Angel Pittman had a simple idea: she purchased a simple patch of land in Rowan County, North Carolina for $10,000, three school buses for $14,000, and planned to create a mobile hair salon. Her plan was to live out of one of the buses and use the other two to travel around the community providing her services.
But according to The Guardian, she ran into an immediate problem: an elderly white neighbor who objected to a Black woman setting up a business across the street — and quickly made her life a nightmare.
According to Pittman, the man “had already given me weird vibes” while she was going through closing, and then "About a week after closing, on 23 September, she returned with her mom to drop off the buses. This time, she said, the man approached them and asked, '‘Why are you guys here? Are y’all looking for shade?’'"
And then, things got even worse, as Pittman tells The Guardian that he began to exhibit violent and racist behavior.
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"He sat over there and had his gun out the whole time," she said. "He was like, ‘Get the f**k off my lawn. And [that] we need to get them f**king buses off his lawn. So basically saying, my land was his."
He then began displaying swastikas and pro-KKK signs in his yard, which prompted Pittman to call the local police, who dismissed her complaint on the grounds that her neighbor had put up racist signs in the past.
Sheriff Captain Mark McDaniel defended this response, claiming there was no evidence the neighbor committed a hate crime because he had white supremacy signs even before Pittman moved into the neighborhood: “It wasn’t like he put it there overnight.”
As for Pittman, she has fled back home to Charlotte, where she is raising funds to try to cover her losses and restart her business on a patch of land in that area instead. “
I cried for a long time," she told reporters. "For somebody to be hateful because of my skin color makes it even worse. It’s really heartbreaking.”
