COMMUNITY BUILDER: MIXING POLITICS AND AN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE PLACED HARVEY GANTT AT THE CENTER OF A BURGEONING STATE.

• Author: Infanzon, Vanessa
• Position: NC TREND First take: Harvey Gantt

Pillars of North Carolina is a new series featuring prominent men and women who have made a significant impact in their industry and communities.

Harvey Gantt's always been a trailblazer. As a teenager, he sat at lunch counters closed to people of color. He became the first African American student to attend Clemson University in 1963. In 1971, he and Jeff Huberman formed Gantt Huberman Architects in Charlotte, a rare pairing of Jewish and black business owners. He was Charlotte's first African American mayor from 1983-87 and ran two unsuccessful campaigns to unseat U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Now, he's enjoying retirement by playing golf and tennis and reading books about past presidents such as Washington, Lincoln and Grant. Gantt, 76, talks about the power of fear, optimism and business in comments edited for length and clarity.

Sometimes you become the first just because history sets it up that way. I'm not so sure you are so special as much as you are at the right place, at the right time and you are the right person to have been there. That's how I kind of feel about going to Clemson because it was a time of great ferment in the South and things were changing. The civil rights movement really had taken hold. Going to Clemson probably was a significant historical situation that's lasting, but I don't get too high on that because it could have been another student. It needed to happen, and I was just there at the right point in time.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader, but there were lots of other brave people that also showed courage that inspired me to have the courage to say, "We can do this, we can make changes." One reason I have such an optimistic outlook today about the challenges we face is that we overcame so much back then that was even tougher. It took a lot of people to be courageous enough to want to make those changes. Those same kinds of people exist today to deal with the different kinds of challenges we have. Hopefully, many of them are inspired by those who went before.

There's no getting around the fact that you represent a powerful entity when you employ people. When you seek to develop the industry, businesses and services that are needed in our society, you deserve to be respected for the impact you have on the daily lives of citizens. And you affect them in so many ways, all the way down to whatever they talk about at the kitchen table--jobs, wages, benefits.

When I ran for city council, I paid a lot of attention to...