Editor’s note: This is part of a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
Segregation created two Greenvilles. White residents expected public institutions to serve them. Black residents, however, often had to build their own. Hattie Logan Duckett did exactly that and spent her life doing it.
In 1919, she opened the Phillis Wheatley Association on Haynie Street as a place for young Black women in a city that had made none for them. The name was a choice. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved teenager in Boston when her poems were published in 1773, and a panel of white men was assembled to swear she had written them herself.
Duckett bought a small house on East McBee Avenue. Girls came there for religious instruction and recreation. Then the boys started coming. The need was larger than the original plan. So was the cost.
When the small operation became too expensive to sustain, Duckett approached Greenville businessman and mill owner Thomas Parker. A biracial board raised $65,000 for a permanent center. White contributors gave $45,000. Black contributors gave $20,000.
Those numbers deserve some context. This was a segregated city asking Black residents to help finance the institution that segregation itself had made necessary.
The new Phillis Wheatley Center opened at 121 Broad Street in 1924, in the heart of Greenville’s Black business district. It gave the community something the city had not: a place for recreation, education, meetings, and organized social services for Black residents.
By the 1930s, people sometimes referred to it as Greenville’s Black YWCA. The center offered music, dance, child care, sports, and other programs. It also became a gathering place for Black civic leaders and housed one of Greenville’s earliest libraries available to Black residents.
During World War II, Black servicemen from the Donaldson Air Force Base came to the Center because much of Greenville was closed to them. They met there. They played ball there. Twenty years later, the children who had grown up in its gym and its art rooms were the adults who carried Greenville out of segregation.
The easy version of this story is that Hattie Logan Duckett built a remarkable institution. She did. The harder version is that she had to because it wasn’t available any other way.
The Phillis Wheatley Center showed what Black Greenville could accomplish with leadership, organization, and money. It also showed how much work segregation forced the community to do for itself.
Next: How newcomers and immigrants built Greenville.
Russell Stall is a Greenville native, former at-large Greenville City Council member, and certified city planner. He serves as executive director of the Greenville County Historical Society. For more information, visit greenvillehistory.org.
