Sunset, Sunrise

His portrait occupies a prominent place on the wall. The suit is gray, the tie red with diagonal stripes. He returns a viewer’s gaze with a direct, beneficent look and a hint of a grin. The fingers of his right hand grasp a book with a deep golden cover: Leon Levine and Family Dollar: An American Success Story.

When he died on April 5, 2023, at 85, Leon Levine was hailed nationwide as the founder of both a business empire and an eponymous philanthropic organization in Charlotte that granted more than $450 million to health care, education, and community causes over 43 years. Levine and his second wife, Sandra, founded the Leon Levine Foundation in 1980, and he devoted himself to it after retiring from Family Dollar in 2003. 

In an age of tech oligarchs and rapidly accrued millions from nebulous sources, Levine seemed to represent the values of another era, one in which wealth and generosity weren’t incompatible.

“Two things flew out of him,” said Michael Tarwater, a friend and former health care executive who now serves as the Levine Foundation’s board chair. “One, he was a businessman. He approached every aspect of his thinking through a businessperson’s mindset, including our philanthropy. But the counterbalance to that was this real sense of humanity and this desire to give back.”

To give back on a large scale, though, Levine had to accumulate a fortune. He was an aggressive, tough-minded entrepreneur. Family Dollar, which Levine started in a humble storefront on Central Avenue in Charlotte, didn’t grow into an $8 billion national retail giant because of his altruism. 

But the business reflected his concern for people on the economic margins. He followed generations of fellow Jewish merchants in the South who had exercised a lifelong commitment to fair trade and community building: Sell affordable goods to people who need them in the places where they live.

“Once somebody walks out of a store, they rarely remember how much they paid for something,” he once said, “but they do remember where they bought it and if it lasts.”

The two institutions he founded and shepherded had different goals but similar attitudes toward their neighbors. That’s why, three years after his death, Levine’s legacy carries a glaring, even tragic, contradiction: The Leon Levine Foundation, which inherited his wealth, is embarking on a $2 billion effort to help communities in need throughout the Carolinas over the next half century. Meanwhile, under private equity ownership, Family Dollar faces scrutiny for exploiting those same communities. 

The Southern Jewish Merchant Way

Throughout his life, Levine championed the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “world repair.” If you’re able to improve the world around you, the principle holds, you’re obligated to do everything you can. His father, Harry, was one of 10 children who emigrated from Russia with their parents around 1900. The family brought the principle with them across the Atlantic.

The 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, falsely blamed on Jews, led to violent attacks and anti-Semitic laws in Russia and, ultimately, mass emigration. An estimated 2.5 million Eastern European Jews poured into the United States between the 1880s and the mid-1920s. Some of them, including the Levines, worked their way south rather than establishing homes and businesses in the Northeast. 

Many of their forebears had been itinerant peddlers who traveled from village to village, selling inexpensive goods to people who couldn’t afford better. Jewish immigrants adopted some of the same patterns in the post-Civil War South, where they loaded up carts in the region’s new whistle-stop towns.

During the Jim Crow era, the wealthy white landowners who owned the largest businesses wouldn’t sell to Black customers or would price goods out of their reach. Jewish merchants were often their only source of affordable essentials like flour, farm equipment, and work clothes. Some Jewish stores even extended credit to Black patrons, an unheard-of practice among white merchants.

Over the decades, a bond developed. “The Jewish immigrant had never seen black men before,” wrote Eli N. Evans in The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, published in 1973. “He was more willing to respond out of actual experience with the Negro than out of a twisted history of slavery, guilt, and pathological hate.”

The Levines lived and worked within that tradition. After Harry Levine’s discharge from the Army in 1919, he and his wife, Minnie, settled in Rockingham, a small textile town about 70 miles east of Charlotte. They bought a modest, whitewashed Craftsman-style house with a gabled roof and eventually raised four children: Dorothy, Sherman, Alvin, and Leon. In 1921, Harry bought a downtown building from another Jewish merchant, Abram Aronson, and turned it into a department store, The Hub. All the Levine children got their first real work experience at The Hub, and all four would later go into retail themselves. 

Even as a child, Leon Levine understood the necessity of hard work—some of his earliest memories were of cleaning coal ash from the family’s basement furnace—and displayed a penchant for the hard-headed deal. When he was about 9, his older brothers left him at home while they took a day trip to the beach. Leon was so furious, he broke his piggy bank, counted about $13 in pennies, and took a taxi there.

“It wasn’t enough to cover the fare,” Leon later remembered, “but the driver figured he could get my father to give him something from the store for the rest.” 

Rockingham, a town of about 9,000 today, remembers and honors the Levine family’s legacy, especially Leon’s. On a sunny April day, John Hutchinson, Rockingham’s mayor and an avid amateur historian, guided me on a walking tour of the town’s sites linked to Levine, including Discovery Place Kids, an interactive children’s museum to which the Levine Foundation contributed a $2 million grant.

“There are a lot of people who’ve come from here who became successful,” Hutchinson told me as we walked, “but not all of them have reached back and continued to make a difference like Leon Levine did.”

Charlotte and the Rise of Family Dollar 

In 1949, when Leon was 12, his father died of a heart attack. Sherman and Minnie ran The Hub for the next 11 years, and Leon helped, especially after Sherman was drafted into the Army and shipped off to Korea. By the late ’50s, however, Minnie and her sons were ready to leave Rockingham for the “big city,” Charlotte.

Alvin, the middle son, was first. He co-founded the Pic ’n Pay shoe store with Albert Segel, Dorothy’s husband, on Charlotte’s Central Avenue in 1957. Two years later, his brother Sherman opened a clothing shop, Sherman’s Ltd., on the same block. 

Discount retail was just beginning to settle into its economic niche. Leon Levine, then 22, had recently learned about a Kentucky chain that sold nothing for more than $1. He liked the low operational costs but found the $1 limit too confining. He set the cap at $2, then $3 soon after. But Levine still wanted “dollar” in the name. He went through dozens of options before he chose the one that sounded right. He opened the first Family Dollar in November 1959. A Charlotte Observer photograph from June 1960 shows the three Levine brothers arm in arm, striding down the sidewalk in front of Sherman’s Ltd. They were on their way.

Leon Levine never strayed from his bedrock vision of what a Family Dollar should be: a clean, well-lit discount store in low- to middle-income neighborhoods that operated on a cash-and-carry model to keep costs down. “I knew who my customers were,” he said later, “and I bought merchandise based on what they wanted.” He famously scouted store locations by checking supermarket parking lots for oil stains. If the neighborhood had enough people who drove old, leaky cars, he reasoned, it was the right place for a Family Dollar. “Our customers,” he recalled, “didn’t drive Cadillacs.”

His was a version of the old railroad-town Jewish merchant’s ethos updated for the post-World War II economic boom, and it flourished as other retailers relocated to the more affluent suburbs. By 1966, Family Dollar operated 27 stores in four states, with annual gross sales exceeding $5 million. 

That year, Levine absorbed another personal blow—Barbara, his wife of eight years and mother of their three children, died of breast cancer at 27. But Levine kept working, eventually outpacing his two brothers. Sherman’s Ltd. lasted for only a few years, and Sherman later joined Family Dollar as an executive. Alvin had more success, turning Pic ’n Pay into a nationwide brand before he sold it in 1979.

Having gone public in 1970, Family Dollar made the Fortune 500 in 1995. By 2003, when  Levine retired and passed the chairmanship to his oldest child, Howard, the chain had grown to 4,700 stores in more than 40 states and rewarded shareholders with 27 consecutive years of rising profits. 

Today, despite its 7,000 stores nationwide, the retailer’s prospects are far dimmer than they were a decade ago. Worse, its relationship with the communities where the stores are—a guiding principle from the beginning—flies in the face of Leon Levine’s original vision.

‘I Don’t Think It’s Going to End Well’

In 2015, Virginia-based Dollar Tree acquired Family Dollar for $8.5 billion after a long and ferocious bidding war with its chief rival, Dollar General. Dollar Tree cast the merger as a “transformational” step toward creating a top discount retailer that could compete more effectively against Dollar General’s growing empire. The merger included Howard Levine’s appointment to the company’s board of directors.

Almost exactly a decade later, the transformation fell apart. In March 2024, the company announced that it would close 1,000 Family Dollar stores. On July 7, 2025, Dollar Tree said it would sell Family Dollar to a pair of private equity firms for $1 billion, a fraction of what it had paid.

Industry experts said the company struggled with operational issues and poor store locations. “Basically, Dollar Tree bit off far more than it could chew,” said Neil Saunders of GlobalData. By then, Howard Levine was long gone. He left the company in January 2016, after helping complete the merger.

The purpose and public perception of discount retailers like Family Dollar had also turned. The shift began in the 1980s, as Walmart expanded from a few hundred stores to more than a thousand, said Rick Niswander, an accounting professor emeritus at East Carolina University who’s closely tracked the discount retail industry for the past decade. Other retail outlets expanded, but they cut costs, too, which led to a decline in service and quality. Customer bases dwindled, and traditional discount stores began to peel away from their communities.

Private equity firms raise money from investors to buy struggling companies, restructure the companies to make more money, then sell them at a profit within a few years. Once they entered the picture, as in the 2025 Family Dollar sale, any lingering sense of social responsibility disappeared. Researchers and community groups have found that discount retailers in low-income areas create food deserts and undercut local entrepreneurs. They, and private equity owners in general, are sometimes compared to swarms of locusts that strip acquired assets of value, then move on to others. 

Niswander underscored the importance of community relationships in the old model, where retailers “have some consideration of societal issues. If they do something totally stupid, their shareholders can start to try to kick out the executives,” he explained. “If you’re private equity, none of that stuff is there. Their purpose is to increase margins and cut costs.” 

In March, for example, news outlets reported that Family Dollar plans to close a Matthews distribution center and cut 373 jobs. “I don’t think it’s going to end well for Family Dollar as a name,” Niswander said. “It’ll probably take three, four, five years to happen, but you can’t totally cut your way to success.” 

More troubling, a December 2025 investigation by The Guardian revealed that Family Dollar and its rival, Dollar General, regularly overcharge customers in low-income neighborhoods. Since January 2022, Family Dollar stores had failed more than 2,100 government price accuracy inspections in 20 states. The inspections flag when goods are listed at one price on the shelf but ring up at higher prices at the register—discrepancies that shoppers seldom notice. Dollar General was even worse: It failed more than 4,300 inspections in 23 states over the same period.

The Levine family long ago cut formal ties with Family Dollar. Still, the brand and Leon Levine are forever linked. As we sat in the Leon Levine Foundation’s conference room, where his portrait hangs, I asked foundation leaders: Does it rankle to see what Family Dollar has become? Is it fair to see that as part of Levine’s legacy, too?

The questions prompted an awkward silence. Tarwater, the board chair, was at the table, along with President and CEO Tom Lawrence and Senior Vice President Justin Steinschriber. Tarwater finally broke the tension with a direct gaze and an edge to his voice.

“When the private equity firms that bought out those retail outlets establish a foundation to give back to the communities they serve, then you can make a comparison. But we’ll both be six feet under, with daisies growing up above us, before that happens,” he said. “It is a different mindset about how to run a business and a different mindset about serving communities.” Prominent business schools, Tarwater said, “used to teach people how to be great businessmen. At some point, they taught people how to rip other people off.”

Family Dollar’s corporate office, now in Chesapeake, Va., did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

A Private Public Life 

Today, the Levine name adorns so many institutions, buildings, and public spaces in the Carolinas that the foundation doesn’t even keep track of them all: the Levine Museum of the New South, Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute, the Sandra and Leon Levine Jewish Community Center, among many others.

But Leon Levine himself rarely granted interviews. In 1987, his daughter Mindy died by suicide, which led the family to help fund a mental health treatment center in Davidson. A Charlotte Observer profile that year described him as “shy, retiring and obsessively private.” Philanthropy was something he did, not something he talked about, even though he knew his name could draw investment dollars—like Atrium Health Levine Children’s Hospital, which opened in 2007, to which Levine committed an initial $10 million. As Tarwater put it, Levine simply “wasn’t a big fan of tooting his own horn.” 

Levine passed on both his commitment to philanthropy and his disdain for publicity to his surviving family. Levine’s son, Howard, and daughter, Lori, went on to found their own philanthropic organizations; Amy, his only child with Sandra, joined the board of a nonprofit that supports the families of children with congenital heart disease. All three either declined or did not respond to interview requests. 

Until recently, even the Levine Foundation copied Levine’s reticence. (Through a Levine Foundation spokesman, Sandra Levine, the foundation’s chair emerita, declined to be interviewed for this story.) Only in May 2025 did the organization hire its first communications director. That happened in part because the foundation decided it had its own story to tell.

The Dawn of Sunrise 

In a rare 2009 interview, as the nation reeled from the previous year’s financial crisis, Levine said that all of his and Sandra’s wealth would go to the foundation. “My children don’t need any more money; they’re comfortable,” he told The Charlotte Observer. 

The foundation’s assets, worth about $700 million before Levine’s death, swelled to $2 billion after it, and foundation leaders had to figure out the best ways to spend that money. Last summer they announced the largest initiative in the foundation’s 45-year history: a campaign to spend the $2 billion in grants over 50 years across the foundation’s “mission areas” of health care, human services, education, and Jewish values. 

Some philanthropic organizations operate on a “perpetual endowment” model that distributes charitable funds indefinitely. Others choose to “spend down” their assets over a set time, then close—which allows them to achieve the greatest impact. These are typically referred to as “sunsets.” The Levine Foundation deliberately named its new effort “Sunrise” to signal what they see as a new day in its history and, they hope, for people and communities in need throughout the Carolinas.

Foundation leaders are still determining which specific projects the effort will target. They’d rather not restrict themselves or the organizations that might apply for grants. “We’re still at the very beginning,” Lawrence said, noting, “It will not just be spending to spend.” He did say that affordable housing, perhaps the most dire civic issue in Charlotte and other cities, will remain a priority. Just last year, the foundation awarded grants totaling $3 million to help seniors age in place in Forsyth County and $2 million to expand the Charlotte area’s Habitat for Humanity building program.

But recently, foundation leaders realized they would have to talk more openly about Sunrise and its connection to Levine’s legacy. The Levine name, prominent as it is, signifies little to a flood of Charlotte newcomers who don’t know its history.

They may not know about the mass Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or how the Levines and others settled in places like Rockingham, or about tikkun olam. They may never have thought about how someone can both do well and do good.

As the years pass, the people at the Levine Foundation who knew the man personally have to tell his story to new hires who didn’t. That’s now about half of the foundation’s 30 staff members.

To make his memory more real, they participate in intimate community projects. Just a few days before I spoke with Lawrence again, members had helped clean, repair, and sort donated books for Promising Pages, a Charlotte nonprofit that directs books to the homes of underserved children.

“It gives us the chance to really talk about him and who he was for a few minutes,” Lawrence said. The staff does it every year in April to mark the anniversary of Levine’s death.

“It is a priority for us,” Lawrence said, “to make sure that he is known as a man, not a portrait.”