Her busses were vandalized and her neighbors threatened her by displaying Confederate flags, swastikas and KKK signs in their yard. The police also did nothing to help her.
She says her plans were ruined by an unfriendly white neighbor who allegedly displayed Confederate flags, swastikas and KKK signs in his yard. She suspects he was behind destruction of her buses that she reported shortly after moving to Salisbury in September.
In January, she posted a TikTok of a heated interaction with a man she identified as the neighbor.
“When I scouted the land the first two times before buying the property, the neighbor was not around,” Pittman told The Post of the man, whose name she did not disclose.
Angel Pittman’s dream was to create a mobile hair salon. So the 21-year-old stylist bought less than an acre of unrestricted land in North Carolina for $10,000 in September and purchased three school buses for $14,000 with money she had saved since she was 17.
“I’ve never seen anybody driving around doing people’s hair,” she said. “But not only did I want to get paid for doing hair, but I wanted to drive around, do a couple of homeless people’s hair and maybe go to some prisons and help incarcerated people.”
Pittman’s plan was to place the buses on the land, transform one into a living space, and turn the other two into mobile salons. She could do hair on her property, set up shop in different locations, or do house calls.
But that goal was crushed before it even began because of where Pittman chose to buy land: Salisbury, a small city in Rowan county, North Carolina.
When she first visited the property, and later during the closing of the land, she felt something was off in the predominantly white neighborhood but forged ahead with her plans. During the closing, Pittman encountered an elderly white man who lived across her property who she said “had already given me weird vibes”, but there were no indications of his intolerance.
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?’”
Rowan county, which is 79% white and 17% Black, is a “sundown town”, a Jim Crow era term used to reference overwhelmingly white neighborhoods known for racial segregation. Katherine Mellen Charron, a history professor at North Carolina State University, said sundown areas remain prevalent in places like Rowan county to limit homeownership from Black Americans. (The Jim Crow saying was: N-word, “don’t let the sun go down on you in this town”.)
Salisbury, which sits between Charlotte and Greensboro, has made headlines for racial incidents as recently as last year.
According to US Census data from 2022, nearly 54% of the city’s population is white — while 37% is black. Salisbury is the seat of Rowan County, which is nearly 80% white.
The Guardian reported the county is a “sundown” area, a term originating from the Jim Crow era that’s used to refer to segregated white communities. Katherine Mellen Charron, a history professor at North Carolina State University, told the outlet that “sundown towns” limited homeownership for black Americans, “economically and politically” benefitting “white supremacists.”
“It’s a matter of economic insecurity and rising economic inequality, and the sense that white property values will go down if black people move into the neighborhood and real estate agents blockbusting and taking advantage of that,” she explained.
She told The Guardian her neighbor sat in his yard with his “gun out the whole time.”
She continued: “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.”
In late September, she reported to the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office that someone had broken the glass and vandalized her buses with racial slurs, according to a police report obtained by The Post.
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