(Top) Picketing workers outside of the Cigar Factory building, ca. 1945, Charleston, South Carolina, courtesy of Georgia State University, Southern Labor Archives. (Bottom) Flyer for the cigar factory workers' union meeting at Morris Street Baptist Church, 25 Morris Street, circa 1945, courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society.

Charleston in the 1940s remained a city of segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, and public and private facilities, forcing the Black population to remain mostly north of Calhoun Street in their established enclaves. Working class African American families were displaced from former tenements south of Broad Street, such as those on St. Michael’s Alley, Elliott Street, Tradd Street and East Bay Street, as northern investors and local real estate professionals continued to restore and convert the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures into single family dwellings. As a result, dozens of Black families migrated to northern neighborhoods, such as the East Side, Radcliffeborough, Cannonborough and Elliotborough and ultimately contributed to the midcentury cultural vibrancy of the business district.

After World War II, Morris Street grew as a commercial and sociopolitical epicenter for Black citizens of diverse economic backgrounds with political activism intensifying. In October 1944, the Local 15, a newly formed worker’s union at Charleston’s American Tobacco Company Cigar Factory, held their first meeting in the Morris Street Baptist Church. Those first meetings set the stage for the Cigar Factory Strike of 1945-1946. On October 23, 1945, over 1,000 employees, predominantly Black women, walked out of the American Tobacco company’s plant to protest the factory’s low wages and poor working conditions. Two weeks later, another meeting was held at the Morris Street Baptist Church for “all citizens interested in bringing the strike to a successful conclusion.” The five-month strike concluded with the factory manager and the union stewards brokering a deal that resulted in a modest pay increase and federal pressure for the American Tobacco Company to further negotiate working conditions.

The Local 15 and strike leaders chose to organize at the Morris Street Baptist Church, evidence of the continued importance of Black churches as political and civil rights organizing spaces. In fact, while some cigar factory laborers resided on and around Morris Street, most of the Local 15’s board members and the strike’s documented leaders were living in the East Side neighborhood. Seven residents of Morris Street worked for the American Tobacco Company: four women who worked as inspectors and cigar makers, two men who packaged the cigars, and one man who prepared the tobacco. Several other cigar factory workers also resided on nearby Felix, Coming, and Cannon Streets, though most lived in the East Side neighborhood and elsewhere. The strike leader’s choice of the Morris Street Baptist Church as an organizing location seems to reflect that Morris Street and its surrounding neighborhoods remained a place in Charleston where African Americans felt a sense of safety, belonging, and ownership.

Ebony Beauty School, photograph by Walter Boags, 87 Coming Street, 1958, courtesy of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.

In 1953, William Ackerman, a prominent Jewish lawyer in Charleston, purchased 120 acres of undeveloped land west of the Ashley River, developing one of the earliest suburbs in the region. Much of Charleston’s Jewish community migrated to newly developed suburban neighborhoods. By 1958, many of the nearly twenty Jewish families that relocated were former Cannonborough and Radcliffborough residents. The swift exit of these white families from one of Charleston’s urban business districts coincides with national trends of heightened racial tensions and segregation as well as a broad pattern of white families leaving urban space for intensely and sometimes violently segregated suburbs. Morris Street, once dotted with Jewish-owned groceries and small stores, was void of all but one Jewish business by 1979: Greenberg’s Laundry and Grocery.

Throughout the 1950s, former immigrant-operated stores and properties were subsumed by essential midcentury Black-owned businesses, such as Dave's Paint and Body Shop at 51 Morris Street. Long-standing corner stores experienced significant turnover: 41 Morris Street, which was formerly a German grocery, became McClary’s Beauty Shop by 1958, and a formerly Greek-owned corner store at 60 Morris Street gave way to the midcentury Brooks Motel constructed in 1963. The Brooks Motel was owned and operated by Benjamin and Albert Brooks, who also owned the Brooks Restaurant at 56-58 Morris Street and several other establishments along the corridor.