Rose Leary Love

Born near the turn of the twentieth century, Rose Leary Love lived most of her life in Brooklyn, an African-American neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina. A family heritage of fighting for human rights and dignity prepared her well for the social changes that would occur in neighborhood, and in her lifetime.

“Ministers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, railroad men, teachers, artisans, servants, and common laborers all lived together in one community,” Love reminisces, even as she looks into the future and predicts, “The Brooklyn that we loved will soon be no more.”

Like some other urban communities that were home to minorities, the neighborhood fell into decline. City officials decreed that the area be razed.

The demolition of Brooklyn during the urban renewal movement soon after the author’s death heightens the poignancy of this memoir.

“Men and machines have erased the old churches, the ancient trees, the homes (whether loved or unloved), the multihued flowers, even many boundary lines,” Love writes. “But as I look at this open land which will one day be rebuilt with new buildings, laced with new roads, and peopled with new faces, I remember honeysuckle vines that climbed over fences and purple lilacs in an old-fashioned flower garden…”