchett, Charlotte’s growth patterns shifted dramatically in the post-war decades, shifting from a dense, “walking-scale” city to one more heavily reliant on auto-based planning and racially segregated suburban sprawl. Today, the former hub of Black Charlotte houses sleek high-rises, the Charlotte Convention Center, and the Spectrum Center. However, the land holds intricate histories, and because of this, the Charlotte Community Relations Department has partnered with community activists and historians to preserve the legacy of Brooklyn as digital exhibits, oral histories, and public installations. New redevelopment projects like the Brooklyn Village Project are also occurring, aiming to restore affordable housing and commercial use while honoring the neighborhood’s past. Initiatives like Save Cedar Grove have also attempted to bring attention to sites like Laura B. Teague’s final resting place. Once overgrown and neglected, Cedar Grove Cemetery is now being restored by local volunteers to honor the lives of Charlotte’s African American forebears, those like Laura who built the city from its outskirts.  The city of Brooklyn is no longer what it used to be, yet its history endures in the memories of the elderly, in the names written on tombstones, and in the project’s fight to reclaim and preserve Charlotte’s Black past.