Black Wall Street

The two blocks of Parrish Street between Mangum and Corcoran are the historic centre of Black Wall Street. The most prominent surviving landmark is the Old North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Building, a five-storey 1920s neoclassical block where the company built itself into the largest Black-owned business in the United States by mid-century.

Interpretive plaques along the street tell the story; the recently expanded Black Wall Street Gardens just south of Main Street serves as a memorial and gathering place. The route makes the natural anchor of a self-guided walking tour of downtown Durham; pair it with a visit to the Hayti Heritage Center in the historically Black Hayti neighbourhood a few blocks south.

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A story
Parrish Street earned its "Black Wall Street" nickname in the early twentieth century from the cluster of Black-owned financial institutions along it — the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, Mutual Savings and Loan. Together they made Durham the wealthiest centre of Black American business in the United States, an achievement built in the face of, and partly because of, the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South.

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