Gantt, Harvey

Source:

 African American National Biography

Gantt, Harvey

(14 Jan. 1943– ),

architect, politician, and community leader, was born Harvey Bernard Gantt in Charleston, South Carolina, the first of five children of Wilhelmenia Gordon and Christopher C. Gantt. His father was a skilled mechanic at the Charleston Naval Shipyard and an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he encouraged his son to speak out against the segregated society in which they lived. Gantt graduated in 1960 from Burke High School, where he was salutatorian of his class and captain of the football team. Only a month before graduation, he helped twenty-two other student leaders from the all-black school stage a sit-in demonstration at the S. H. Kress lunch counter. In Gantt's later assessment, the action “started a change in the minds of the whole [city]” and “ultimately ended up in a movement that spread throughout all of Charleston” (Haessly, 47).

Gantt attended Iowa State University with a stipend from the state of South Carolina, which refused to admit him to all-white Clemson College (later Clemson University), the only school in the state with an architecture program. When Clemson failed to act on his second application for admission, Gantt filed suit in federal court on 7 July 1962.

In spite of South Carolina's sometimes violent response to demands for black civil rights, the state's political and business establishment vowed not to allow a repetition of the turbulence that characterized James Howard Meredith's entry to the University of Mississippi in September 1962. Clemson quietly acquiesced when a federal court ordered Gantt admitted. On 28 January 1963 Gantt enrolled at Clemson surrounded by elaborate security precautions, an estimated 160 reporters, and a small crowd of protesting students. For his part, Gantt's quiet and dignified response to the situation won praise from many vocal critics of integration, including his future nemesis, Jesse Helms, then a commentator at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina. Helms noted that Gantt “has done a great deal—probably more than he himself realizes—to establish respectful communications across sensitive barriers in human relations” (Ellis, 394).

Gantt married Lucinda (Cindy) Brawley, the second African American student to attend Clemson, in 1964 and received a bachelor's degree in Architecture with honors from the college the following year. He then joined the architectural firm of Odell and Associates in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the three years he spent there, he learned firsthand from the principal of the firm the significant influence architects could have—not just on designing buildings but on urban planning. Believing that he needed further education, Gantt entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a master's degree in city planning in 1970. He moved back to North Carolina, and for a year he directed physical planning for Soul City, a small town in Warren County that Floyd Bixler McKissick, a civil rights leader, sought to develop as a model biracial community.

Gantt returned to Charlotte in 1971 and opened his own architectural practice with Jeffrey Huberman, who had likewise started his professional career with the Odell firm. He also became associated with Fred Alexander, the first African American member of the Charlotte city council in the twentieth century. When Alexander won election to the North Carolina State Senate and vacated his council seat in 1974, Gantt was appointed to fill the remaining year in his mentor's term. He won reelection on his own in 1975 and 1977, and he missed winning the Democratic Party primary contest for mayor in 1979 by only twelve hundred votes out of nearly fifty-one thousand cast. Two years later, he led all at-large candidates for city council and became mayor pro tem. Gantt ran for mayor again in 1983; and although he faced an electorate that was less than one-fourth black, became Charlotte's first African American mayor. In 1985 he was easily reelected with 61 percent of the total vote.

Journalist Margaret Edds noted that Gantt's “lexicon was that of an urban planner, not a civil rights activist” (207). In a city that was in one of its recurrent growth cycles, he stressed the need for revitalizing the center city and balancing growth in the suburbs. Such issues as the site of a new coliseum, public transportation, disputes over where beltways should be located to move traffic most effectively, and impact fees for developers and payroll taxes for commuters consumed much of Gantt's attention during his two terms. Many of these issues affected African Americans, of course, and Gantt did work for increased black involvement in the awarding of city contracts.

Although his reelection in 1987 seemed certain, Gantt and his supporters, including the city's business and political elite, underestimated his opponent and the negative feelings about growth, especially relating to traffic congestion, that had arisen since his first win. Republican voter registration, resulting in large part from an influx of newcomers more accustomed than natives to voting for Republicans in local races, had increased by 6 percent during 1983; and the Gantt organization failed to turn out the black vote as vigorously as it had in previous campaigns. Gantt's maverick rival, Sue Myrick, adopted a more aggressive style of campaigning than had traditionally been the custom in relatively reserved Charlotte, and she went on to become the city's first woman mayor. Still, the election was very close, and a shift of only five hundred votes would have resulted in Gantt's winning a third term.

In 1990 Gantt took on the formidable Helms, one of the Republican right's major icons, who was trying for his fourth term in the U.S. Senate. Gantt led the field against three white candidates in the Democratic Party primary and won the nomination in a runoff. As the incumbent, Helms enjoyed a natural advantage, and Gantt was little known outside his home county. Helms portrayed Gantt as a typical “tax and spend liberal” (Ellis, 395), but Gantt fought back by stressing education, environmental issues, and Helms's indifference to the real needs of the state's citizens. As the election neared, Gantt led in some polls, and his advisors had begun to think that race would not be a factor. With less than two weeks remaining, however, the Helms campaign began broadcasting television ads pointedly attacking Gantt's support for affirmative action and blatantly playing on racial fears. In the end, Helms won with 52 percent of the vote to Gantt's 48 percent. Six years later the two men faced each other again, and Helms won by a seven percent margin.

In the years after his second loss to Helms, Gantt concentrated on practicing architecture; and the Gantt Huberman firm grew to include more than forty architects and interior designers. Gantt was recognized as a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1987 and received honorary degrees from his alma mater and several other universities. He was a guest lecturer at numerous institutions, including Yale, Cornell, and Hampton, and he served as a member of the accreditation committees at the schools of architecture at Howard University and Southern University and as a member of the visiting committee of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design for 2006–2008. Showing continued commitment to his hometown, in 2005 he cochaired a task force to study the management and governance structure of Charlotte public schools.

Gantt's success as a politician and the respect he enjoyed in Charlotte had roots in his ability to build consensus. According to his partner, Huberman, Gantt “has always worked very hard to lead others with different ideas into a unified point of view or perspective” (Ellis, 396).

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