Your route through Biddleville crosses one of Charlotte's oldest and most historically significant African-American neighborhoods, which grew up around Johnson C. Smith University in the years following the Civil War. The neighborhood took its name from Biddle Memorial Institute, the predecessor to JCSU, and developed as the residential and commercial community that served the university's students, faculty, and staff — and more broadly as a center of Black civic and cultural life in west Charlotte. During the long decades of segregation, Biddleville and the surrounding west Charlotte neighborhoods were among the few places where Black Charlotteans could build wealth, run businesses, worship, and organize community life with some degree of autonomy.
The neighborhood produced ministers, educators, doctors, lawyers, and political leaders who shaped Charlotte across the twentieth century. Like many historic African-American urban neighborhoods, Biddleville has faced decades of disinvestment, urban renewal clearance, and highway construction that fragmented its fabric. Community organizations and preservationists have been working in recent years to document its history and stabilize what remains.
The streets around the JCSU campus still hold the traces of that community.