1712 Madison Avenue

Built 1953-54 for Robert Person, Jr., a counselor at Mecklenburg County Juvenile Court and his wife Dorothy H. Person, an assistant librarian with the Charlotte Public Library system.

Person came to Charlotte after earning his Masters in Social Work at Atlanta University in 1948. His thesis documented the John Avery Boys Club, founded in Durham, North Carolina by the local Negro Citizens League to help youth in poverty. That task — building institutions to assist youngsters struggling against poverty — would be Person’s life-long calling.

Person’s accomplishments as counselor in Charlotte’s Juvenile Court — at a time when few African Americans held professional positions in the justice system — won respect statewide. North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges appointed Person in 1959 to the state’s “advisory committee for the state training school for Negro children at Goldsboro,” a facility for juvenile delinquents. The University of North Carolina brought him in as a part-time lecturer in the early 1970s in its School of Social Work in Chapel Hill.

When U.S. Government funds began to be available to cities as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on Poverty, Robert Person stepped into leadership roles. In the late 1960s, he took charge of the Charlotte Area Fund which managed local grants under the various anti-poverty programs. In the 1970s Person directed the Charlotte office of the Manpower Program, a federal initiative to train and employ jobless youth.

Robert Person, Jr., was an active member of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, chairing the large congregation’s Board of Trustees in the 1980s.