March 25, 2025

Linda Lockhart arrived with her family in Charlotte as the schools were desegregating in 1970. Her narrative this morning about her experiences as the first African-American woman hired into the Charlotte Fire Department is difficult to listen to. But overall it’s compatible with other stories of slow, grudging change in post-WWII Charlotte culture.

Forum participants might remember the late Thereasea D. (TD) Elder, who was in a pilot program to integrate public health nurses in 1960s Charlotte. Her supervisors said that integration was going to happen, that the black nurses would have to sell themselves to the public – and then assigned Elder to a neighborhood stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. Firefighter Lockhart was assigned in the 1980s to work at the same neighborhood’s fire station.

What makes Lockhart’s tale salient today is this: She asserts that policies about equal pay or nondiscriminatory treatment might be adjusted each time a major incident occurs, but the attitudes and behaviors that led to the incident are allowed to continue. Her suggestions for fundamental change include outsourcing hiring decisions to an independent contractor.

A 2007 news story on the occasion of Lockhart’s retirement that year is here. A 2017 Charlotte Observer report on an appearance before Charlotte City Council has been archived at WBTV here.