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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview U-0186, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is the second of two interviews with Ted Fillette, a southern lawyer who
began working with the Legal Aid Society of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina,
in the early 1970s. The interview begins with Fillette's assessment
of grassroots activism within Charlotte, North Carolina, neighborhoods in
reaction to urban renewal in the mid-1970s. He describes how residents of the
Biddleville neighborhood organized with the help of the Legal Aid Society of
Mecklenburg County and explains how plans to demolish the run-down neighborhood
were revised to provide better public housing for the existing residents.
Fillette paints a bleak picture of life for low-income tenants living in
Charlotte during the 1970s: when he arrived in 1973, low-income residents had no
legal protections requiring that landlords repair damaged property. Subject to
substandard living conditions and given no notice for evictions (which were
often retaliatory in nature), low-income people in Charlotte found themselves
victims of urban renewal programs. Moreover, federal welfare programs such as
AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and Medicaid often failed to
provide relief within the parameters of federal regulatory processes. Fillette
devotes considerable attention in this interview to a discussion of the legal
and political measures taken to ameliorate these kinds of conditions. In so
doing, he describes how court cases such as Alexander v. Hill
and Taylor v. Hill of the 1970s aimed to provide medical care
for the mothers of unborn children and to ensure that the needy would receive
welfare payments in a timely manner. In addition, he describes how he helped
lobby the North Carolina General Assembly to adopt the Residential Rental
Agreements Act. Fillette describes the staunch resistance the advocates for
welfare rights faced in the General Assembly, drawing attention to the adept
political maneuvering it took to ensure the act's passage in 1977.
Fillette also discusses how housing advocacy changed in the late 1980s and
describes his work with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership (founded
in 1988), which sought to meld business and leadership in order to encourage
private investment in public housing so that the community was no longer reliant
on federal and state subsidies. The interview concludes with
Fillette's assessment of continuing disparities in social class in
Mecklenburg County in the early twenty-first century. While acknowledging that
marked progress had been made, Fillette worries that continuing wage gaps and
inequality in public schools are indicative of continued tensions.
This is the second interview in a two-part series with southern lawyer Ted Fillette of the Legal Aid Society of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. In this interview, Fillette focuses on his work as a legal advocate of tenant and welfare rights from the 1970s into the early twenty-first century. Throughout, he discusses the legal and political measures taken to ameliorate housing conditions for low-income tenants and to ensure that low-income people have access to social welfare services.
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
This is a second interview with Ted Fillette in the offices of Legal Aid of North Carolina—or Legal Aid of Southern Piedmont—
No, it's Legal Aid of North Carolina.
Legal Aid of North Carolina. Today is April eleventh, 2006. My name is Sarah Thuesen. I am conducting this interview for the Southern Oral History Program. This is part of our Long Civil Rights Movement project. In our last interview, we were talking about your work with the Cherry neighborhood in Charlotte and how the residents there were fighting to prevent the demolition of their neighborhood as part of a community block grant initiative.
You had discussed how you had had some success with that effort, partly because of changes in Charlotte politics, changes on the city council. I wanted to maybe pick up with that story and extend it a little bit, and ask you to describe the similar work you did with the Biddleville neighborhood in Charlotte. Could you tell me a little bit about what was going on in Biddleville in the mid-70s and what brought you into work with that neighborhood?
Sure, Biddleville is a neighborhood in west Charlotte that's
probably within a mile of the immediate downtown commercial district
that surrounds Johnson C. Smith University, the historically black
college in Charlotte. This neighborhood was built back in the late 1800s
What happened in this neighborhood was that a VISTA volunteer project, that had been organized by a part-time professor out at UNC-Charlotte, had sent young VISTA volunteers through the neighborhoods to do surveys of the residents about how they felt about the prospect of their neighborhood being torn down. That was really the catalyst for an attempt by an indigenous neighborhood leader named Louise Sellers, who reacted to that by deciding to do her own door-to-door campaign to organize people and started having meetings of residents in churches. The essence of their meeting was that people did not want to be displaced wholesale. Most of them did not want to go into what they perceived as dangerous and bad public housing in other parts of the city, which is what a lot of them assumed would happen to them if they were forced to move.
Ms. Sellers contacted our office for assistance in trying to stop this
demolition plan. I was the main lawyer that was available at that time.
This was about the end of 1979 and, I think, the beginning of 1980. At
that time, we had pretty much finished the litigation in the [Margaret]
Harris-[Mitchell] Kannon suit and we didn't really see any
necessary relationship of that litigation to this new community fight. I
can't remember the details about that analysis, but
And who was that city representative?
That was Charlie Dannelly, who serves in the General Assembly now as a state senator. So when the community organization approached Mr. Dannelly for help to try to modify the plan, he pretty much rebuffed them and said there wasn't anything wrong with the plan and it needed to proceed. Although that was somewhat disappointing, what it did was make the neighborhood organization even more motivated and angry about the initial lack of sympathy for their position. They started taking carloads and busloads of residents to the city council meetings and completely filling the audience to express their displeasure with the plan.
Was Louise Sellers the leader of this?
Oh yes, she was. She would go door to door and tell people they needed to
come out. They needed to find babysitters or they would bring the
children with them. Sometimes there were children of all ages who were
coming down to these city council meetings and packing the room. After
having that done once or twice, the decision by the city council, which
was not made in public, I think out of deference to Mr. Dannelly, was to
tell the staff to go negotiate with the community organization about a
new plan so that nobody would lose face. The upshot of that was that a
new plan was devised and what it did was save all of the
structurally-feasible housing that was in the community. So instead of
demolishing everything,
The one section that had very small and severely dilapidated housing we conceded needed to be replaced and what we were able to do there was negotiate for a brand-new apartment complex to be owned and operated by the housing authority, where residents would have the first right to apply and live there. What that ended up doing was providing housing that was actually more affordable than some of the previously-owned substandard housing, where some of those low-income families were paying more than thirty percent of their net income for really bad houses and having to pay their own utilities. By getting public housing, the federal subsidy limited the tenants' contribution to only thirty percent of their net income for rent and utilities and they got much better housing. That was a lot better than having people go to some of the older public housing in other parts of the city. So I think generally speaking, people in the community thought that was a good compromise and overall preserved the neighborhood as being a low-income neighborhood, but with better quality housing and with some options.
How do you think Charlie Dannelly ultimately felt about the compromise?
I think that he ended up believing that it was alright, was fair. The
university did get some property that was adjacent to its athletic
field. As far as I can tell, they still haven't been able to
build anything new on that vacant land they got twenty-five years ago.
They got more land than they were able to utilize, but not at a great
expense to the neighbors. I think that ended up being a pretty decent
outcome also. It took about a year and a half to do that in the whole
process. It also gave the neighborhood a sense that they could have some
power. At one point, the director of the city neighborhood development
department tried to hire Ms. Sellers, Norma Rae so that
she could try to get some perspective on what kind of role she was
playing in this environment. I think she appreciated seeing that and
could see how the city would like to get rid of her because she had a
whole lot more power than she imagined.
I take it she refused the city's offer?
She did refuse the job and she remained the leader of the neighborhood and ended up becoming an entrepreneur in this different organization that came up with some foundation money in the 1980s after that. But anyway, that's pretty much how that one turned out.
What was her background prior to her community activism?
She was a housekeeper and a single mother who had raised quite a few kids. By the time this was going on, most of her kids were teenagers. So she had a busy life.
Do you know the name of the organization she worked for after the Biddleville activism?
I don't.
That's okay.
It had something to do with "incubator" in it, but I can remember, something about the ‘northwest corridor incubator’ something, but I'm not sure.
It was a development organization of some sort?
Yeah, it was an attempt for economic development promotions.
This is skipping ahead a little bit in chronology, but just to wrap up the Cherry and Biddleville stories, how have those neighborhoods fared over the past twenty-five years since your main work with them?
Well, I don't have a very detailed working knowledge of that. I have watched what happened in Cherry somewhat from a distance and from reading things that are in the newspaper. I think that Cherry survived pretty well for about twenty-five years, with the neighborhood remaining pretty much intact with a lot of the lower-income and elderly residents still there. But there have been more commercial encroachments in Cherry, with some of the folks that own land, individuals, were eventually persuaded to sell out to developers that have started to develop some other property on the borders. I think that the Cherry community organization has not had any great increase in financial support that has enabled them to maintain some of that older housing that was rehabilitated in the late 1970s. So some of those properties have kind of worn out, and I'm afraid that some of those are going to be lost. I think the public housing development, which was another fifty-unit complex, has survived quite well. It seems like it's in good shape and is occupied all the time.
It was a scattered-site-type model?
Yeah, it was sort of mixed. It had duplexes and fourplexes that were sort of scattered around several streets. It was not a very intrusive-looking development, no bricks, no high rise. It was designed to fit in somewhat with the prior building structures and styles.
Your sense is that the Biddleville neighborhood has had a similar trajectory?
I think so. I drive through it from time to time and it looks like to me,
most of the housing that was there when the new plan was implemented in
1980 is still there. There has not been as much pressure from outside
development on Biddleville as there has been in Cherry. But one of the
contiguous neighborhoods has experienced some gentrification and my
sense is that if that continues, eventually it may arrive in Biddleville
too. But the public housing development is still in quite good shape and
it seems to be completely occupied. That part
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 2]
In a moment, I want to return to the issues of public housing as well as recent gentrification in several areas of Charlotte, but I thought we might step back a little bit right now and talk about some of your more general work in the area of tenants' rights and welfare rights. It might be helpful if you could sketch for me sort of the general landscape in the mid-70s that you encountered that led to your work in those areas.
Alright, I'll try to sort of describe the landscape in 1974, which was the first full calendar year after I came to Charlotte. The low-income housing in Charlotte was in generally extremely bad shape in the private market. Most of the low-income tenants had week-to-week leases and many of those were oral and not written. A typical lease would be for the tenant to pay fifty dollars a week or seventy-five dollars per week and there would be no provision for any kind of repairs to be done in the lease. If there were written leases at all, they would usually be one page and it would be very perfunctor. It would say what the address was, the amount of the rent, and what time the rent was due, and that's all it said.
The law in North Carolina at that point was based upon the common law of
England in the seventeenth century, which has been described in legal
jurisprudence as under the doctrine of caveat emptor,
or "the buyer beware," which means that the tenant was
not entitled in common law to have the landlord make any repairs at all.
What that meant was that low-income tenants could not force their
landlords to do any repairs at all, no matter how serious. The only
potential relief that tenants had at that time was to ask for an
inspection from a housing inspection department of the city of Charlotte
that enforced the housing code. But what that meant in practical terms
was that if a tenant requested a housing inspection from the city, the
inspector would come out and might find twenty or twenty-five violations
of the housing
Under North Carolina law at that time, the week-to-week tenancy could be terminated on two days' notice. So if the lease began on a Monday, the landlord could give the notice on Friday to be effective Sunday night, and then on Monday, they would be considered a holdover tenant. It was very common at that time for landlords to retaliate by evicting tenants that called for housing inspections. So in the same scenario I've described, if the notice was sent out on Friday, the landlord would file an action for summary ejectment in the small claims court on Monday and that might be scheduled for a trial on Friday of that same week. Then when the tenant would go to that trial and I went to many of these in small claims court, the tenant was not entitled to raise as a defense to the summary ejectment that it was in retaliation for having called for the housing inspection. That was not a defense in common law and there was no statutory right to be protected from retaliatory evictions. So it was very well-known in the community that if a housing inspector came into your home and reported the defects to the owner, that inside of a week, you were likely to be faced with an eviction trial.
So let me tell you what happened when people had eviction trials. When
there was no right to get repairs done, there was no claim for the
tenant to make about having paid rent for
What happened then is, and this is going back to the original scenario,
if the trial was scheduled on Friday and they lost and they could not
pay three months' rent in advance, the following Monday, the
sheriff and the landlord would be at the house and they would physically
remove all of the belongings of the tenant and they would put them out
on the street. Usually every Monday and sometimes every day of the week,
you would drive through the low-income neighborhoods of the city and you
would see all the furniture, the clothes, the food, the appliances, the
televisions, everything that belonged to these families, was put out on
the street. You had people with pickup trucks who were scavengers that
would go through the neighborhoods and pick through the items of the
tenants that were put out on the street and take
In talking with other folks in Legal Aid work across the region, did you find this to be a similar pattern? North Carolina, how would it rank or compare to other southern states or nationally?
Well, there weren't very many Legal Aid people in the South at that time. There were only three counties in North Carolina that had Legal Aid offices and all of us could talk, we could all meet in this same room. When we would talk, we would realize we all had the same problem with the landlord-tenant law or the complete lack of it. So that was very well-known among our three offices. South Carolina, I knew, had similar laws that were mostly just common law from England. Alabama and Mississippi, I think, were similar. I didn't know much about Georgia and Tennessee. But that was pretty typical in the South.
It was certainly very different from the law in Massachusetts that I had studied under and had practiced with as a law student working with Legal Aid there. I was quite aware that in Massachusetts, they had a statute that created a right of tenants to get repairs done and that when landlords failed to make repairs, the tenants had a right to escrow some of their rent to help pressure the landlord to do the repairs. But that was done by statute in Massachusetts.
Now what compounded this problem for tenants who could be evicted so
swiftly and so severely was what went on with the Department of Social
Services at that time. The Department of Social Services, of course,
received money from the federal government through the Social Security
Act, which set up the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was
One of the things that really shocked me in 1974, that I still remember vividly, was how many families came to us with what was viewed as a housing or utilities crisis—that is they were behind in their rent or their utilities were unpaid and utilities were either threatened to be terminated or had already been terminated, and the landlords were threatening to terminate the lease for non-payment—was really as a result of their family having applied for AFDC and having gotten no decision from the welfare department. There were a couple of families that came to us with that problem, but then the same month, it was July of 1974, and one lady had applied more than ninety days previously and still had not gotten a decision. Another one had applied something like sixty or seventy days.
One of the other lawyers in the Legal Aid office and I were looking at
this and we realized, we did a little research and found that the
federal regulation that governed the AFDC program required the local
department to make a decision within thirty days of the
family's applying for help. For people that apply for
Medicaid, they had forty-five days to make a decision if that was based
upon a claim for disability of the applicant. When we contacted the
welfare department and asked why these applications were pending so long
and creating these crises for people that were about to be evicted, the
answer was, well we had different answers,
So what we decided to do was file a civil action in the federal district court in Charlotte seeking injunctive relief to compel the welfare department to comply with the federal processing standard of making a decision within thirty days, to get the decisions made so that people would have enough money to pay for at least the rent and the utilities, to try to not be completely destroyed by eviction. I've just explained to you what happens when a family is evicted. The welfare department's only remedy for a family that's been put on the street was to pick up the children and put them in foster care, which was a whole lot more expensive than paying the grant for the family of four. It would cost the welfare department three times as much to put the family in foster care as it would be to just grant their application for AFDC and try to stabilize the family where they were.
Was this the Alexander. v. Hill case?
Yes it is. It was filed in 1974.
And who was Alexander?
She was one of those families that I described. Her name was Clara
Alexander and she was a young mother. I can't remember
exactly how many children she had. It was not a very large family, but
she just didn't have any other source of income at that time.
Now a lot of times people were working and then they lose their job and
there wasn't any other way to get
Was that the Taylor v. Hill case?
I believe that was Taylor. Both of those cases were assigned to Judge
McMillan and eventually, we turned both of those cases into statewide
class actions. After we had filed the Alexander case, we were in
communication with some of the other people in the other two Legal Aid
offices and at that time, they realized that the counties they were
trying to serve had similar problems. They were not as severe as
Mecklenburg's. In Mecklenburg, we had people that were going
three and four months without getting a decision and it was creating
truly severe crises for families, whereas in Greensboro and Durham, they
wouldn't make the decisions in thirty days, but they usually
didn't take three or four months. They would just take maybe
two months instead of one month. By doing discovery with some of those
other counties, we realized that it was more of a statewide problem, so
we asked permission to convert the case for the individuals in
Mecklenburg County to cover a class of similarly-
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 2]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 3]
In working with welfare recipients, to what extent did you find race played a role in the distribution of benefits? Or did you find that both white and black clients, their rights were being ignored?
Well, I think that on an individual basis, we could not find in
Mecklenburg County any conscious decision to discriminate on the basis
of race. There was certainly a very great predominance of
African-American recipients in Charlotte. We very rarely saw white AFDC
recipients in Charlotte. Most of those folks that got help from Social
Services that were white lived outside of Charlotte in the mobile home
parks and the other parts of the county or in adjacent counties. So
there was no clear way for us to see discrimination on the ground.
However, in pursuing the Taylor v. Hill case, which
was the one about the failure of the state to cover unborn children in
their AFDC and Medicaid programs, initially we had won that. We had
gotten a decision from Judge McMillan that found that the Social
Security Act did cover unborn children for these programs and he ordered
the state to provide AFDC and Medicaid to the women with unborn
children. The state appealed that decision to the Fourth Circuit Court
of Appeals and while that was pending in front of the Fourth Circuit,
the same issue reached the United States Supreme Court from a case that
had started in Iowa. And despite the fact that every circuit court that
had decided this issue was in favor of covering the unborn children, the
Supreme Court of the United States decided that the Social Security Act
did not cover unborn children.
Then the fourth circuit vacated Judge McMillan's decision
based upon the decision of the Supreme Court on the same statutory
issue, which then left us back in the trial court level with our
constitutional claim. Our constitutional claim was actually based on the
Fourteenth
What was interesting to us is that most of the southern states did not.
In North Carolina at that time, we realized we had the second highest
infant mortality rate in the country. We had very poorly developed
medical delivery systems in the rural parts of the state. And if there
was anything that pregnant women needed to try to avoid premature births
or losing children, it was medical care, but they couldn't
get it without having this coverage that we were seeking through the
litigation. Well, as we started reading through these archives, we found
minutes that showed the board members of the state welfare department
saying that the biggest problem they thought the state had was Negro
births out of wedlock, is how they determined it. They did all kinds of
things to try to discourage people from having children. We also saw
references to how some counties in eastern North Carolina, and I
particularly remember Robeson County systematically cutting off AFDC
payments to qualified mothers during harvesting season to provide a
source of cheap labor for the farmers to force women to go harvest crops
in the field. That was known to the state welfare board and they
tolerated it, because they thought that was a good way to motivate
people to go work for cheap prices. It was put in the minutes of the
state.
So we decided with that knowledge, we thought that the decision of the department to not cover unborn children was viewed by the department as unpopular because it was predominately black families that needed that help. That was the basis for our constitutional challenge to the decision of the department not to cover unborn children at the constitutional level.
Who was the person at Chapel Hill you spoke with, do you remember?
I don't remember his name.
This would have been mid-70s?
This would have been about 1976, probably.
So what was the ultimate outcome of the Taylor v. Hill
and Alexander v. Hill litigation?
With Taylor, we had a new hearing in front of a three-judge court in
Charlotte. Judge McMillan was one of the judges. The district judge from
the Asheville division was the
I had done a deposition of the secretary of the state department and asked him why, with North Carolina having the second highest infant mortality rate in the country and no free health clinics available throughout the state, would the state choose not to accept the federal money and cover these unborn children. His answer was something to the effect of, "My wife didn't need any more money after she was married than before she was married." That was his answer to that question. We argued to this three-judge court that that was an irrational basis for making a policy decision that adversely affected thousands of people's lives in the state.
Unfortunately, the two judges other than Judge McMillan voted to deny our claim and Judge McMillan dissented with a very strong opinion. We appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of the United States and the court chose not to hear the appeal, as they have their power to decide which cases they will consider important enough to hear. They accept about one of a hundred and ours was one of the ninety-nine they chose not to hear. By 1977, I think that that case had been declined for review by the Supreme Court. Two more years later, our lobbyist in the General Assembly, who was Leslie Winner, who's now the general counsel for UNC, I think by it was probably 1981, she was able to convince a couple of key legislators that it was irrational and damaging to not cover the unborn children. So through legislative action, we got the state to opt in to cover the unborn children.
As for Alexander v. Hill, the processing case, the
state departments at the county level basically just seemed to not want
to have enough competent staff to make the decisions in a timely manner.
So similar to what happened in Harris and Kannon v. HUD, about every two
years, we would keep monitoring their progress and find that they were
not complying. We filed a motion for contempt of court in front of Judge
McMillan and he decided that after three years of not coming into
compliance, and in some counties, like Mecklenburg particularly was
doing worse than better in many instances, he got mad enough to enter a
new order that said for every single application that was pending over
the deadline without good cause that was documented in the file, the
county would have to pay a fine to the applicant in the amount of fifty
dollars per week for every week the application was overdue without good
cause.
The state appealed that decision the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and that appeal was heard in Durham, which is an unusual place for the Fourth Circuit. It usually doesn't sit in any place other than Richmond, but they had a panel in Durham. They heard the state's arguments there and completely dismissed them and upheld Judge McMillan three to zero. The state then petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to review that decision and we wrote a brief in opposition to that petition. The Supremes declined to review the Fourth Circuit's decision that upheld Judge McMillan. I think that decision was made in 1979. So we had a permanent injunction that required all the decisions to be made within the federal time guide.
By then, the federal rule had been amended from thirty days to forty-five
days, so they had fifteen more days to make the decision than when we
started in 1974 and most of the counties still were not doing it. Then
we would have a series of other motions in front of the court. There
were so many creative ways that the state and some of the counties
figured to
So we had to go back in and get supplemental orders to prohibit their denying people arbitrarily to avoid having the deadline come and being overdue and having to pay the fines. This went on for twenty-five years. After about the first seven years, I couldn't stand it anymore. I got out of it shortly after the Fourth Circuit decision. I was pretty much totally into housing work and doing this work with these neighborhood organizations and things like that, and doing legislative work.
I could not do the day-to-day guerrilla warfare, but I do remember this one thing. There was one county in the state that finally got its act together and consistently accepted people on the same day that they came to apply, which was another part of the order. They would process all the applications within the forty-five-day time limit. They wanted to be exempt from the fifty-dollar per week fines, because they just said, "Well, we're the only county that's doing well." This was Davie County.
So the attorney general made a motion before the court to exempt Davie
County from the class action that covered all a hundred counties for the
purposes of the fine. We had sort of Federal
Supplement, he recited "The Ballad of Davie
County" that we had offered and printed it in the
court's opinion, but granted the state's motion
and let them out. So we were able to get a little bit of humor in this
otherwise terrible, seemingly endless struggle. It was a very difficult
time.
You don't remember any of the lyrics of the ballad, do you?
Sure I do.
Do you care to put those down for history?
Well, I'll be glad to. I've got the printed opinion. I'll be glad to give it to you if you want to add that to the transcript [see copy enclosed with transcript].
Sure, yeah, that'd be great.
You're, of course, describing considerable hostility to the notion of welfare rights across the time you're working with this issue. Thinking broadly about the years you worked with this issue and beyond, how would you describe the level of popular and political support for the idea of welfare rights and any changes in that level of support?
Well, within North Carolina, there was just virtually never any visible support for welfare recipients in any way that I ever saw. I mean, welfare was just generally unpopular and poor people were generally unpopular. I never quite realized the level of that hostility until I became an amateur lobbyist and went to the General Assembly to try to change all of those common law rules and negative rules about tenants that I was describing for you.
Tell me a little bit about that experience lobbying on behalf of low-income tenants.
Well, I still remember my first meeting with a very progressive Democratic representative in Mecklenburg County who had been one of the leaders in the women's political caucus and was a political science professor out at UNC-Charlotte. I told her about these rules, about the common law rule that entitled tenants to no repairs and the quick procedure for evicting people and how impossible it was to ever have a new trial and get it in front of a judge and so forth. I told her we wanted to try to get a bill that would give some minimum protections for tenants' rights and she said, "They won't vote for that." I said, "What do you mean?" She says, "Most of the people in the General Assembly are landlords and they're not going to tell you why they're going to vote against it, but that's the reason. You have no chance. You shouldn't even bother." That was 1975.
Who was that?
That was Louise Brennan. Well, given how bad things were in the courts
and we had tried three different times to get the court of appeals to
change the caveat emptor rule, that is amend the
common law and adopt the modern day doctrine of the implied covenant of
habitability or implied warranty of habitability, as they tend to call
it, which every other appellate court in the country had accepted in the
1970s, but North Carolina rejected it three times. After the third time,
one of the judges said, "And by the way, this is a matter for
the legislature." So finally we decided even though it might be
difficult to deal with the legislature, we weren't getting
anywhere with the courts. So, in 1975, we tried to get a bill that would
create this implied warranty of habitability and outlaw retaliatory
evictions. The bill's sponsor for us in the House was Wade
Smith, a lawyer from Raleigh. Wade Smith was a very
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 3]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 4]
What do you think inspired Wade Smith to take up such an unpopular issue?
He was just a good person and the rules were so grossly unfair that I think it just—he found it unconscionable that tenants could be required to pay the rent and have completely unsafe and unhealthy dwellings and not be able to do anything about it, and the one attempt people could make to do something about it, through the city inspectors, could be completely undercut by retaliatory evictions. So he was willing to try that and we came very close in 1975. I think we got it passed on the first reading and then it was defeated in the second reading, but it was very close.
The following year, I came back again and I decided I was going to just work full-time on it for the whole session, if it took four months. I just moved to Raleigh and I worked on it for four days a week. Wade Smith had dropped out of the legislature and this time we convinced Henry Frye to be the sponsor. Now he was one of only three African-Americans in the House out of a hundred and twenty, but the good thing about Henry was that he was smart and he was kind and he was fairly well-respected and he had been appointed chairman of the judiciary committee by Carl Stewart, the Speaker of the House. I think he realized that it was very difficult. He knew that two-thirds of the people in the legislature were probably landlords, but he realized that this was probably the single most important thing for African-American families in the state that he could deal with.
At that time, there were two other really, really hot issues going on in
the General Assembly. One was the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] and
people were extremely excited about that. All the women's
groups were working hard for it and many of those groups wanted to get
the Landlord-Tenant Bill passed, because most of the tenants that were
low-income were
Henry Frye and the two other black legislators finally realized that they and some of their allies could make the difference on whether or not liquor-by-the-drink would pass, because they'd have to have about ten or twelve urban votes to pass liquor-by-the-drink. Because the rural legislators were generally very much opposed to it and they were also opposed to the landlord-tenant bill. So the margin of difference for getting the landlord-tenant bill and liquor-by-the-drink was all in the metropolitan areas. So I think Henry and some of his allies finally figured out that they could find a way to support both if people would agree to support both. I think that was the key to getting the bill passed that created the implied warranty of habitability for the first time in 1977.
We got it passed on the Senate side by another just incredible quirk of
circumstances. The lieutenant governor was Jimmy Green and he hated
these tenants' rights bills. He had been the one that stopped
it in the House side in 1975 and now he was lieutenant governor and he
had Henry Frye's bill bottled up in a committee on the Senate
side. But I found a lobbyist for the AARP [American Association of
Retired Persons], who was this little old, retired professor from Wake
Forest who was seventy-eight years old. I explained to her how important
this
That was some skillful maneuvering on her part.
It was brilliant on her part.
Do you remember her name?
I think it was Dr. Elizabeth Welch, I think was her name.
Was Green himself a landlord?
I think so, yeah. Tobacco warehouses was his main business, but I think
he was a landlord too. So that passed in 1979. Then in 1977, we came
back and got a new bill to outlaw retaliatory evictions and the key to
that again was the Charlotte city council, because people like Harvey
Gantt and Betty Chafin knew that their housing inspection program was
completely thwarted by the imminent threat of retaliatory evictions,
which created such a climate of fear that most of the tenants
wouldn't let the inspectors into their houses. So they
convinced Parks Helms, who was one of the legislators from Mecklenburg
County, to sponsor the Retaliatory Eviction Defense Bill in 1979. He did
a masterful job getting that passed. What that did is it disallowed
evictions in response to tenants asking the landlords for repairs,
tenants having inspections done by the city or health department, the
city doing an inspection on its
That same year, Louise Brennan, that same legislator I was telling you
about, was on Henry Frye's committee. No, this was 1977. She
was on his judiciary committee and we had gotten Judge McMillan to
declare the rule about all the procedural rules that kept tenants from
doing appeals were unconstitutional: the requirement that they pay three
months' rent in advance, the rule that if they did appeal and
they lost, they'd have to pay the landlord double the amount
that he claimed, I didn't tell you about that before, and
then the third rule was that there was no grace period to not be evicted
during the ten-day period you had to appeal after you lost in small
claims court. Those three rules together were declared unconstitutional
by Judge McMillan in 1976 in Usher v. Waters Insurance and
Realty Company, which is on that list I gave you.
Then the Landlords' Association came back the next year in the
General Assembly and tried to undo that decision by sponsoring a bill
that would give the magistrates complete discretion to set any amount of
bond they wanted. So it could be more than three months' rent
if they wanted. That was assigned to Henry Frye's committee
and Louise Brennan created a subcommittee and basically invited me to
rewrite the bill. I sat down with the Realtors' Association
and we worked out a whole new bill that enabled tenants to stay in
possession by paying only the next week's rent in advance one
at a time, or if it's a monthly rent, one month at a time.
That became the law. So by 1979, all of those fundamental problems for
tenants that
How did the passage of that legislation affect the type of clients you saw on a daily basis here at the Legal Aid office?
Well, it mainly meant that we had so many new rights to protect people that it became somewhat known in the community that we could actually do something. Instead of just telling people they were out of luck and that they were going to lose and how quickly they were going to lose and how badly they were going to lose, we suddenly had all kinds of rights. We had the ability to stop retaliatory evictions, the ability to get repairs done, we had counter-claims to offset unpaid rent when people had lived in substandard conditions for long periods of time, and we were winning virtually every case, at least in district court. That success started to become known by people in the social services community, so we got more clients referred to us, because we had something useful to provide.
Part of what we did eventually was develop pro se
pleading forms that people could take and fill out themselves and go to
court on their own. We developed videos, which simulated trials, so
people could watch that and learn how to present their own case.
We've had plenty of tenants that used that and stopped their
evictions in court, won judgments against their landlord. Then sort of
the next level of what we did was start training volunteer lawyers to
help tenants exercise these rights, too. So we've had a whole
series of continuing legal education programs that we offer for private
lawyers to learn about tenants' rights and remedies. Now we
have a pretty good set of volunteer lawyers that help people.
Just three months ago, I gave a case to this lawyer who was a first-year
lawyer, this is the first trial she had ever had. In that case, she
stopped the eviction, she won a counter-claim
Were there new issues that you started dealing with more in the 1980s that you had not dealt with in the 1970s, even as you continued the tenants' rights work?
Well, there were different things that came up at different times. A lot of what happened in the 1980s was trying to expand some of the victories that we had achieved in litigation or in a legislative way to other parts of the state. When we had these new laws for tenants, in Mecklenburg County, it only took us maybe two to three years to educate the magistrates and the judges to be able to get them to actually follow the new law. While that was happening here, nothing was happening in Gaston County twenty-five miles away and nothing was happening in Cabarrus County. Down in the eastern part of the state, it was even more primitive than the counties contiguous to Mecklenburg. So a great deal of what we did in the 1980s and in the 1990s, frankly, was hiring and training lawyers to cover these other parts of the state outside of the three main metropolitan areas, and trying to get those lawyers to be able to educate judges and get clients with enough confidence to try to stand up for their rights. This was not just in housing and in welfare. It was also in the context of employment.
The changes in consumer law were equally as dramatic as in housing and welfare. In 1974, the consumer law was completely oriented towards the creditors. I still recall that furniture companies would create security agreements that would take a security interest in every single thing in a consumer's house. So they would go to the furniture company and they would try to buy a couch and the couch would cost five hundred dollars, or a dining room set. The security interest as collateral for the purchase in that loan would say that they were giving a security interest in the dishes, the other furniture, the TV, the pictures in their house, and they would waive their right to their constitutional exemption from judgments that would take all of their personal possessions. Whether that was lawful or not was tested in the North Carolina Supreme Court in a case that two of our lawyers handled. The Supreme Court said that it was okay for the consumer to waive her constitutional right to keep a minimum amount of her own personal property in one of these security agreements, and that security agreement enabled that creditor to take her picture of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and they took it out of her house to sell to satisfy their claim. It was that extreme.
This was the mid-70s?
This was in the middle 70s. Our response to that Supreme Court was to send two cracker-jack legal services lawyers to Raleigh to create new legislation for exemptions from judgments. It created the first statute that defined how people could make claims for their exemptions and they would have twenty days to make a claim for exempting their basic household goods and a certain amount of other personal property from execution of judgments. Until that time, people, again it was similar to the landlord-tenant law, they could be just totally wiped out by creditors. So I think we got that, that legislation was passed in 1979 also, to protect creditors from total, total wipeout through judgments in security interests.
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 4]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 5]
You're describing a lot of victories that you had in the mid- to late 70s. Then in the late 80s, you became involved in more housing advocacy work. You were one of the founding board members, am I right, of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership?
That's right, yeah.
What led you to become involved in that organization and how did you see at that point the various housing needs of Charlotte changing?
Well, I think the reason I became involved in it was because it was going to be the politically acceptable vehicle to do more housing work than the Housing Authority of the City of Charlotte could be. I need to explain that. The Housing Authority of the City of Charlotte was just sort of an unpopular political entity, for lack of a better description. It had a huge inventory of housing that was beginning to deteriorate. It had leadership that was not very skillful and was not able to get any good support from the city council. Political support for low-income housing in the Congress was beginning to wane. The budget for HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] to support the ongoing operation of low-income housing was beginning to decline. It didn't matter which administration was there. HUD was pretty much the whipping boy of every administration. It was getting the worst treatment in all the budget fights and what that meant on the local level is that as the older public housing inventory began to deteriorate, nobody wanted to do anything about it.
The people on the city council were not willing to try to put a lot of
local money into public housing and so I think a decision was made
politically, and I don't know exactly how it was, but to
create a new vehicle that would have some business components in it and
some other leadership component, and that would try to leverage private
money to put into housing
The political theory behind it was get some high-level executives from
the banks, from Duke Power, from Piedmont Natural Gas, and a couple of
ministers, and you'll have kind of a political
Noah's Ark and they will have the credibility to borrow
money, do partnerships with private developers, and draw down whatever
kinds of federal money was available at that time. Well, about the only
federal money that was available after we got operating was the federal
low-income housing tax credit deals that were administered through the
state department that got the allocation of federal tax credits. But my
thought was if we had a vehicle for new housing that would be aimed
mostly at first-time home buyers and then to some extent, working-class
tenants, that that still was very helpful, because it was still filling
a niche in the market that existed, that was pretty much vacant between
the subsidized housing at the very bottom and the market rate
middle-class rental housing was still completely out of reach for most
very low-income tenants. People that were making the minimum wage, were
living on disability, couldn't pay market-rate rent at that
time, because market-rate rents were five hundred and fifty to six
hundred dollars for a three-bedroom apartment. Most people that were our
clients had ability to pay at about two hundred and fifty dollars, and
so there was this gap of two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars
between what the market provided for decent housing and the ability of
even the working-class lowest tenants could pay. So our theory was
create a vehicle that can somewhat provide some housing in that gap
using a variety of
Then the other aspect of this was it could become the development arm for attacking deteriorated neighborhoods that the Housing Authority wouldn't be able to do, wouldn't have the credibility to do. So one of the first projects we took on was the neighborhood adjacent to the Fairview Homes public housing development, this neighborhood that was considered to be probably the biggest drug infestation in the city of Charlotte. It was located between Interstate 77 and Fairview Homes. It was a relatively small, but intensely-populated, low-income, mostly rental property neighborhood.
Is this Genesis Park?
It became Genesis Park. What we did there essentially was go in and buy
up the entire neighborhood and convert fourplexes or duplexes into
single-family homes that would have four bedrooms and two bathrooms,
instead of having two two-bedroom apartments next to each other. We tore
down the worst properties and evicted the drug dealers and essentially
remade a neighborhood that had been the biggest criminal thorn in the
side of the city into a very upbeat, home ownership neighborhood where
people could buy a new home with two thousand square feet for
forty-eight thousand dollars. It was a huge bargain. Of course, it had
to be a huge bargain to attract people. The only people that really were
willing to do that were people who were tired of renting and not having
any value for their monthly housing payment, no investment. Once you had
a few pioneers that would do that and the city assigned community
policing to this neighborhood, it was sort of the advent of that program
at the same
The [Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing] Partnership was founded in '88, '89?
Yeah, it started in 1988, but I don't think we hired Pat Garrett until 1989. She was the first director and the only director we've had.
And the Genesis Park project was in the mid-90s that that was going on, is that correct?
I think it started in the early 90s. It was one of the first things. The other neighborhood we did was ironically, the old Greenville urban renewal neighborhood that had been pretty much left dormant. Some of that land was vacant for twenty years after the urban renewal occurred, but we were able to get that property from the city for free and just built new houses with Bank of America Community Development Corporation, was the partner with that. They built beautiful houses, eighteen hundred square feet, for high forties or low fifties, a good bargain, half a mile from downtown.
In 1999, when the Charlotte Observer did their series
on the housing situation in the city, you at that time warned that
Charlotte was becoming a "tale of two cities." What
did you mean by that?
Well, Charlotte had become one of these so-called Sun Belt success cities
in the sense of suburban development, not totally suburban, but also in
sort of a renaissance of the inner city too, with some of the high-end
developments that were coming into near downtown or in downtown in
Fourth Ward and in Third Ward, the reinvestment in Dilworth. You had
great expansion of the three major banks and very successful attraction
of other business. I think that Charlotte was perceived sort of on a
national scale as being a very attractive place for
So what was going on was that we had a strata of people at the bottom, who were the disabled people or the people that were making the minimum wage, who really could not afford to live here, but they were still here. What has happened is that a lot of those people now are the hidden homeless people. What they have done, since they can't afford to rent their own house for six hundred dollars a month, is they join households. Sometimes you have one or two and even three families living in the same houses. You don't have families with children living out on the streets like you do in Calcutta. Instead, they don't live on the street, they live in other people's houses unknown to the host family's landlord, which creates a precarious situation.
You mentioned the declining number of public housing units, or the federal government not building new units. You've worked with some folks who used to live in Piedmont Courts, is that right, or the Belmont neighborhood, or maybe both?
Well, Piedmont Courts is in Belmont. That's another one of
these developments that, that is one of the two original public housing
developments. I think it was built about 1938. It was built, ironically,
for white people. It was officially segregated when it was originally
built. The Housing Authority had tried to do some renovations on that
property in the 1980s, I think, to keep it from falling apart, but
twenty years later, even those renovations had
What's been your sense of what's happened to the people displaced by the demolition of Piedmont Courts?
Well, the real short answer is I don't know what's
happened with them. I know that they have been offered other places and
they've in fact relocated. Most of them, I believe, have
gotten these portable Section 8 vouchers that have allowed them to rent
private dwellings. I think that probably most of them feel like
that's better than what they had before, because Piedmont
Courts had become deteriorated and there were still some serious crime
problems. Unfortunately, a lot of people just thought any other place
would be better than having to live there, and for that reason, they
haven't come to our office and complained. But somewhat to
the credit of the Housing Authority, I think that out of the criticism
that they receive from their handling of the first Hope VI project in
Earle Village that was somewhat featured in that article in the paper,
they have become a whole lot more sensitive to developing more feasible
and likeable alternatives for the relocatees. I think some of them also
did transfer to other public housing vacancies and I think they have
promised to let people come back to the new
[END OF DISC 1, TRACK 5]
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 6]
Just by way of summing up then, how would just describe the progress Charlotte has made in the time you've worked here and lived here, in terms of closing the gap between rich and poor?
Well, I think that the severity of the conditions poor people lived in from the early 1970s and before, I think has certainly been ameliorated. I think that the quality of the housing now is so much better as a result of state law changes and also some amendments to the housing code, including the requirement that there actually be heating equipment in the houses. I think that the city inspection process has worked well. I think the landlord community has largely accepted the new responsibilities. What has not happened is there is any real improvement in the economic buying power of the lower-income community. The minimum wage has remained so low and the welfare payment level is so low and the disability compensations are so low, that the people at the lowest strata of the community can barely afford to live here. If they can get more income from any sources, they can do much better. I mean, I think there is a whole lot available in terms of amenities in housing and good places to live and work. This is not unique to Charlotte. It's true all over the state and all over the country. I think the economic trends show that. There's not much you can do tinkering with a local government and a local economy that will address that. That's sort of the new reality.
If it can't be done on the local level, what do you think ultimately is going address this wage and income gap you're describing?
I can't quite get a vision of that. I think it's
going to be a crisis that will have to get to a certain proportion where
people that have a political interest in fixing it will speak on behalf
of the lowest-income strata. That is, enough employers will start to
say, "We've got to
What role do you see race playing in the crises that you're describing here?
Well, I think that in the short run, it's the general
perception that all poor people are people of color and that is somewhat
of a hindrance, I think, to conservative-dominated legislatures at the
state and federal level to want to address them. It's very
unclear what impact this national crisis over immigrants and
particularly Latinos will have on this. My thought is that how that is
resolved will also impact the whole issue of minimum wages, health care
provision, and funding of schools in a way that we've never
seen before. It's extremely important that Mecklenburg County
is now a predominately non-white school system. I'd say that
it's very much up for grabs as to whether or not the
upper-middle-class leadership in this community is going to continue to
support and provide resources for the school system or abandon the
school system, like what has happened in most of the metropolitan
communities in
So in other words, we can sort of look to the schools to see where the rest of the city's health is?
I think that's it a great barometer. Right now, the Chamber of Commerce in Charlotte is saying, "We need to go ahead and support the schools and maintain them, because companies, leaders that are considering Charlotte, want to know about whether the public school system is positive or not." As long as they still ask that and the Chamber of Commerce wants to attract more business to the community, then they see that as something that has to be addressed. But if it ever gets to the point where the whispering campaign says, "You can forget the public schools. Everybody of substance is going to go to private schools and it doesn't matter," then we will have completely institutionalized class strata in every way. I think because of what Judge McMillan did with the school system and the Supreme Court upholding it, we had a truly integrated school system where the upper-middle-class and the lower-class people had a common stake to make a school system work. That was probably the overarching point of contact for people of different races and classes here for thirty years. If that source of contact and common interest is lost, I think we will have an almost irreversible disconnect between the poor and the wealthy in this community.
Well, I know that's an issue we could probably spend another hour at least talking about, but you've already been very generous with your time today. Was there anything that you had wanted to bring up that I haven't asked you?
I don't think so. I think we've covered all the main points pretty well.
Well, thanks so much for sharing your time with us.
Glad to do it.
END OF INTERVIEW