It started with a map, hand-drawn on a piece of paper and filled using the memories of Charlestonians who could recall when Morris Street had one of the highest concentrations of Black-owned and operated businesses in the city.
The Morris Street laid out on that map looked very different from the Morris Street of today.
Now, details of Morris Street’s history have been preserved in a new online exhibit from the College of Charleston’s Lowcountry Digital History Initiative and the Preservation Society’s Thomas Mayhem Pinckney Alliance that celebrates the district’s stories of resilience, community and cultural identity.
Tour the Digital Exhibit
The Morris Street Business District Project can be viewed online via the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative at http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/msbd.
That alliance was formed with the intent of honoring talented craftspeople like Pinckney himself, an African American artisan who specialized in historic structures and, though relatively unsung, was integral to the city’s preservation movement.
Susan Pringle Frost, founder of the now century-old Preservation Society of Charleston, was quoted saying that, while she often got credit for starting the movement, Pinckney was “the one who really started” it.
In that spirit, the group hosted events lifting up the work of people who continued Pinckney’s legacy of craftsmanship. They also celebrated community figures like Esau Jenkins, known for establishing the Progressive Club on Johns Island and founding the C.O. Credit Union.
The group had the expressed goal to “identify, recognize and preserve” contributions of African Americans to the region’s built environment and “places that are significant to the African American experience.”
At one of the Alliance’s meetings, founding member Julia-Ellen Craft Davis brought that hand-drawn map of Morris Street, partially filled, and people took turns adding to it — a doctor’s office here, a pharmacy there.
Some of the places — mostly the churches — were still standing, but others were not. Or, if they were, the present-day buildings had no indication of what used to be there.
Drawing out that map was the beginning of a bigger effort to preserve at least the histories of the establishments that were in that part of the city and the Black and immigrant families who owned and operated them, since much of the physical evidence of their existence was gone.
There was the Brooks Motel, which opened in 1963 and counted Martin Luther King Jr. among its prominent guests during the civil rights movement. In 1969, it served as lodging for activists who converged on Charleston during the Hospital Workers Strike.
The motel was demolished in 2000.
Benjamin and Albert Brooks, who founded the motel, also ran a pool hall on Morris Street, which they later turned into the Brooks Restaurant, a business the exhibit describes as “part of the social backbone of the Black community.” It was listed in the Green Book, which provided African American travelers with a guide of safe places to eat and sleep while traveling during the Jim Crow era.
Like the motel, it welcomed its share of high-profile visitors, like James Brown, who received his key to the city there in 1976 at the restaurant’s second location across the street at 57 Morris St. Brown ate the restaurant’s beef stew, according to a News and Courier account.
The restaurant has long been closed, but its first location — a one-story structure at the corner of Morris and Felix streets, which also housed another Brooks business, Brooks Realty — is still there with its Philip Simmons iron gratings in the windows.
At the corner of Coming and Morris streets, Robert F. Morrison opened his Esso gas station in 1938. Morrison, a prominent Black resident of the district who fought for civil rights, employed Black attendants and provided services for Black motorists. Morrison lived right behind the station in a two-story single house.
It was demolished in 1974, and the property now sits vacant.
“For me, the thing that’s really startling is the loss of the school,” Craft Davis said, in reference to the Simonton School.
Founded as the Morris Street School in 1865, it was the first public school for African American children in Charleston. Later renamed the Simonton School, it was open for more than a century.
The school was demolished in 1976, and the block where it had been was developed with townhomes and condominiums.
A grassy area surrounded by the residences was named Simonton Park.
Seeing what’s been lost in the Morris Street district says something about “who’s history has been more valued” in a city that “prides itself on its preservation,” said local historian Millicent Brown, who was also serving on the Thomas Mayhem Pinckney Alliance when that first map was drawn up.
“We’re left at meetings trying to see what people can remember because the structures aren’t there to tell the stories,” Brown said.
Sites included on that map informed the research process that followed.
That research went back to times well before the Morris Street of that map, to when the area was established just before the Civil War.
The neighborhoods around the district were home to free and enslaved African Americans and European immigrants. After the Civil War, new waves of European and Asian immigrants arrived.
From the 1860s to the 1960s, the exhibit recounts, Morris Street was home to “German grocers, Irish laborers, Chinese businessmen and Russian Jewish merchants.” By the 1950s, many of those immigrant-owned properties left — by 1979, the street had just one Jewish business, the exhibit says — but the street was filled with “essential mid-century Black-owned businesses.”
Desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s “marked a significant shift” in the history of the district. Black-owned and White-owned businesses competed for customers, and White-owned businesses that had unequal advantages “were often victorious,” the exhibit explains.
The construction of the Crosstown, which bisected neighborhoods and displaced many Black residents, was also a “trigger for change.”
There was a sense of urgency to documenting the Morris Street business district’s history, said Craft Davis. Because the area retains so little visual evidence of its past as a hub of Black-owned and operated businesses, that history lives largely in memory.
“Our children will not know these stories personally, so it’s important that we go after this information now because we have already lost so many people of the previous generation that knew it,” Craft Davis said in an announcement from the Preservation Society about the exhibit’s debut earlier this month. “We can’t lose our history; once it’s lost you can’t regain it.”
That first hand-drawn map and the memories used to fill it in were essential to the process of putting together the digital interactive map that now lives online through the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative.
It highlights 20 sites on Morris and connecting side streets, including text and images to explain evolution of each location.
The Preservation Society is also offering an opportunity to experience that research in person on new walking tours of the district. The first was offered in March. Another is being held in May, and they’re hoping to keep offering the tour more in the future, said Erin Minnigan, director of historic preservation.
Anna-Catherine Carroll, manager of preservation initiatives for the society, said the progression of the Morris Street project, which has been years in the making, shows the importance of “telling undertold stories” before it’s too late.
And while this research won’t bring back the places that have been lost, like the Brooks Motel or the Simonton School, it could inform future decisions about development in the still-changing area.
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