Last Great Investment

Hugh McColl’s Last Great Investment

The ex-Bank of America chief is dedicated to improving the plight of black people in his hometown. He started by helping a young black protester reach the city council.

By MICHAEL GRAFF

n the night of September 20, 2016, while tear gas plumed and bottles flew and the interstate burned in Charlotte, the man who built the city was in a hotel room 750 miles away, watching it all on television, wondering what in the hell was going on.

Hugh McColl wielded more influence than any banker in the country during the last quarter of the 20th century, turning a small North Carolina bank into Bank of America, a financial colossus that transformed the nation’s financial landscape as much as it did the city’s skyline. After McColl retired in 2001, he remained a prominent figure in Charlotte. But he often reminded people in speeches and interviews that he wasn’t going to live forever, that new leaders needed to emerge. In recent years, around the time of his 80th birthday in 2015, McColl made a decision with his family that he would devote his remaining years to Charlotte’s black community and west side neighborhoods, investing time and money in early-childhood education buildings, affordable-housing projects and job programs. He had helped make Charlotte a capital of the New South, but he was galled by a 2014 study that ranked Charlotte last among the country’s 50 largest cities in terms of upward mobility. To oversimplify, he knew that under the surface of this sparkling city, the distance was growing between people who looked like him and the mostly black people he saw protesting. What he was watching on television that night from his Little Rock hotel room was a reckoning.

“You ask yourself, ‘How as a society did we treat people so badly?’” McColl told me recently. “We’re guilty as charged.”

The scenes on TV were familiar by then—aerial footage of large groups squaring off with officers after another police shooting of a black man. But until the night, when Charlotte-Mecklenburg police shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, those scenes always unfolded somewhere else, places like Baltimore and St. Louis. Charlotte, the expression here went, was too nice and friendly to stand up.

Braxton Winston believed that, too.

A former college linebacker with long dreadlocks, Winston was driving home after coaching a middle-school football game when he saw flashing lights and people in the street. Winston was an anonymous figure in this fast-growing city, a father of three kids scratching together a living as a videographer, an Uber driver, a stagehand and a part-time coach. His father is a New York City Fire Department captain who served in both the Marine Corps and the Air Force. His mother was a New York City schoolteacher. Winston graduated from the prestigious Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and then Davidson College, with a degree in anthropology. A few weeks before the September 20 shooting, he recorded himself venting his frustrations over the fallout from Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem. “Flags and songs and medals are not more important than people,” he said in the video. “You value that smiling black face, but you (don’t) value the crying black soul.”

Now here he was, a 33-year-old black man getting out of his car to protest in the streets of the city McColl built.

Over the next five days, Winston’s Facebook Live videos from the Charlotte protests would generate more than 110,000 views. But he became famous that first night when he stood shirtless in front of a line of officers in riot gear and raised his left arm. A newspaper photographer took a picture of him from behind, a lone black man with his hair tied up in a bunch and a fist high in the air in front of officers with nightsticks. It became a defining image of the week.

McColl saw the photo the next morning. Today, he laughs in a sharp Southern accent, “I remember seeing him nekked to the waist.”

In the coming days and weeks and months, as Winston’s role as a leader of the protests solidified, McColl would come to see him as someone who could talk and listen to anyone, someone who could fill a leadership void that he considered one of the city’s biggest liabilities. The two men became not just friends, but allies. They had uncomfortable conversations about race—some of them “cringe-worthy,” Winston says—often while the country’s faltering dialogue on the matter became more strained. In November, just 14 months after Winston first raised his fist in protest, the alliance between the two men ended with Winston earning a seat on Charlotte City Council, an election that has profoundly altered the direction of politics in this Southern city.

***

McColl flew home from Little Rock the day after the Scott shooting, a Wednesday, to a city stewing. Uptown businesses, including Bank of America’s corporate headquarters, closed early in preparation for another night of demonstrations. Few things pain McColl more than seeing the bank shut down.

That night, he watched footage from his home in the city’s richest zip code as people filled the streets in the center of town. I was covering the protests for Charlotte magazine. The demonstration started just before sunset and became tense as darkness settled in. Just after 8 p.m., protesters reached the front of a hotel across the street from Bank of America’s 879-foot tall headquarters building. Officers in riot gear blocked the glass doors. Around 8:20 p.m., someone in the crowd fired a single gunshot. The bullet hit a 26-year-old protester in the head. Justin Carr died later that night. In the chaos after the shot, people fled. But surveillance video shows a tall man with dreadlocks headed in the other direction, not running away but walking toward the spot where Carr fell, holding a camera up to record it.

“I remember leaving my house that night, and I couldn’t tell my wife and my kids if I was going to be safe,” says Winston, who considers himself a citizen journalist. “I made the decision, and once you make it, you’ve got to go or you don’t. When that happened, I was like, ‘You have to keep your camera up.’”

Calmer protests continued through the week. Winston was arrested during a Sunday demonstration outside a Panthers football game (the charges were ultimately dropped). By that weekend, most of the city’s leadership was under fire, with the sharpest criticism coming from the black community and directed toward the mayor, police chief and city council.

Many in the white community joined the protesters in condemning the mayor and council. But others wrote letters urging police to respond more forcefully and make sweeping arrests. Republican Congressman Robert Pittenger, who lives in an affluent south Charlotte neighborhood, appeared on the BBC that week and said the protesters’ grievance was that “they hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.” He apologized the next day. Meanwhile, residents in outer suburbs were largely apathetic, likening the protests to a snowstorm that closed their offices.

That Friday, though, McColl showed up at a Charlotte Symphony function to deliver a speech that had been planned for months. He addressed the events of the week. “The time is now,” he said. “I challenge everyone, particularly the white community, to begin today to talk with and listen to the concerns of each other.”

The Charlotte Observer ran an editorial that weekend that opened with the lines, “God bless Hugh McColl, but the man is 81 years old and 15 years removed from his retirement as Bank of America’s CEO. Surely Charlotte has the leadership to respond to this perilous moment … without falling back on yesterday’s captains.”

The following Monday, Winston attended the regularly scheduled city council meeting. In the public comment portion, he stood at a lectern and called for the resignation of mayor Jennifer Roberts, saying he was there to “indict the Charlotte government for crimes against the humanity of the City of Charlotte.” Then he led the audience through the chorus of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”

***

McColl and Winston met for the first time last winter, at a gathering set up by the Women’s Inter-Cultural Exchange, a Charlotte organization whose mission is “building trust across race and culture.” There were about 30 men seated in a circle at the meeting, at least two-thirds of them black, including the city’s police chief, Kerr Putney.

McColl watched Winston criticize Putney about police treatment of the black community. He admired Winston’s courage and firmness, but he wasn’t sure whether he agreed with him on a few points. So he approached him after the meeting. Winston remembers it clearly.

“I might’ve been star-struck that night. I mean it was the first time I met Hugh McColl,” Winston says. “[He asked] why, if violence is happening in these black neighborhoods, why black or brown people won’t be more cooperative with police in terms of adjudicating it.” Winston stuttered through an answer he can’t remember. The next day, he sent a lengthy email to one of the group’s organizers and asked to have it forwarded to McColl.

The email told the story from November 3, 2015, when Winston jumped out of bed to the sound of a woman screaming in the yard of a home across the street from his. The woman, a Latina, was holding a baby and her house was on fire behind her. He ran across the street in his boxers. She was wobbling and had been beaten and stabbed. The woman’s boyfriend had bashed her with a pipe several times, then cut the gas line and tried to blow up the house with all three of them inside.

Winston held the woman’s 2-year-old son until firefighters and police arrived. Officers approached the child, but he wouldn’t say a word. Winston and his wife of 12 years, Sheena, can speak Spanish. They learned that the child could speak English, but that he was trained to pretend he couldn’t whenever he was approached by someone in uniform.

“In the very worst times,” Winston remembers telling McColl, “there are people that are taught, for good reason, that if you go to the people that are supposed to help you, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up criminalizing yourself.”

McColl responded with an invitation to meet privately.

Over breakfast at a low-key restaurant called Eddie’s Place, they began frank, and not always comfortable, conversations about race. At one of their first meetings, McColl asked Winston whether his hairstyle cost him a lot of time each day. Winston laughed and explained that the dreads are easy to keep clean. Winston asked questions about McColl’s accomplishments and the city’s history. He recently told the retired CEO that he remembers family vacations when his mom would withdraw all of her cash before the trip, and said it only recently occurred to him that McColl was the person who made it possible to have a familiar bank wherever they went.

Their conversations continued against the backdrop of an increasingly stressful year for Charlotte and the rest of the country. The weekend after the violent Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, McColl attended a wedding there and found himself looking around for the few nonwhite people. As Charlotte’s murder rate climbed to its highest point since the 1990s, Winston found himself befriending leaders in the same police department he once confronted.

“That’s what it’s about,” Winston tells me later, pounding his right fist against his left hand and smiling. “We gotta be willing to say cringe-worthy things, to be honest with ourselves, to say, ‘Hey, I don’t know. This is what I experienced.’ Let’s be real with one another. [Someone] can say something and you can think, ‘You may ought to rethink that,’ rather than saying, ‘You’re a racist,’ or, ‘You’re a bigot,’ or, ‘You’re a radical.’”

Says McColl: “He’s lived the world of being guilty being black. And he’s even guilty of having dreadlocks. So he’s guilty on all kinds of counts of looking different. … Those of us who’ve never experienced it cannot actually identify with it. We can say we’re sympathetic, but we have no basis of understanding because it’s never happened to us.”

***

McColl remembers the wagons rolling into town on Saturdays. Growing up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, his family wasn’t rich, but he never wanted for much. His dad and grandfather had to sell the bank they owned, the Bank of Marlboro, during the Depression, and his dad became a merchant. McColl would go into town early on Saturdays to wait for the cotton and produce to arrive.

McColl is a lifelong Democrat who always thought he was better than the racism he saw growing up in the rural South. But now, on the other end of life, he remembers ignoring words and scenes that would be unforgivable today. “The black sharecroppers were coming in, and the women would nurse their babies on the sidewalk because they had no other place to go,” McColl says. “I didn’t think anything about it as a child. And so I think I was the worst kind of racist in that I didn’t even notice it.”

He graduated from the University of North Carolina and served in the Marine Corps before taking a banking job in Charlotte in 1959. Serving in the Marine Corps taught him that “everybody pulls their pants on the same way. They don’t care whether you’re rich or poor, who your mother and father were, what your color is. They don’t give a damn about that.”

He says his first salary was $4,500 a year. He rose steadily in his field, and in 1974 he was named president of North Carolina National Bank at age 38. Newspaper and magazine stories throughout his career characterized him as progressive for his time. He was part of a leadership group that came up with an affirmative-action plan for the bank in the early 1970s so that, regardless how the government waffled on the matter, the bank would have a healthy percentage of black employees.

McColl became CEO in 1983 and, playing up his Southern charm in meetings with state and federal politicians, led the fight to dismantle laws that hindered interstate banking. In the late 1990s, NationsBank merged with Bank of America and McColl had achieved his goal of owning the country’s largest bank. In 2000, the New York Times reported tax records showed he had made $75 million in salary, bonuses and stock options the previous year.

He says he valued the money less than the thrill of building something. “I don’t care about money or taxes or the things that most people in my economic bracket talk about,” he says. “I’m not the least bit interested in taxes. I’ve never missed a dollar that I’ve paid in taxes, and I’ve never missed a dollar that I gave away.”

Once, when the city council was about $6 million short for a new transportation center, his bank put up $10 million. When the symphony was low on cash, he started an endowment. When he wanted the tallest skyscraper between Philadelphia and Atlanta, he built it.

“There’s not a mayor anywhere in this country who has a banker or businessman in their community like Hugh McColl,” says Richard Vinroot, a Republican who was Charlotte’s mayor from 1991 to 1995. “I always say I was the luckiest mayor in the world.”

As McColl approached retirement in 2001, so did many of his counterparts in local business, leaving many to wonder who might assume those leadership roles. It was a precarious time for the city. Immigrant populations were exploding and busing policies were being dismantled in local schools, and people of different races were resegregating into old neighborhood patterns. From the moment he retired, people wondered if the “next Hugh McColl” would come along to lead Charlotte. But the Charlotte he created needed something other than another Hugh McColl to lead it.

Braxton Winston graduated high school that same year.

In the fall of his senior year at Phillips Andover Academy, he was the captain of his football team. He led Andover to the New England Prep School championship on a soggy day. After the game, he leaned on his parents and wept. Then he showered and changed clothes. He had to play the lead role that evening in the school play, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

His father, David, still thinks about that day, especially after the image of Winston standing in front of police went around the world. “Hearing him speak Elizabethan English, without pause or flaw, for two hours,” David wrote to me, “made me marvel at his toughness, his dedication, and his intellect.”

***

Early last summer, Winston was lying in bed one morning when he called McColl to tell him that he was thinking about running for city council. McColl told him to go for it.

“I’m gonna support you, and I’m gonna get other people to support you,” McColl said. “But you better go out there and win.”

At a meeting that included Charlotte businesspeople and lawyers and philanthropists in June, Winston announced publicly he would run for an at-large seat. McColl, who’d just turned 82, put his hand on Winston’s shoulder and said he’d be the first contributor, and he gave $1,000. McColl’s endorsement carries a ton of weight still. Just this past week, after longtime Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson abruptly put the team up for sale amid sexual harassment revelations, McColl was the first local businessman to publicly announce his support of Tina Becker’s promotion to chief operating officer. Late Wednesday evening, the Charlotte Observer published a story that listed McColl among a group of locals looking to put together an investment group to make sure the team stays in Charlotte.

For Winston and his run for office, McColl’s endorsement meant that “at least people are going to pick up the phone. At least people will say, ‘I need to take this guy seriously.’”

Suddenly, Winston the protester had the support to become Winston the politician. The president of Davidson College gave $1,000. Architects and developers followed. So did unions for ironworkers and stagehands. The money enabled Winston to pay a team that included people who helped on campaigns for former mayor and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. By late summer, Braxton Winston signs were all over Charlotte and money was coming in from everywhere. Eight candidates—four Democrats and four Republicans—were vying for four at-large seats in the general election. On November 7, Winston, the political rookie, earned the second-most votes.

That night, Winston stood in front of television cameras and said, “I’m at a loss for words. So many people have spent their social capital, their political capital, their real economic capital on this guy that that decided to stand, stand up, and …”

He choked up and walked away.

In the weeks since, Chelsea Clinton and the rapper Common have praised him on Twitter, and new outlets from CNN to the Guardian have run stories about the “protester turned politician.”

At a breakfast meeting organized by a chapter of the Women’s Inter-Cultural Exchange in late November, Winston walked in wearing a zip-up jacket and jeans. McColl smiled, leading a round of applause. The meeting’s organizer asked Winston to introduce himself. “Councilman-elect Braxton Winston,” he said, looking at a group of people in slacks and button-downs, and they all clap again.

In late August, SmartAsset ranked Charlotte No. 1 among cities where millennials are moving, with a net gain of nearly 11,000 in 2015. The transition is obvious to people who live here. Thousands of apartment units have gone up in my neighborhood in the past five years. But less-discussed is a booming elderly population, with the number of people 65 and older growing from about 75,000 in 2010 to 96,000 in 2015, a jump of about 28 percent.

McColl, at least politically, is trying to connect the two groups.

In the city election, McColl also backed Dimple Ajmera, a 31-year-old whose family moved to the U.S. from India when she was 16. She made national news last summer when she said that anybody who’d supported Trump has “no place” on the city council. A month before the election, made a video on Ajmera's behalf and helped raise money for her. She claimed an at-large seat, too.

Ajmera and Winston were part of a major makeover for the 11-member Charlotte City Council. This past Monday, five new members were sworn in, four of them Democrats and all of them under 40. Also sworn in was new mayor Vi Lyles, 65, who became the first black woman to hold the office after defeating Roberts in the Democratic primary and Republican challenger Kenny Smith by 18 points in the general election. In one election, the average age of Charlotte’s city council dropped from 60 to 45. And the new members weren’t put there by their peers. Nearly 80 percent of voters were over 41. Fourteen months after the protests, the older voters had not just come to accept the young shirtless man in the photograph, they agreed with him that it was time to completely reset the city’s political leadership.

“We can’t keep trying to live for yesterday,” McColl tells me on a recent morning. “Without getting into a debate about whether we like Mr. Trump or not, much of what he has run on is taking us back somewhere, not forward somewhere.”

McColl’s cellphone rings. It’s his personal trainer. We’ve talked too long, and he’s late for a workout. He tells her he’ll be there soon. Then, as if he realizes that he wants to make the next point clear, he dials her back to cancel the workout. And one of the most influential bankers of all time leans forward and continues.

“Make America Great Again means go back to isolationism, go back to the ’30s. I don’t know. He’s not a man for our times, actually. He got elected by people who want things to be like they were, rather than like they are. [In Charlotte,] we’ve elected people that would’ve been unimaginable in the ’70s, just on appearances if nothing else. I think that’s good, not bad. It’s about the future, not the past.”