As we continue our living history lesson, tonight, we explore civil rights issues in the '60s throughout our region.

Carolina Impact's Beatrice Thompson and videographer Marcellus Jones have more on how those changes impacted not only communities, but how it changed the life trajectory for many.

- [Beatrice] The historian, the war hero, the educator, each with their own story about Charlotte's experiences during the '60s, and the impact of the major social issues, the most disruptive and effort called urban renewal.

In city after city, highways were built to appease white suburban commuters.

Through imminent domain and funds from the 1949 Housing Act and the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, freeways were shoved through minority communities, causing surrounding blight and pollution.

Among the black neighborhoods divided by those highways were Treme in New Orleans, the Brooklyn area of Charlotte, and Overtown in Miami.

The efforts saw the removal of close to 7,000 residents in Charlotte's Brooklyn community.

- So you lose this sense of identity, the sense of culture of a community that had businesses and churches all right together.

So I think that did affect African Americans.

- In the middle of my second grade year is when we experienced urban renewal, and my family had to leave the Brooklyn area.

- [Beatrice] In Brooklyn, she'd grown up experiencing community and culture, and she watched the dismantling of the community.

- It was really rough for some people, because they had to find somewhere to go.

- [Beatrice] The problem?

These neighborhoods weren't really slums.

They were areas that black citizens had been contained into, through private covenants that barred selling homes to blacks and government zoning.

While the housing was run down due to overcrowding and poverty, the neighborhoods were still functional, full of churches, grocery stores, restaurants and shops.

It was also central to the civil rights movement in Charlotte.

- Charlotte had one of the second largest sit-in movements in the country that lasted for most of the first half of the 1960s.

Off and on, they would target restaurants and other public facilities.

And so it was very, I mean, it was extremely active.

- [Beatrice] In the spring of 1963, a prominent civil rights leader led dozens of protestors on a four-mile march from Johnson C. Smith's campus to the center of Charlotte's uptown area.

Dr. Reginald Hawkins warned the city leaders that if something wasn't done to end segregation, future marches might not be so peaceful.

Similar protests took place in Rock Hill, South Carolina with the Friendship Nine, a group of black college students who were jailed after a sit-in at a lunch counter.

- We are going to sit at the lunch counter, and we are gonna stay at the lunch counter, and they're going to have to arrest us and put us in jail.

- [Beatrice] There were many who believe these organizing efforts were partially to blame for the loss of black communities like Brooklyn.

- The NAACP used these political action initiatives to get more voters on the polls, on the rolls, and they would go out and began to affect local elections.

And so some argued, particularly in the black press, that the move to disband or remove this community was an effort to try to disorganize the African American community.

- [Beatrice] And then there was the Vietnam war.

- So I joined the Marines at 17, got sent to Vietnam three months after I turned 18, got shot twice before I was 19, got shot once again after I was 19.

- [Beatrice] His family was among those forced out of Brooklyn to the west side of Charlotte.

Second War, Charlotte's original black high school was closed along with the demise of Brooklyn.

He then attended his beloved West Charlotte for one year before desegregation sent him to North Mecklenburg High School.

- At that time, North Mecklenburg was known as the rebels, as in confederate rebels.

Had a guy with a full confederate uniform and a big confederate flag waving around at all the pep rallies.

- [Beatrice] His disenchantment with school led him to join more than 300,000 Black Americans serving in Vietnam, making up 16% of the Armed Forces.

Early on in that war, Black Americans made up 11% of the forces.

Their casualty rates soared to more than 20%.

Ultimately, more than 7,000 died, 14% of all the deaths, while Blacks made up only 11% of the young males in America, but it was the first American war in which black and white troops were not formally segregated.

Yet the Black service members felt the opposition when they returned.

- That was a double-edged sword, because number one, in the '60s, you had civil rights unrest, you had campus unrest on all universities, anti-war protestors and all like that.

So I'm caught from both sides.

- [Beatrice] But when you ask all three how African Americans fared in one of America's most turbulent decades- - There's a large misconception about the civil rights movement that it was solely about integration and voting rights.

And since the country achieved those things, then the movement was successful.

But the movement was primarily about economics and access to economics.

- Well, I guess the test is still out.

I think we're moving to classism, but I think it's more economic class more than anything else.

- Right at the end of the '60s or the beginning of the '70s was when things finally started to turn around on a major scale.

- [Beatrice] In a new millennium, many are looking back to better understand history and to make sure it does not repeat itself.

For Carolina Impact, I'm Bea Thompson.