‘Don’t Lose Heart’ salutes the Smithville community

SMITHVILLE COMMUNITY COALITION

“Don’t Lose Heart,” a collaboration between poet Maurice Norman and the Smithville CommUNITY Coalition, combined spoken word, music and research by Davidson College students to tell the story of the historically Black Smithville neighborhood.

On Nov. 2, poet Maurice Norman captivated audiences at the Cain Center for the Arts in Cornelius.

As director of “Don’t Lose Heart,” Norman collaborated with the Smithville CommUNITY Coalition to tell the stories of Mecklenburg County’s largest intact historically Black community, which like many others across the country, face the squeeze of gentrification.

As a multi-part event, “Don’t Lose Heart” combined spoken word with research presented by students in the Africana Studies program at Davidson College, Norman’s alma mater.

With the help of Smithville CommUNITY Coalition executive director Lisa Mayhew-Jones, who is also a granddaughter of Smithville, Norman interviewed generations of community descendants. He delivered poems dedicated to each resident, accompanied by a quintet from the Charlotte Strings Collective.

Though Norman isn’t from Cornelius, he connected with the residents because his hometown of Mineral Springs faces similar challenges.

“These are elders processing aging in a place that’s disappearing,” he said.

Using motifs of nature and discussing generations of labor, Norman performed poems that encouraged the audience, many of them residents of Smithville, to keep their stories alive.

“Smithville isn’t a passive community,” he said.

In addition, Jay Ward, Charlotte’s poet laureate, performed a poem about displacement that Black and working-class people are facing in Charlotte. Mayhew-Jones, speaking toward the end of the event, said that she was called to be the director of the coalition, despite an urge to stop.

“This is where we belong,” she said. “We can’t let anybody push us out of here.”

Davidson students presented data from their senior capstone projects, which evaluated the rise in costs of staple groceries, property taxes, and supplemental Social Security income from 2011-23.

They discovered that from 2011-19, property taxes in historic Smithville increased 71%, and from 2019-23, they rose an additional 89%. From 2011-19, supplemental social security income did not increase at nearly the same rate: it increased 14%, and from 2019-23, it rose another 18.5%.

The students also used U.S. Census data to evaluate the median household income of Smithville at $42,000, which is less than half that of Cornelius at $107,000.

Smithville doesn’t have a historic district overlay status, but the coalition wants to build housing to fight displacement. Mayhew-Jones said the coalition hopes to secure funding from local and federal governments to accommodate seniors so they can age in place, such as covering down payments on affordable homes.

“I know if I lose my community, I lose my identity,” she said.

Comments