Changing Charlotte

Chapter 5 focuses on Chambers's impact on his new hometown, Charlotte. Chambers worked easily and well with the city's two leading civil rights figures, state NAACP director Kelly Alexander, Sr., and Rev. Dr. Reginald Hawkins, who was both younger and more convinced of the usefulness of protest and direct confrontation. In a major step, Chambers renewed litigation to desegregate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school system. He meanwhile led a successful effort to force desegregation of a popular high school all-star football game held annually in Charlotte. Although Chambers and Charlotte's handful of additional black attorneys were mostly shunned by the city's white lawyers, U.S. District Judge J. Braxton Craven Jr., impressed by Chambers's talent, appointed Chambers to the part-time position of U.S. Commissioner. Press coverage brought Chambers increasingly into the public eye. In November of 1965, Chambers was again the target of racist violence when his home, and those of Alexander, Alexander's brother, and Hawkins, were attacked with dynamite. National media coverage of the bombings threatened the image of Charlotte crafted by white elites as a moderate, business-friendly city largely free of racial conflict.