Taking On Landlords
- Poor and working-class renters banded together to learn housing codes and demand that landlords fix up their homes. When legal channels produced no results, renters took to the streets to challenge the worst slumlords.
- Renters were able to win housing improvements from one of the city’s most notorious slumlords, Abe Greenberg.
Flyer distributed during the demonstrations in front of Abe Greenberg’s offices invites other tenants to join the fight to demand change, 1966.
Courtesy North Carolina Fund Records, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Edgemont neighborhood was a lightning rod in the struggle for fair housing. The old white mill village became home to many Black residents displaced from Hayti. Members of the UOCI-affiliated Edgemont Community Council protest landlord Abe Greenberg’s refusal to improve his rental housing. They are pictured picketing in front of Greenberg’s downtown office, June 1966.
Courtesy Billy E. Barnes Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“We’re not particularly interested in what these people have to say.”
– Abe Greenberg, about members of the Edgemont Community Council
During their fight for better housing conditions, neighborhood organizers would invite community members to demonstrate their unity by joining neighborhood clean-up days. Here Howard Fuller (left) and Ben Ruffin (right) lead a clean-up day using a garbage truck on loan from the city in the mid-1960s.
Courtesy Billy E. Barnes Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Poor and working-class renters banded together to learn housing codes and demand that landlords fix up their homes. When legal channels produced no results, renters took to the streets to challenge the worst slumlords.
- Renters were able to win housing improvements from one of the city’s most notorious slumlords, Abe Greenberg.
Flyer distributed during the demonstrations in front of Abe Greenberg’s offices invites other tenants to join the fight to demand change, 1966.
Courtesy North Carolina Fund Records, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Edgemont neighborhood was a lightning rod in the struggle for fair housing. The old white mill village became home to many Black residents displaced from Hayti. Members of the UOCI-affiliated Edgemont Community Council protest landlord Abe Greenberg’s refusal to improve his rental housing. They are pictured picketing in front of Greenberg’s downtown office, June 1966.
Courtesy Billy E. Barnes Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“We’re not particularly interested in what these people have to say.”
– Abe Greenberg, about members of the Edgemont Community Council
