Jan. 28, 1963
Harvey Gantt became the first Black student at Clemson University in South Carolina, the last state to hold out against court-ordered desegregation.
After graduating second in his class from Burke High School in Charleston in 1960, he studied architecture at Iowa State University and began to fight a legal battle to attend Clemson, which he won. Nine months later, Lucinda Brawley became the first Black woman to attend. A year later, they married.
Gantt graduated with honors in 1965, receiving a bachelor’s degree in architecture and later a master’s in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He moved to Charlotte and co-founded an architectural firm with Jeff Huberman. Their firm developed some of the city’s most iconic landmarks, including the Johnson C. Smith University Science Center. He also broke down barriers, becoming the city’s first Black mayor in 1983. Three years later, he became a fellow in the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor given to an architect.
Gantt continued to be active in civil rights, collaborating with activist Floyd B. McKissick to design Soul City, an experimental interracial community. In 1990, he ran against U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and was leading in the polls against the politician who had backed racial segregation, filibustered against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and once called the University of North Carolina the “University of Negroes and Communists.”
“Every race I’ve been in,” Gantt said, “I calculated race into the equation. If you’re in America, you calculate it into the equation. It is a factor. I never make it an issue. I don’t run the campaign wearing it on my sleeve, but I don’t run away from it either.”
Before the vote, Helms aired a commercial with a pair of white hands with the voiceover declaring, “You wanted this job, but because of a law they had to give it to a minority.”
He won with 52.5 percent of the vote.
Today, the African-American Center for Arts+Culture in Charlotte bears the name of Gantt, who continues to urge young people to “never give up on their dreams and vision to become somebody. We all possess the potential to become successful in life, and I challenge every student to settle for nothing less.”
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