High-rise buildings and parking decks pepper the streets of downtown Columbia. Traces of the vibrant landscape of decades past exist primarily in memory and a few scarce photographs.
The business district that stretched up the 1000 and 1100 blocks on Washington Street was once known as “Black Main Street,” sprawling out onto Assembly and Park streets. From funeral homes to bowling alleys, movie theaters to a newspaper, “everything you could want was on Washington Street,” said Margaret Dunlap, Local History Manager at the Richland Public Library.
This bustling area developed because White businesses downtown offered limited services to African Americans or were entirely segregated. In addition to providing basic goods, the district offered space for community, with the movie theater doubling as a site for meetings and political rallies.
While the Black Business District was active from the early 1900s to the 1970s, its peak, according to Dunlap, was from the 1930s to the 1960s.
As Columbia integrated, the high concentration of Black-owned businesses began to diffuse away. While neighborhoods west of Assembly Street were once home to almost exclusively working-class Black people, many people were moved when the area was cleared for urban renewal in the 1960s. This removal of customers, combined with integration and a general migration to the suburbs, led to the area’s decline.
A mural on a new off-campus student housing complex, The Standard, aims to honor the history of the district.
A mural commissioned by The Standard, a luxury-branded student apartment complex on Assembly and Washington streets, which was once an anchor for "Black Main Street" in Columbia, S.C. Feb 1, 2024.
Commissioned by development company CRG in partnership with One Columbia, the mural features flat, graphic depictions of the buildings that made up the historical district — including Angeline’s Beauty & Wig Salon, the business whose building was replaced with the Standard.
“That building is sitting on a very remarkable historic Black business district,” said CRG Art Director Frank Maugeri. “And that was an element of the parameters — that the community wanted to make sure that we were consciously and actively celebrating the history of that Black business district, versus sort of clearing it away and forgetting about it.”
What once was
Pockets of what once was remain.
Many businesses, such as the Big Apple Night Club, relocated, but several structures from the era still stand. The area where the Standard is was once home to one of these few remaining buildings.
Built in 1905 by African Americans as a drugstore, the now-demolished structure at 1401 Assembly Street was occupied by a series of White businesses before becoming home to Angeline's Beauty & Wig Salon in 1980. Founded in 1954 by Angeline Miller, the salon was taken over by Miller’s daughter, Pamela Tidwell, after her death. Angeline’s original location on Washington Street burned down in the 70s, causing the business to move to Assembly Street, where it stayed until the land was sold to developers in 2015.
“I think that people are sorry to have seen that building go,” said Dunlap. “It is sad because the district — the Washington Street business district — was so vibrant during its heyday and that building was constructed as one of the first on that prominent corner to lead African Americans, other businesses to congregate there.”
A mural commissioned by The Standard, a luxury-branded student apartment complex on Assembly and Washington streets, which was once an anchor for "Black Main Street" in Columbia, S.C. Feb 1, 2024.
A committee of artists, business owners, library staff and stakeholders selected North Carolina-based artist Sharon Dowell to create the mural.
Dowell heavily researched the history of the area with Dunlap before she started painting the walls of the Standard. Because little of the Black Business District has been archived, much of the photographic imagery that exists is documentation of fires or shows the neighborhood in decline.
“It’s better that the artist was able to paint them so that you can imagine what the businesses might’ve been like in their heyday,” said Dunlap.
Dowell wanted the mural to serve as an educational tool on the area’s history, while also nodding to the Vista’s present-day vibrancy. As the main section of the mural faces the entrance to the children’s wing of the public library, Dowell considered who the mural might serve.
“As an artist coming from outside of town, you don’t want to be what I call a ‘plop artist,’” Dowell said. “Where you just go ‘plop! Here’s some art’ … You want to think about the stakeholders, the people that are coming to the library, the people who are walking by on the street, people that maybe used to be part of the Black Business District — what would they want to see?”
This project is not the first to memorialize downtown Columbia’s Black history through art.
Back in 2021, local artist Ija Charles created a towering mural on the corner of Main and Washington inspired by a photo of the Black Business District.
And in August, the Columbia Museum of Art and Columbia SC 63 opened the Our Story Matters gallery, which focuses on exhibitions that share the stories of African American life in the city from Reconstruction to the 1960s.
A mural depicting Columbia's Black history by Ija Charles, who was commissioned by the city to transform a facade on the 1400 Block of Main Street. Feb. 1, 2024.
According to Bobby Donaldson, executive director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research and lead scholar of Columbia SC 63, these types of projects help to partially reconstruct history, and serve as reminders that Columbia’s growth and progress were built on the legacies of these historically Black spaces.
“It’s also a reminder that progress came with a price,” Donaldson said. “It came with a price paid by certain people and certain neighborhoods. It is a reminder that people did not just lose a street, they lost livelihoods. They lost churches. They lost a reflection of their own history. They lost an anchor in their own lives.”
Changes to Columbia's urban core such as The Standard's construction are not exclusively the choices of landowners and developers. The task of creating a new apartment complex with public art also required input from the city, who was integral to deciding that The Standard was constructed in that area, according to CRG's Maugeri.
And the demolition of Angeline's building was allowable. It was not a protected structure, and the owners were free to sell.
Protecting while progressing
New construction not only raises questions of historic preservation, but can also create challenges for the existing populations of downtown Columbia.
A symptom of a gentrifying neighborhood is that working class and lower class people can be priced out. In the past three years, rents in Columbia have raised a cumulative 31 percent.
A Black Lives Matter mural on the facade of Sweet Temptations Bakery at 2231 North Main St. Taken Feb. 1, 2024.
To Donaldson, the ways in which new developments affect marginalized communities, in particular, is an ongoing struggle.
“There is clearly going to be vigilance needed to safeguard the remaining African American communities," he said. "And if not, they will go the same way as Washington Street.”
Fragments of history persist on Washington Street.
Bits of brick or glass from a bygone era — items Dunlap called “artifacts” — still find their way to today’s sidewalks. Rather than removing these items, Dunlap said, she looks at them and feels a slight connection with the past.
“We shouldn’t just pretend that Columbia’s always been a city of promise and hope for everyone,” Dunlap said. “But it can be now, I hope.”
