Reign interrupted: a symbol of tolerance to some and depravity to others, Charlotte earned international attention and Business North Carolina's mover and shaker of the year honors.

• Author: Otterbourg, Ken
• Position: MOVER & SHAKER

It was on the afternoon of Sept. 20 that Keith Scott was shot to death after a brief confrontation with police, setting off several days of protests and rioting across Charlotte. I watched it unfold on the television, and it was all so tragic and foreign, the sort of thing that always seemed to take place elsewhere but had finally come to North Carolina. This happened during the campaign season, and it was one more log on the fire, one more event punctuating the nasty and visceral political debates swirling around law and order, both in the streets and in our public restrooms, the latter courtesy of House Bill 2. It was hard to digest, to make sense of the jumble. But I remember saying to myself these three little words: We are Charlotte.

When I first spoke the words aloud in early fall, they sounded uncomfortable. Perhaps a bit disloyal. I live in Winston-Salem, and it has been only in the past few years that I had stopped alternating between trying to ignore or actively disliking our state's largest and ?Hi more important city. Part of that personal reset happened during a reporting trip for a Fortune story in 2012. The scars of the recession were still fresh, but the optimism in Charlotte is contagious, and there is a sincerity there that either oozes or flows depending on your view of its inhabitants.

But the phrase, "We are Charlotte," has stayed with me, and I have continued to wrestle with the meaning. What I kept returning to was this idea that the big m'~ issues in our society--how we respect individuals, the power of the state, the fairness in our economy--were all on display in Charlotte. The election didn't EK make them go away. On the contrary, they are here to stay. It's what makes Charlotte Business North Carolina's Mover and Shaker of the Year. Now, you can say no, that you aren't Charlotte, never have been, and never will be. But there is a different geography and aggregation taking place. Much of it is not by choice. It doesn't matter whether we live there. Or work there. Or even go there. It's more basic. "We are Charlotte" means that the events that thrust the city into the harsh glare of the nightly news this past year are not just Charlotte's challenges but all of ours. This is not to suggest that the outlines of the challenges or even the potential remedies are agreed upon. But in the riots and protests and the battle over HB2, I was glimpsing the future. Tomorrow had showed up, for better or worse, in a city that...