The wind rustled the traditional African kente cloth around Rev. Janet Garner-Mullins’ neck as she recalled memories of growing up in Charlotte’s historic Brooklyn community.

Garner-Mullins remembers clearly the disparities — many she still sees.

“I painfully remember that there were two Charlottes, like there are today,” she said, in front of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center at a press conference Friday.

“In the past years, we have grown accustomed to a regular barrage of blatant segregationist-style racism... and the flow of red blood from Black bodies in our streets.”

Garner-Mullins is chair of the Coalition for Truth and Reconciliation, a group of 48 local entities founded in 2019 pushing for racial equity and restorative justice.

“We recognize and acknowledge the work that local government is doing to address these issues,” coalition member Sevone Rhynes said. “But we also know that these efforts are insufficient, and that the problem not only remains, but it is worse.”

The coalition called on Mayor Vi Lyles last August to apologize for city government-driven urban renewal policies that displaced Black Charlotteans from neighborhoods like Brooklyn in the 1960s.

Members also pushed county government officials to research historical policies and practices that have resulted in continuous racial inequities in Mecklenburg County.

Last May, county commissioners Mark Jerrell and Laura Meier tasked Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library’s Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room with investigating how the county government has perpetuated racism in Mecklenburg County.

That report was finished in September and released this week by the coalition. It outlines the ways in which white Mecklenburg County residents ascended to power and enacted policies that harmed Black residents.

“To begin to heal and to move forward, we need to address real racial justice,” Garner-Mullins said. “We must be a community to begin to address the harms tracing back to the city’s origin.

“Racism has played a part an active role ... virtually all aspects of our lives and the city’s founding. To right the wrongs, we must do several things together.”

The 40-page document analyzes four major areas — politics, law enforcement and justice, education and infrastructure — where Black residents have historically been treated unjustly.

Starting with the earliest days of popularly-elected local government seats, the report says, “the determination of county officials to maintain a system that restricted the movement and rights of formerly enslaved people in a way reminiscent of slavery set the stage for the years to come.”

In 1869, the Mecklenburg board of commissioners had to fill a state assembly seat with the sudden death of Mecklenburg state senator, J.W. Osborne. They sent H.C. Jones — the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, according to the report.

Directly following Reconstruction, little changed in local government — white Charlotteans maintained power and many believed recently-freed Black people were unfit to “be involved with public affairs” or be elected, according to the report.

Cited in the report is an 1898 newspaper editorial, published in The Charlotte Daily Observer, attributed also to The Charlotte Observer, which became the name of the paper. In the Observer editorial, newspaper leaders wrote: “It is well known that the Observer is kindly disposed to the colored race. ... But he is not fit to rule and the party that is responsible for his being placed in power must be defeated. The negro, like fire and water, is a good servant but an awful master.”

Voting was made strategically impossible for Black residents, through voter registration removal, literacy tests and poll taxes. In more recent years, those tactics to keep Black voters from the polls have evolved into various forms of voter intimidation.

The county criminalized vagrancy, which most often gave police power to arrest Black residents. An Observer article quoted in the report showed that police frequently behaved aggressively toward Charlotte citizens in the late 1800s.

Imprisoned people, who were disproportionately Black, were harshly mistreated in Charlotte jails and were used to perform work that was previously done with slave labor. In fact, through a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, Mecklenburg County legally built roads and railroads using almost all-Black, unpaid labor.

The protests following the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in 2016, the report said, were a result of “decades of frustration” with Mecklenburg law enforcement.

“... the criminal justice system in Mecklenburg County has unequally targeted Black citizens from its conception,” the report reads, citing slave patrols as the inception of modern policing.

The report details the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools administration’s unwillingness to comply with desegregation practices. The Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg case exposed intentional segregation by the district, the report said, and some of Mecklenburg County’s white residents and politicians opposed the ruling.

Though Black students were permitted to ask for transfers to white schools through the Pearsall Plan, which achieved minimum compliance after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Mecklenburg County didn’t grant a single request.

After an influx of white newcomers to the district in the 80s and 90s, the Swann ruling was reversed, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district, which was once a beacon of hope during desegregation, is now one of the most segregated districts in North Carolina.

Black residents were also discriminated against in government services such as garbage collection, public health, welfare programs and recreational facilities. Citizens who were deemed “feeble-minded” — mostly women and Black people — were even sterilized, up to 10 or 12 a month, up until the ‘70s.

“Segregation, of course, existed in the distribution of all services in the county, which then negatively affected the health and wellbeing of the region’s Black citizenry,” the report reads.

The report concludes that the effects of these decisions reverberate today, evidenced in nearly every aspect of civil life.

While the county directed $2 million of its fiscal year 2022 budget toward racial equity programs, the coalition hopes that the county makes the money an annual allotment, instead of a one-time investment, and increases the amount.

They also asked for part of the city’s $250 million Racial Equity Initiative funding and to make racial equity a line item in its fiscal year 2023 budget.

“Two million allocated to respond to 154 years of harm is not adequate,” Garner-Mullins said.

Rabbi Judith Schindler said Friday that the coalition will meet in the coming days about ways to move forward, including considering asking the city of Charlotte to request its own report.

“For us, the journey to justice is three steps: truth telling and apology, restorative measures and systemic change,” she said.

The coalition also called on residents and other organizations to read the report and get involved with their movement.

“Silence serves no one. People and systems count on our silence to keep us exactly where they are, and where we are,” Garner-Mullins said. “Don’t let them, because it’s never too late to do the right thing.

“To combat systemic racism, we must pursue systemic equality.”