Secondary Data Analysis
EconomyTo understand Durham and its residents, it is necessary to examine Durham's past. What is now Durham began as a Native American trading village named Adshusheer. In the 1750s, European immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland started settling in the area as farmers, millers, and traders. Over the next 100 years, several local families successfully built large plantations, capitalizing on the availability of slave labor. Durham was officially incorporated by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1869, at which time it had 258 residents.
Farmers in the Durham area began to produce tobacco as a cash crop in the 1850s. Durham's main tobacco producer, Washington Duke, increased his market share throughout the 1860s and by the 1880s Durham's tobacco companies produced 90% of the nation's cigarettes (North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 2000).
In the 1890s, the booming tobacco economy in Durham necessitated local production of textiles to make storage bags and sacks for tobacco production and sales. In response, several textile companies were founded in Durham. As time went on, the textile mills expanded their product lines to include other fabrics and cotton products, including denim and hosiery.
Durham's tobacco and textile industries continued to bring prosperity to the city through the first half of the 20th century. Tobacco jobs were known as secure, well-paying jobs that guaranteed employees access to bank loans and other economic benefits. However, as the 1950s drew on, Durham's economic base started to shift. Automation of cigarette production, loss of market share to competitors, and "the release of a U.S. Surgeon General report in 1964 that linked smoking to lung cancer" resulted in layoffs in Durham tobacco factories in the 1970s and 1980s (Clabby, 2000). The textile industry also dwindled and eventually closed in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the 1890s, the philanthropic endeavors of the Dukes and George Watts began to transform the health and welfare status of Durham's citizens. An important contribution was the building of Watts Hospital in 1895. Watts Hospital, funded entirely by George W. Watts, was a private, 22-bed, modern hospital dedicated to the care of Durham's white citizens and offered free care to those unable to pay (Darkis, 1991). The hospital became public in 1953, and in 1976, the 480-bed Durham County General Hospital opened to replace Watts Hospital (Darkis, 1991). The Duke family financed the construction of Lincoln Hospital in 1901. Lincoln Hospital was dedicated to the treatment of Durham's African-American citizens and served the African-American community until 1976, when it was restructured into the Lincoln Community Health Center and transferred its in-patient services to Durham County General Hospital. Since the 1980's, Lincoln Community Health Center has offered an active outreach program for homeless people at the Community Shelter for H.O.P.E.
In 1924, a third major philanthropic event contributed to the foundation of the future City of Medicine: the creation of the Duke Endowment. Before his death in 1925, Buck Duke endowed a gift of $10 million to establish a liberal arts university, medical school, hospital, and home for nurses as part of Duke University (Darkis, 1991). Duke Hospital opened in 1930, and the Medical School followed in 1931 (Darkis, 1991). The Hospital was racially segregated, but it did treat both white and African-American patients. Over the next few decades, Duke University and its affiliated medical institutions became nationally known for its provision of quality health care services, excellent training of medical personnel, and medical research.
For many years now, Durham's medical facilities have attracted top physicians and health care professionals from across the country. With the deliberate creation of Research Triangle Park as a research and development park in 1956, Durham has also become a center for groundbreaking biomedical research and entrepreneurialism. In recognition of the changing nature of Durham's economy from tobacco and textiles to medicine and health care, the Durham City Council voted in 1981 to declare Durham as the "City of Medicine" (The Herald-Sun, 2000).
Although free African-Americans lived in the area before 1865, it was not until after the Civil War that an African-American economy began to develop in Durham (Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, 2000). In 1898, John Merrick and others created the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association to provide life insurance to African-Americans. Prior to this time, most African-Americans were either unable to obtain life insurance or were charged inflated premiums from white insurance companies. North Carolina Mutual rapidly expanded its customer base, first within Durham and then to North Carolina and nearby states. By 1950, North Carolina Mutual became "the largest and oldest African-American owned life insurance company" in the U.S. and the largest African-American owned business in the world (Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, 2000; Vann & Jones, 1999). North Carolina Mutual, along with the growth of other African-American owned businesses in Durham, created a need for an African-American bank. This call was answered in 1907 with the creation of Mechanics and Farmers Bank, "the nation's first African-American owned bank" (Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, 2000). In the 1990s, Mechanics and Farmers became "the pioneer in stimulating and financing the construction of low income housing in North Carolina" (Mechanics and Farmers Bank, 2000).
In striking comparison to many Southern cities, many African-American owned businesses were located in Durham's downtown district, not isolated and removed to segregated residential neighborhoods. By 1950, it has been said that Durham's African-American community controlled $46 million of the local economy (Wilkinson, 1950). In order to be economically competitive, many white banks and other businesses accepted African-American clients because they knew these customers could easily go to African-American owned businesses for the same trade. As a result, there was more mutually beneficial interaction between the two racial groups in Durham than in nearby cities during the same time period.
By 1950, Durham included five geographically distinct African-American communities: Hayti, East End, Walltown, Hicks-town, and Lyon Park (Wilkinson, 1950). The largest of these was Hayti ("hay-tie"). The 1940 U.S. Census shows that 53% of Durham's African-American population lived in Hayti (Wilkinson, 1950). Hayti contained 75% of African-American owned businesses at the time, most of which were located on Fayetteville Street (Wilkinson, 1950). The concentration - and partial isolation - of African-Americans in Hayti, coupled with the benefits of the economic prosperity that tobacco, textiles and African-American owned businesses brought to the city as a whole, resulted in the formation of a thriving African-American community in Hayti with a relatively self-contained economic, social, and cultural life. In addition, Hayti created its own library, the Stanford L. Warren Public Library, and became the home of North Carolina Central University (NCCU) in 1909, the nation's first publicly supported liberal arts college for African-Americans (Wilkinson, 1950). The library, NCCU, and other local institutions distinguished Durham as one of the more racially progressive cities in the segregated South, and it was generally felt that African-Americans had more of a chance to succeed in Durham than in many other parts of the country.
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