'I cried for a long time': Black hair stylist's dream crushed by racist neighbor

[marmar]

(Guardian UK) Angel Pittman’s dream was to create a mobile hair salon. So the 21-year-old stylist bought less than an acre of unrestricted land in North Carolina for $10,000 in September and purchased three school buses for $14,000 with money she had saved since she was 17.

“I’ve never seen anybody driving around doing people’s hair,” she said. “But not only did I want to get paid for doing hair, but I wanted to drive around, do a couple of homeless people’s hair and maybe go to some prisons and help incarcerated people.”

Pittman’s plan was to place the buses on the land, transform one into a living space, and turn the other two into mobile salons. She could do hair on her property, set up shop in different locations, or do house calls.

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About a week after closing, on 23 September, she returned with her mom to drop off the buses. This time, she said, the man approached them and asked, “‘Why are you guys here? Are y’all looking for shade?’”

Rowan county, which is 79% white and 17% Black, is a “sundown town”, a Jim Crow era term used to reference overwhelmingly white neighborhoods known for racial segregation. Katherine Mellen Charron, a history professor at North Carolina State University, said sundown areas remain prevalent in places like Rowan county to limit homeownership from Black Americans. (The Jim Crow saying was, N-word, “don’t let the sun go down on you in this town”.)

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She then noticed her buses had been vandalized. The glass windows were broken. Racial slurs were etched. The man prominently displayed Confederate flags, swastikas and KKK signs all over his yard, which Pittman said weren’t there when she previously visited the plot. ..................(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/21/north-carolina-racism-stylist-driven-from-her-land-white-neighbor