Durham N.C "Black Wall Street"

In the early decades of the 1900s, Durham acquired a national reputation for entrepreneurship.  Businesses owned by Black Americans lined Parrish Street.  Among them were N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Co., led by John Merrick, Dr. Aaron Moore, & C. C. Spaulding, and Mechanics and Farmers Bank, led by R. B. Fitzgerald and W. G. Pearson. 

In the early twentieth century, Parrish Street in Durham constituted what today would be called an enterprise zone, propelled by the Bull City’s American Black businessmen. Nationally recognized, the business district acquired the nickname “Black Wall Street.” The four-block area complemented the Hayti community just to the south, the principal residential district for black Durham residents and center of the city’s educational, cultural, and religious life. In a period when race relations elsewhere in North Carolina were at an all-time low, Durham’s black businessmen, with the tacit support (or tolerance, at any rate) of their white counterparts, made strides.