Modernizing the Old Order: Elite Power and Postindustrial Growth in Charlotte, North Carolina

This paper examines Charlotte, North Carolina’s transformation from a regional railroad and textile center into the leading financial city of the Southeast. It argues that the transformation was not only the product of broader economic trends or coincidence, but also of a durable coalition of local elites who adapted older Southern racial and class hierarchies to support the consolidation of industry and ceaseless growth. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s as a critical turning point, the paper shows how managed desegregation, urban renewal, the expansion of various public projects such as the airport and university, and loose regulations came together to redirect Charlotte’s manufacturing capacity toward finance, real estate and service-sector development. Rather than displacing the antebellum courthouse elites, this transition reorganized elite power through the Chamber of Commerce and other public-private coalitions. Charlotte’s rise as a New South success story reveals how urban growth in the modern South was built upon inherited structures of inequality and elite control.