A Black woman who had dreams of running a mobile hair styling business has been stifled by a racist neighbor in her town.
According to The New York Post, 21-year-old Angel Pittman spent $10,000 on unrestricted North Carolina land to us as a home base. She then spent $14,000 on three school buses, so she could hit the road to style her clients’ hair.
That plan was thwarted when a racist white neighbor allegedly displayed Confederate flags, swastikas, and KKK signs in his yard. Pittman also suspects that he was responsible for the destruction of her buses right after she moved to Salisbury last September.
She told The New York Post that her first interaction with the white neighbor was an “awkward exchange.”
“When I scouted the land the first two times before buying the property,
the neighbor was not around. Our first time seeing him was the day we brought the buses over to the land and we had an awkward exchange. He asked us what we were doing there and if we were trying to get shade.”She told The Guardian that after she purchased the land and brought the buses onto the property, the neighbor began harassing her
“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.”
Soon after, she noticed racial slurs had been written on her buses and their windows had been broken, so she contacted the police. Deputies from the Rowan county sheriff’s office came to the property and reported what they saw as a hate crime. Yet, the deputies at the scene brushed it off by telling her, “Oh, yeah, they do that all the time,” Pittman stated. “The police talked to us for a little bit but they didn’t do anything. They just wrote a report and that was it.”
Since then, she started a GoFundMe account to raise money to repair the buses and to relocate to Charlotte, NC. She hoped to raise $80,000 to do so, but surpassed that goal and is currently at $93,000.