Angel Pittman, 21, mulled over ways to expand her hairstyle business and came up with the idea of a mobile salon. According to her, she had not seen anyone operate a mobile salon in the United States.
“I’ve never seen anybody driving around doing people’s hair,” she told the Guardian. “But not only did I want to get paid for doing hair, I wanted to drive around, do a couple of homeless people’s hair and maybe go to some prisons and help incarcerated people.”
To materialize her dream, she bought land in North Carolina for $10,000 and later acquired three school buses she intended to use for her mobile salon business. One of the buses was going to serve as her place of abode while the other two served as mobile salons.
However, her dream failed to materialize as a result of the location of the land she bought, which is just outside Salisbury, a small city in Rowan County, North Carolina. – where the population is overwhelmingly white and noted for racial segregation.
She encountered a white supremacist who did not feel comfortable living near her, and became more violent as the days passed. She recalls returning from her parents’ home one day to find her buses vandalized.
The glass windows were broken, with racial slurs written on them, as well as a display of Confederate flags, swastikas, and KKK signs all over his yard. Pittman tried to reach out to the police but to no avail.
The Guardian spoke to one of the sheriff’s captains, Mark McDaniel, who said the attack was a targeted one because the neighbor always had white supremacy signs displayed.
“It wasn’t like he put it there overnight,” McDaniel told the Guardian. “It’s nothing like that. So those items were not just put there after the buses were put there.”
Pittman disputed the police assessment of the attacks and fearing for her life, decided to move back home to Charlotte. She is also rebuilding from scratch.
“To have all of that ripped from under me was really hurtful,” she said. “I cried for a long time. For somebody to be hateful because of my skin color makes it even worse. It’s really heartbreaking.”
One of her steps is to launch a fundraising event to recoup her losses and buy land in Charlotte. For now, she has managed to tow two of her buses to Charlotte. The third business is still in Salisbury because of the severity of the vandalism.
