For nearly 80 years, the land now occupied by the Government Center in Uptown Charlotte was a thriving predominantly black community. In the late 1860s, recently-emancipated slaves gathered in the neighborhood, known colloquially as “Logtown” before it was a considered a neighborhood, and over the years the community would become a self-sustaining “city within a city” for Charlotte’s black residents with churches, schools, and businesses independent of those outside the neighborhood, where Charlotte’s black residents were not welcome at white institutions.

Residents came to know the neighborhood as “Brooklyn'', an homage to the New York City borough. The community grew as Charlotte’s black families were pushed from other communities during segregation, and the black community was forced to build its own institutions. Some of these included the Myers Street School, opened in 1886, which was Charlotte’s first black public school, as well as the city of Charlotte’s first black YMCA. The library that sat on Brevard Street was the first free library in the state of North Carolina for black residents.

In the late 1950s, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, along with a Federal program that would ultimately grant the city $1.4M for “Urban Renewal” to repurpose the neighborhood for office and industrial buildings, as well as a government center. The program of displacing families and businesses began in the 1960s and continued for a decade, and once it was complete, more than 1,000 homes and 216 businesses were demolished.