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< Back NAACP Officials Celebrating Twentieth Anniversary Photograph: NAACP Officials Celebrating Twentieth Anniversary - Source: LOC The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Founded in 1909, it was at the center of nearly every battle for the rights and dignity of African Americans in the twentieth century. Today, the NAACP honors its heritage of activism and continues to work for civil rights. Historical Background 1895 Booker T. Washington delivers a speech at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia. This speech calls for a moderate approach to race relations, with an emphasis on gradual economic and social advancement for African Americans. After the speech, the scholar W.E.B. DuBois sends a note to congratulate Washington on the speech. 1909 A group of white activists, including the descendants of abolitionists, issues a call for a conference to protest discrimination and violence against African Americans. Some 60 people, seven of whom are African American, sign the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth. The call leads to the first meeting of the National Negro Conference, held on May 31 and June 1, in New York City. 1910 The National Negro Conference adopts the name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The organization names as president Moorfield Storey, a white constitutional lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. W.E.B DuBois is selected as the director of publications and research. 1916 The NAACP establishes an anti-lynching committee. In 1918 this committee releases the booklet Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 1917 After a deadly race riot in East St. Louis, the NAACP organizes the Silent Protest March in New York, N.Y. Over 10,000 African American men, women and children march to the sound of muffled drums while marchers carry banners calling for justice and equal rights. 1918 Walter White, the Assistant Field Secretary of the NAACP, travels into the south and sends back reports on lynching and other violence against African Americans. Included in his reports are notes on the lynching of fifteen year old Sammie Smith in Nashville, Tennessee. 1920 James Weldon Johnson, the noted writer and diplomat, becomes the first African American to head the NAACP. Also this year the NAACP begins to fly a flag from its office with the words, “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday”. 1929 NAACP celebrates its 20th anniversary at the annual conference in Cleveland. By this time, there are 325 branches across the country. 1931-1941 During the Great Depression, the NAACP begins to focus on economic justice. Walter White, a friend and adviser to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, meets with her often in attempts to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to outlaw job discrimination. 1932 The NAACP sends staff to investigate complaints about the treatment of laborers working on the War Department’s Mississippi River Flood Control Project. Their report on conditions there, Mississippi River Slavery– 1932, is followed by a pay raise and shortened hours for many Mississippi levee camp laborers. 1935 Charles Hamilton Houston is named NAACP chief counsel. His strategy on school-segregation cases will pave the way for his protégé Thurgood Marshall to prevail in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. One of the cases Houston will litigate is the case of Donald Murray, who in 1935 became the first African American student admitted to the University of Maryland law school. 1936 Walter White writes to the track and field star Jesse Owens to encourage him not to participate in the Olympics in Berlin. Owens decides to go to the Olympics, where he wins four gold medals. 1939 Marian Anderson performs at the Lincoln Memorial after being denied permission to sing at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s (DAR) Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt resigns from the DAR in protest and helps arrange the concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 1941 The NAACP decides to support A. Philip Randolph’s proposed mass March on Washington to protest discrimination in defense industries and armed forces. 1944 The NAACP has 430,000 members, the largest in the association’s history. In the Smith v. Allwright voting rights case the Supreme Court states that Lonnie Smith of Houston, Texas, was illegally denied the right to vote in a 1940 primary election. Thurgood Marshall describes his work on this case in a detailed, and often humorous, memo with the subject “Saving the Race.” 1947 Harry S. Truman addresses the NAACP’s thirty-eighth annual conference, in Washington, D.C. A year later he will sign two executive orders: One institutes fair employment practices in the federal government and the second directs the armed services to provide equality of treatment and opportunity to all personnel. 1954 In the Brown v. Board of Education decision the Supreme Court states unanimously that school segregation is unconstitutional. 1957 Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches, leads the fight to desegregate Arkansas schools. In September, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, is integrated. 1970 The NAACP affirms its commitment to universal suffrage and begins work to amend the Voting Rights Act. 1989 NAACP holds a Silent March to protest U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have reversed many of the gains made against discrimination. This is modeled after the 1917 Silent Protest protesting against the East St. Louis riot. 2001 The NAACP joins a class action lawsuit against the state of Florida alleging voter irregularities in the 2000 presidential election. Click Source Link To Read Articles Associated To The History Of The NAACP. Source: https://www.loc.gov/.../naacp-a-century-in-the-fight-for.../ Previous Next

< Back Sylvia Elizabeth Mathis ​ On June 2, 1976, FBI Director Clarence Kelley presented Special Agent Sylvia E. Mathis with her badge and credentials, #2658. She was issued a leather attaché case, an unadorned purse, and a Smith & Wesson revolver with a snub-nosed barrel short enough to fit inside the purse. Sylvia Elizabeth Mathis was the first Black woman to be recruited as a special agent for the FBI of the United States, and she was the first Black woman agent recruited in the state of North Carolina. At the time, only 41 agents out of a total of 8,500 in the country were women. Sylvia E. Mathis, was born in 1949 in Durham, NC. She graduated from New York University (1969-72), where she received a Bachelor’s in Political Science this was after a year (1968-69) at Fisk University. In May 1975, Mathis graduated from UNC School of Law and in July she passed the North Carolina Bar. Right after law school, she stayed in North Carolina and worked for the Department of Cultural Resources. . Hers was a life framed by a commitment to service, a dedication to family, and marked by numerous accomplishments. At age 26, Mathis became the first Black woman FBI agent, beginning her training at Quantico in February 1976. Quoted in the February 7, 1976 issue of the Virginian Pilot newspaper, Mathis explained, “…I am interested in delving into the relation of defending of rights and enforcement of rights. Going into the FBI seemed like a natural step.” Mathis was first assigned to the New York office of the FBI where she worked as a special agent and then as an advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel (1979-80). She then returned to Jacksonville, Florida to care for her parents in 1982. Accounts vary as to whether Mathis was a Florida or North Carolina native, but while the family may have had Durham connections, Jacksonville was where her parents had called home for many years, and Sylvia had attended Bishop Kenny High School in the city. Just the next year, in 1983, Sylvia’s life was tragically cut short by a car accident at age 34. At the time of her death, she worked as the Director of the Jacksonville Downtown Ecumenical Service Council, providing support to homeless and unemployed residents of the city. Shortly before her death, she was awarded “Ms. Metro” by the Jacksonville weekly newspaper, The Metropolis. A volunteer who worked with Mathis was quoted in the October 19, 1983 issue of the paper that, “She is a very caring person and has given a lot of her time to those who need help.” In a 1984 letter to the UNC publication University Report, Law School professor James B. Craven III remembered that she was a “rare and unforgettable” student, that he “was always proud of her and miss her now.” ---------- From The FBI's Bio Web site: On February 17, 1976, a 26-year-old lawyer named Sylvia Elizabeth Mathis arrived at the sprawling Virginia campus that housed the FBI Academy. Like the other recruits, she was there to begin the rigorous four-month training program, and, hopefully, earn her stripes as a special agent of the FBI. Mathis, however, had an added motivation and challenge. She was aiming to make history—to become the FBI’s first female African-American agent. It was an opportune moment. Nationwide, doors were finally opening for African-American women. Thanks to the groundwork laid by such 20th century pioneers as Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Height, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Daisy Bates, the civil rights and feminist movements were converging and gaining momentum. By the 1960s and 1970s, black women—like Shirley Chisholm, who won a seat in Congress in 1968—were rising to positions of leadership, in government and elsewhere. Despite the signs of progress, Mathis had her work cut out for her. At the time, integration of women into the Bureau’s agent ranks was moving slowly. Only about 40 of the approximately 8,500 FBI agents were women; the first two female agents of the modern era—Susan Roley Malone and Joanne Pierce Misko—had earned their badges and credentials less than four years earlier. Though welcomed by some colleagues, women and minorities often felt out of place at the Academy. Then, as now, the training itself was also quite demanding. Candidates had to master a variety of academic subjects and excel at a series of real-world practical exercises. The overall physicality of the training was arduous and required less-athletic recruits—men and women alike—to put in extra effort. Even if they had never fired a weapon in their lives, trainees needed to quickly become proficient in marksmanship. In previous years many aspirants, including two female African-Americans before Mathis, had not been able to complete the training. But Sylvia Mathis was determined. Born on July 7, 1949 and raised in North Carolina and Florida, she had demonstrated both smarts and resolve. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from New York University in 1972 and a Juris Doctor from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1975. Her law school dean, a former FBI agent, encouraged her to consider the Bureau. Given her interest in both the protection and enforcement of civil rights, she felt it was a good fit. She applied and was accepted in early February. As the training progressed, Mathis showed adaptability and dedication. Her six-week report noted that although she had some “difficulty in the gym and on the range,” she was working hard. Academically, she was performing well. Overall, her instructors were confident in her graduation and ultimate success as an agent, and they were right. On June 2, 1976, FBI Director Clarence Kelley presented Special Agent Sylvia Mathis with her badge and credentials, #2658. She was issued a leather attaché case, an unadorned purse, and a Smith & Wesson revolver with a snub-nosed barrel short enough to fit inside the purse. Following graduation, Mathis was sent to the New York Field Office and assigned to its organized crime squad, where she helped investigate illegal gambling and extortion cases. She worked a variety of other matters, including handling short-term undercover duties and interviewing survivors of the 1978 massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. In 1979, Mathis left the FBI and went to work as an attorney in New York for a few years before moving to Jacksonville, Florida, to be with her family. She was later named director of the city’s Downtown Ecumenical Services Council, which provides emergency assistance to those in need. Tragically, Mathis was killed in a car accident in October 1983. Photo Source: The Carolina Times, February 21, 1976 Article source: https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/.../01/16/sylviamathisuncalumna/ Article Source: https://www.fbi.gov/.../our-history-our-service-sylvia... Previous Next

< Back Harvey Gantt “Harvey Gantt and the Sea of Reporters”: On January 28, 1963, Gantt became the first Black student of Clemson College (now Clemson University) in South Carolina. The Charleston, SC native later became the first Black mayor of Charlotte, NC twice elected, in the 1980's. —Photo by Cecil J. Williams Previous Next

< Back I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny Vivian Liberto Cash. The First Wife of Johnny Cash. In her book, "I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny" by Vivian Cash (Author), Ann Sharpsteen - October 21, 2008 She gives her truth in her voice about her life before, during and after her marriage to Johnny Cash. Amazon Summary: I Walked the Line is a chronicle of first love, long-kept secrets, betrayal, forgiveness, and the truth--told at last by Johnny Cash's first wife, the mother of his four daughters. It is a book that had the full support of Johnny Cash, who insisted it was time for their story to be told, despite any painful revelations that might come to light as a result. Many myths and contradictions regarding the life of Johnny and his family have been perpetuated for decades in film and literature. Vivian exposes previously untold stories involving Johnny's drug addiction, his fraught family life, and their divorce in 1968, as well as the truth behind the writing of two of Johnny's most famous songs, "I Walk the Line" and "Ring of Fire." Supplemented by a never-before-published archive of love letters and family photos, I Walked the Line offers a deeper look at one of the most significant artists in music history. Here, fans and readers can experience the extraordinary account of love and heartbreak between Johnny and Vivian, and come to understand Vivian's dignified silence over the years. Through this elegant, revealing, and powerful memoir, Vivian Cash's voice is finally heard End of summary. ---- Below is an article by the Washington Post about Vivian and Johnny Cash. Quote from WaPo article: "Vivian Cash’s maternal great-great grandmother was indeed an enslaved Black woman, Sarah Shields, whose White father in 1848 had granted her and her eight siblings their freedom and their passage into Whiteness, too. Shields married a White man — albeit illegally — and by the time Jim Crow arrived in the 1930s all of her children and their descendants were listed as White." --- White Supremacists Attacked Johnny Cash for Marrying A ‘Negro’ Woman. But Was His First Wife Black? By Sydney Trent / WaPo May 16, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT On Oct. 4, 1965, country music star Johnny Cash was arrested near the U.S.-Mexico border after buying amphetamines and sedatives from a drug dealer in Juárez and stashing them in his guitar case. His long-suffering first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash, left their daughters in California and journeyed to El Paso to be by his side for the arraignment. As Vivian stood with Cash in front of the federal courthouse, wrapped in a dark coat, her eyes downcast beneath her bouffant hairdo, a newspaper photographer snapped a picture. In the image, Vivian, whose father was of Sicilian heritage and whose mother was said to be of German and Irish descent, appeared to be Black. (Note: photo mentioned in this article is the top middle image in photo collage with this post)-End Note. At that time in the eyes of most Americans, you were either Black or you weren’t. Interracial marriage would not become legal nationally until 1967, and it would be considered anathema, particularly in the South, for years to come. As the image of Johnny and Vivian began appearing in publications across the country, white supremacists went wild. Leaders of the racist National States’ Rights Party in Alabama ran a story in their newspaper “The Thunderbolt” with the headline: “Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash’s Negro Wife.” “Money from the sale of [Cash’s] records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and negro women,” the paper warned. The story also mentioned the couple’s “mongrelized” young children, which included future country star Rosanne Cash and her younger sisters, Kathy, Cindy and Tara. The organization, which was connected to the Ku Klux Klan, then launched a fierce boycott against the famous musician that lasted over a year. Cash’s handlers quickly launched a counterattack, filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and soliciting testimonials from relatives and friends attesting to Vivian’s racial background. They included Vivian’s designation as Caucasian on her marriage certificate and a list of the Whites-only schools she had attended. But was Vivian’s heritage fully Western European as her relatives insisted, or was something else mixed in? An African American passing her on the street could be forgiven for thinking Vivian was a light-skinned Black woman, with her full lips and darkish skin. Yet if it were a case of “passing” as White — something many Black Americans had done to escape discrimination throughout history — Vivian and her family seemed wholly unaware. The DNA tests that have upset conventional thinking about race had not yet been invented. Were there African ancestors in Vivian Cash’s family tree? The answer would not arrive for more than half a century. A Long-Distance Courtship Johnny Cash and Vivian Liberto met during the summer of 1951 at a roller rink in San Antonio where Vivian had been raised in a strict Catholic family, the daughter of Thomas Liberto, owner of an insurance agency and an amateur musician, and Irene Robinson Liberto, a homemaker. Cash, who came from a struggling Arkansas farm family, was in his Air Force uniform. The petite and lovely Liberto, 17, was out skating before a sleepover with a friend. The story goes that Cash’s buddies dared him to talk to her and that he possibly bumped into her on the rink to get the conversation going. However it started, the couple’s romance appeared instantaneous. After Cash, then 19, left for Germany a few weeks later, they began an ardent courtship. They wrote each other almost every day, sometimes more than once, amassing more than a thousand letters over the next few years. Vivian would later publish some of them in her memoir “I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny Cash,” named for the 1956 song her husband wrote about their marriage. “My Baby,” Cash wrote to Liberto on March 29, 1952 at 11 a.m. “I just went to mail call and I got two more letters from you. That makes seven in the last three days. And I’m in love with you, honey. I never fell so hard in my life. I think about you every minute of the day and you’re with me wherever I go. Don’t ever worry about me stopping loving you darling because I know I never will. I’ve gotten you so deep under my skin that you’re a part of me.” He called Vivian, who was shy and very traditional, his “little girl” and referred adoringly to her Italian heritage, even as he fretted over their impending “mixed marriage” because he was Protestant and she was Catholic. Cash also wrote about getting in a fight with a Black man in which Cash hurled racial epithets. “I yelled for a full 30 minutes that I could whip any Negro who walked on the face of the Earth,” Cash wrote Vivian in a letter on May 1, 1953. His actions stand in sharp contrast to his later reputation as a tolerant man, which some attributed to his evolution from a small-town rural boy to a much more worldly musician. Cash’s letters to Vivian also revealed that he was already battling demons as a deeply religious man who had love-hate relationships with alcohol and women. His struggles with addiction and fidelity would come fully to the fore after the glorious first years of his 1954 marriage to Vivian. 'I Wanted To Die’ As he spent countless days on the road building and nurturing a booming career, Cash deep-sixed on drugs and began an affair with Country singer June Carter, his future second wife. In 1965, the dalliance was an open secret when Vivian, by then deeply distressed by the state of her marriage, attended Cash’s court hearing in El Paso. The white supremacist media campaign against Cash devastated Vivian. “The stress was almost unbearable. I wanted to die,” she wrote in her memoir. “And it didn’t help that Johnny issued a statement to the KKK informing them I wasn’t Black.” She did not think the campaign should have been dignified with a response. In the 2020 documentary “My Darling Vivian” about Cash and his first wife, the couple’s daughters added more detail: Back home in Casitas Springs, Calif., the death threats and vitriol had frightened Vivian to the core. “She was scared to death that the KKK was coming for her and that Dad would be on the road,” Kathy Cash said in the documentary. “She had no idea what to do. Everyone knew where we lived.” Night after night, Vivian stood at the living room picture window, coffee and cigarette in hand, surveilling the front yard and the driveway, a gun close by. Between Cash’s drug use and neglect, June Carter and the fear, she was unraveling — losing weight, not sleeping, nerves fraying. Her doctor urged her to save herself. Cash’s mother suggested that if Vivian filed for divorce it would jolt her husband to his senses and he would come home and work on their marriage, according to Robert Hilburn in “Johnny Cash: The Life.” Instead, Cash signed the papers and the couple was divorced in 1966. “He won the battle against bigotry but lost his wife,” blared a headline in the Dallas Times- Herald. Two years later, Cash married Carter and Vivian married police officer Dick Distin and faded into “negative obscurity,” her daughters said, much of the world oblivious to her 12-year marriage to Johnny Cash. Yet one thing never changed: Vivian’s love for Cash. After her former husband died at 71 in 2003, just a few months after June, Vivian told her daughters: “Even though I didn’t see him or talk to him very often, just knowing he was on the planet was enough. But now that he’s not, I don’t know if I want to be here.” Vivian died two years later . Earlier this year, the mystery of whether Vivian was descended in part from Africans was finally resolved. In a February episode of the PBS show, “Finding Your Roots,” host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy. Vivian Cash’s maternal great-great grandmother was indeed an enslaved Black woman, Sarah Shields, whose White father in 1848 had granted her and her eight siblings their freedom and their passage into Whiteness, too. Shields married a White man — albeit illegally — and by the time Jim Crow arrived in the 1930s all of her children and their descendants were listed as White. “That’s likely why to this day, many of her direct descendants have no idea that they have any African American ancestry,” Gates said. At one point in the conversation, Gates asked Cash how it felt to learn that her mother’s ancestors had been enslaved? Cash bent her head and began to cry. “It feels heartbreaking,” she said. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../johnny-cash-first.../ ... Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/.../johnny-cash-first-wife.../ Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Cash Source: https://outsider.com/.../johnny-cash-children-who-where-now/ Previous Next

< Back Lincoln Academy first grade class, 1945 Photograph of first graders at Lincoln Academy. Located infolder labeled: Series: A Subseries: Lincoln AcademPhotographs, Campus, Students, Staff 1945. Photograph of first graders at Lincoln Academy. Located infolder labeled: Series: A Subseries: Lincoln AcademPhotographs, Campus, Students, Staff 1945. Source of photograph: https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islan.../object/tulane:858 ------------------------- "The African-American girls' school was founded in 1886 by Miss E. C. Pruden, a Christian missionary from Massachusetts. It was turned over to the American Missionary Association in 1888, and for more than 20 years, under the principalship of Miss L. S. Cathcart and other leaders, the school grew.[4] It admitted boys in 1889. In the following decade, enrollment increased, a new building was constructed, and dormitories were added. Cathcart Memorial Hall was added in 1900, and additional buildings were added over the following 20 years.[5] In 1916, there were 12 teachers and more than 200 students, 68 of whom were boarding students, the others being day students of the region. The Academy had 11 buildings. A mother's meeting was held weekly to discuss problems. Reading circles were conducted by two teachers. The pastor of the Lincoln Academy Church also influenced instruction. Principal I. Alva Hart stated at the time:[6] "Class room work at Lincoln Academy, no doubt, is like class room work in any other secondary school under the A. M. A. For example in teaching our aim is not to teach subjects alone, but through the subjects to teach the student how to think and what to think.... Every pupil and every problem that comes up is an original one and the teacher must find an original way to solve it; must define words because the vocabulary is so small; must interpret thought because the comprehension of relation is so meager. Moreover the pupils so lack concentration that to hold their attention is always a problem within itself. Then their 'had wents', 'done gone', 'mountings', 'fountings', 'aim to go', 'figered to do so', 'met up with', the vocabulary of their homes, make the task seem as large as King's Mountain itself. History means little to them because their people have played such a small part in the history we study. But they wake up when the teacher can bring to them an illustration where their people have taken an active and honorable part. It is a great pleasure to see most of them working with a determination to be better prepared for the great struggle of life that is before them." The state of North Carolina began the process of converting the academy into a public school in 1922. The school added the eighth grade program in 1938–39, and the academy attained accreditation through the North Carolina State Board of Education at that time. In 1943, the AMA sought community activism for the school, with Edgar D. Wilson becoming the official director in the following year. Gaston County took over the school's administration in 1947, but the AMA continued to serve the students who were boarding. When new public schools for African-American students opened in 1955, the academy was shuttered.[5]" Source https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Lincoln_Academy_(Kings... Previous Next

< Back Palmer Institute "On February 14, 1971, the Alice Freeman Palmer building burned down in the early morning hours. Designed by Winston-Salem architect C. Gilbert Humphries, the AFP building was completed in 1921. It was supposedly the first fireproof building on campus. It was the first building in Sedalia to have electricity and indoor plumbing. "On February 14, 1971, the Alice Freeman Palmer building burned down in the early morning hours. Designed by Winston-Salem architect C. Gilbert Humphries, the AFP building was completed in 1921. It was supposedly the first fireproof building on campus. It was the first building in Sedalia to have electricity and indoor plumbing. Lumber used in construction was cut from campus property and students made the building's 225,000 bricks. Comprised of three floors, the building held an auditorium, library, administrative offices, and the majority of the school's classrooms. Ultimately, the loss of the AFP building was a major part of the decision to close Palmer at the end of the 1971 spring semester." Shared from the CHB NC Historic Site FB page. Previous Next

< Back St Augustine’s College was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina on October 14, 1867 ​ On Mon, 10.14.1867 St Augustine’s College was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina. The founding of St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C., in 1867 is celebrated on this date. It is One of over 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in America. It was established by the Episcopalian clergy for the education of freed slaves. Over time, this Black school has become one of the country's most highly respected private, accredited, coeducational institutions. The college's liberal arts department includes programs in business, computer science, teacher education, the natural sciences, mathematics, allied health, interdisciplinary studies, urban, social/international studies, theater and film, adult education, community development, communications, and military science, a required course for all members of the College's distinguished Army ROTC division. Recently the College's annual enrollment has grown to 1,400 students, about half from North Carolina, the remainder from 37 states, the District of Columbia, the U. S. Virgin Islands, Jamaica and 30 foreign countries. St. Augustine’s consists of nearly 100 dedicated men and women, all capable teachers and scholars. Their main campus is over 55 acres with 37 facilities, three of which, its Chapel, St. Agnes Hall and Taylor Hall, are registered historic landmarks. St. Augustine's was the first HBCU in the nation to have its own on-campus commercial radio and television stations: WAUG-AM750 and WAUG-TV68, Cable Channel 20. They provide a strong liberal arts base for all of its students with flexibility. They enable their students to make educational and career choices consistent with widening opportunities and the rapidly changing conditions of society too. While technical skills are highly prized to guarantee students a meaningful role in the marketplace, St. Augustine's also assists students in developing enriched perspectives to deal competently with an increasingly complex, interactive global society. Some of St. Augustine's more than 10,000 living alumni are: North Carolina State Auditor, the Hon. Ralph Campbell, Jr., class of 1968, the first African-American elected to that position in this state; George Williams, class of 65, internationally acclaimed track and field coach; Ruby Butler DeMesme, ’69, former assistant secretary of the Air Force (ret.) for manpower, installations and environment; and Hannah Diggs Atkins, ’43, first African-American woman elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives (1968-1980). Reference: Black American Colleges and Universities: Profiles of Two-Year, Four-Year, & Professional Schools by Levirn Hill, Pub., Gale Group, 1994 ISBN: 0-02-864984-2 Previous Next

< Back Irwin Holmes Irwin Holmes on the NC State University tennis team in 1957. Irwin Holmes Photo description: Irwin Holmes on the NC State University tennis team in 1957. Credit Courtesy Of Meredythe Holmes -A college age Irwin, an African American wearing glasses, smiling, looking at the viewer, holding a tennis racket. He is wearing a grey tee shirt. Below is an interview with Irwin Holmes on The State Of things-NPR Meet Irwin Holmes: From Tennis With Arthur Ashe To Putting Men In Space By Dana Terry & Frank Stasio • OCT 28, 2019 Irwin Holmes had the early makings of an all-around star. He graduated third in his class at Hillside High School in 1956 at the age of 15. In addition to his academic prowess, Holmes was also a champion on the tennis court. He grew up practicing at the Algonquin Tennis Club where he honed his craft by playing against future greats like Arthur Ashe. Holmes became the No. 2 African American high school player in the country during a time when most blacks were not allowed on the tennis court. Holmes would go on to make history in many other ways: He was one of the first African Americans accepted to North Carolina State University and the first to graduate. He is credited with helping integrate ACC sports as co-captain of NC State’s tennis team. Alongside all of these firsts, Holmes and his family were also overlooked and underutilized. As a kid, Holmes watched as his mother, an English major, was unable to secure a job teaching her preferred subject. She took the only one available and put her creativity to work as an arts and crafts teacher. Despite his father’s expertise, education and ambition, no one below the Mason-Dixon Line would hire a black chemistry teacher. Holmes watched his father turn his relationships and reputation into a career running the recreation centers and programs for blacks in Durham. After graduating from NC State, Holmes faced many of the same problems himself. No one would hire a black engineer. So he headed up North where he helped develop technologies including the one that put a man in space and laid the groundwork for the Internet. Holmes would go on to spend nearly 20 years as an engineer with IBM. In 2018, NC State renamed a building after Holmes in honor of his accomplishments at the university and in his career. Host Frank Stasio talks with Irwin Holmes about his life and legacy. INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS On his parents’ lives: [My parents] both finished college. They both were people who liked other people and spent their careers making life better for other people. My dad ended up in Durham as head of parks and rec for black people … And my mom taught in the Durham County Public School system. She was an art teacher. On his parents’ unrealized potential: They were an example of what America did when it ignored the contributions that black people could make. And we still have that problem by deliberately putting us in jobs that white people feel comfortable with us being in that are usually far below what we are capable of doing. On how discrimination was handled by his father’s generation: Black men in America in those days accepted the way it was in America. [They] did not talk about the fact that the discrimination against them prevented them from doing all the things they could do in life. I never heard either him or his friends ever discuss that … My generation, we complained. On the role of the Algonquin Tennis club in Durham: [The Algonquin Tennis club] was put together by members of the upper [class] black community to have a place to congregate for leisure things, but also to develop a tennis program … Some of us kids snuck in when nobody was watching and used that court to learn and taught ourselves how to play. "I was in college before I ever had a tennis coach" - Irwin Holmes On the first time he heard about Arthur Ashe: Arthur’s father was a janitor for some tennis courts in Richmond, Virginia, so Arthur grew up right next to these tennis courts. Somewhere around 6 years old he started playing tennis on these courts. I know that because some Durham people had played in a tournament in Richmond. I heard them talking about this little 6-year-old boy who was out hitting balls on the court almost like a grown man. On the year he finally got to play Arthur Ashe: That was the year Arthur did not lose a match to any black male of any age in America. And that was the year I played Arthur. It was the year when Arthur finally got big enough, and his game was unbelievable for his age. On choosing to attend college at NC State after Howard University ran out of scholarship money: It had already appeared in all of the major newspapers in North Carolina and half the country that this black student was going to be going to North Carolina State. I got all kinds of people who were happy and let me know how happy they were that I was going. And then I get this opportunity to go to Howard on a [full]scholarship … Even with the scholarship at Howard, I would have ended up paying more than if I went to State. On staying off campus with another black freshman Walter Holmes: Since we were doing something nobody had done before at NC State, we didn’t know what to expect from the white community. So the first thing we did was we found us a room next to the highway so we could get out of Raleigh quicker. So we stayed off campus the first year. On how an opposing college tennis team forfeited a match rather than play a black player: So we show up to play, and their white coach with his all-white team shows up to play what he expects to be an all-white NC State team. And lo and behold here’s this black person showing up to play against his players. Poor guy did not know what was happening. On his tennis coach standing up for him: [Coach John Kenfield] gave them a heads up, but he said under no circumstances would they play NC State where I did not play also. On helping develop technology that would make way for the Internet: The government said we have all these computers all over the United States that need to talk to each other directly. And we need a system where they can talk to each other quickly, and we don’t have one. So they asked us to put together this system. On working to help the next generation of aspiring college students: I’m trying to increase the number of scholarships available at NC State and working with HBCUs to better their situations. We have a shortage of opportunities for people in our race to develop into all they can be in life. Please click Source Link to Listen to the Interview. Source Link: https://www.wunc.org/.../meet-irwin-holmes-tennis-arthur... Previous Next

< Back Max Roach Throughout his career, drummer Max Roach constantly sought to extend the boundaries of jazz, both stylistically and in the service of political change. On April 13th, 2022 the National Recording Registry, a division of the The Library of Congress, included Max Roach's "We Insist" among the 25 entries for treasured American sound recordings for 2022. Max Roach was born in the Newland portion of Pasquotank County NC, in 1924. The link below shares Wednesday's news release from the Library of Congress: https://newsroom.loc.gov/.../fee30140-0454-401c-a2a2... "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" by Max Roach (1960) (Album cover is middle image). Throughout his career, drummer Max Roach constantly sought to extend the boundaries of jazz, both stylistically and in the service of political change. “We Insist!” consists of an innovative suite featuring singer Abby Lincoln performing lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr., accompanied by Roach, legendary tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins (on “Driva’ Man”), Booker Little (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), Walter Benton (tenor sax) and James Schenk (bass). Shortly after the album’s release, Roach stated that he would “never again play anything that does not have social significance,” and he urged Black musicians to “employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people.” The album masterfully fulfills this brief. “Driva’ Man” focuses on the history of slavery and the notorious figure of the slave driver, while “Freedom” and “Tryptich: Prayer/Protest/Peace” deal with emancipation, the ambiguous legacy of freedom, and protest. Side two, devoted to pan-African themes, features a larger percussion ensemble including Babatunde Olatunji, Raymond Mantilla and Thomas Du Vall. The resulting works are heavily influenced by African rhythms; they also foreshadow Roach’s future work with the percussion ensemble M’Boom.=boundaries of jazz, drummer Max Roach, tenor sax players Coleman Hawkins and Walter Benton, trumpeter Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester, bassist James Schenk, percussionists Babatunde Olatunji, Raymond Mantilla and Thomas Du Vall, and singer Abbey Lincoln brought forth an avant-garde jazz suite that tells dramatic stories of a nation struggling for freedom and justice, through protest, prayer, and a panoply of African rhythms. The album concludes with "Tears for Johannesburg," a mournful and moving tribute to the victims of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. The album's subject matter was considered controversial by some critics, but Roach protested the importance of performing socially-relevant music. "We Insist!" would stand as one of his most vital works. ---- ABOUT MAX ROACH: Maxwell Lemuel Roach (Born: January 10, 1925--Died: August 16, 2007), was a percussionist, drummer, and jazz composer. He has worked with many of the greatest jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins. He is widely considered to be one of the most important drummers in the history of jazz. Roach was born in Newland portion of Pasquotank County North Carolina in 1924., to Alphonse and Cressie Roach; his family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was 4 years old. He grew up in a musical context, his mother being a gospel singer, and he started to play bugle in parade orchestras at a young age. At the age of 10, he was already playing drums in some gospel bands. He performed his first big-time gig in New York City at the age of sixteen, substituting for Sonny Greer in a performance with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In 1942, Roach started to go out in the jazz clubs of the 52nd Street and at 78th Street & Broadway for Georgie Jay's Taproom (playing with schoolmate Cecil Payne). He was one of the first drummers (along with Kenny Clarke) to play in the bebop style, and performed in bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis. Roach played on many of Parker's most important records, including the Savoy 1945 session, a turning point in recorded jazz. Two children, son Daryl and daughter Maxine, were born from his first marriage with Mildred Roach. In 1954 he met singer Barbara Jai (Johnson) and had another son, Raoul Jordu. He continued to play as a freelance while studying composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He graduated in 1952. During the period 1962-1970, Roach was married to the singer Abbey Lincoln, who had performed on several of Roach's albums. Twin daughters, Ayodele and Dara Rasheeda, were later born to Roach and his third wife, Janus Adams Roach. Long involved in jazz education, in 1972 he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the early 2000s, Roach became less active owing to the onset of hydrocephalus-related complications. Renowned all throughout his performing life, Roach has won an extraordinary array of honors. He was one of the first to be given a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, cited as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, twice awarded the French Grand Prix du Disque, elected to the International Percussive Society's Hall of Fame and the Downbeat Magazine Hall of Fame, awarded Harvard Jazz Master, celebrated by Aaron Davis Hall, given eight honorary doctorate degrees, including degrees awarded by the University of Bologna, Italy and Columbia University. In 1952 Roach co-founded Debut Records with bassist Charles Mingus. This label released a record of a concert, billed and widely considered as “the greatest concert ever,” called Jazz at Massey Hall, featuring Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Mingus and Roach. Also released on this label was the groundbreaking bass-and- drum free improvisation, Percussion Discussion. In 1954, he formed a quintet featuring trumpeter Clifford Brown, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Richie Powell (brother of Bud Powell), and bassist George Morrow, though Land left the following year and Sonny Rollins replaced him. The group was a prime example of the hard bop style also played by Art Blakey and Horace Silver. Tragically, this group was to be short-lived; Brown and Powell were killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in June 1956. After Brown and Powell's deaths, Roach continued leading a similarly configured group, with Kenny Dorham (and later the short-lived Booker Little) on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor and pianist Ray Bryant. Roach expanded the standard form of hard-bop using 3/4 waltz rhythms and modality in 1957 with his album Jazz in 3/4 time. During this period, Roach recorded a series of other albums for the EmArcy label featuring the brothers Stanley and Tommy Turrentine. In 1960 he composed the “We Insist! - Freedom Now” suite with lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., after being invited to contribute to commemorations of the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Using his musical abilities to comment on the African-American experience would be a significant part of his career. Unfortunately, Roach suffered from being blacklisted by the American recording industry for a period in the 1960s. In 1966 with his album Drums Unlimited (which includes several tracks that are entirely drums solos) he proved that drums can be a solo instrument able to play theme, variations, rhythmically cohesive phrases. He described his approach to music as “the creation of organized sound.” Among the many important records Roach has made is the classic Money Jungle 1962, with Mingus and Duke Ellington. This is generally regarded as one of the very finest trio albums ever made. During the 70s, Roach formed a unique musical organization—”M'Boom”—a percussion orchestra. Each member of this unit composed for it and performed on many percussion instruments. Personnel included Fred King, Joe Chambers, Warren Smith, Freddie Waits, Roy Brooks, Omar Clay, Ray Mantilla, Francisco Mora, and Eli Fountain. Not content to expand on the musical territory he had already become known for, Roach spent the decades of the 80s and 90s continually finding new ways to express his musical expression and presentation. In the early 80s, he began presenting entire concerts solo, proving that this multi-percussion instrument, in the hands of such a great master, could fulfill the demands of solo performance and be entirely satisfying to an audience. He created memorable compositions in these solo concerts; a solo record was released by Bay State, a Japanese label, just about impossible to obtain. One of these solo concerts is available on video, which also includes a filming of a recording date for Chattahoochee Red, featuring his working quartet, Odean Pope, Cecil Bridgewater and Calvin Hill. He embarked on a series of duet recordings. Departing from the style of presentation he was best known for, most of the music on these recordings is free improvisation, created with the avant-garde musicians Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, Abdullah Ibrahim and Connie Crothers. He created duets with other performers: a recorded duet with the oration by Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream”; a duet with video artist Kit Fitzgerald, who improvised video imagery while Roach spontaneously created the music; a classic duet with his life-long friend and associate Dizzy Gillespie; a duet concert recording with Mal Waldron. He wrote music for theater, such as plays written by Sam Shepard, presented at La Mama E.T.C. in New York City. He found new contexts for presentation, creating unique musical ensembles. One of these groups was “The Double Quartet.” It featured his regular performing quartet, with personnel as above, except Tyrone Brown replacing Hill; this quartet joined with “The Uptown String Quartet,” led by his daughter Maxine Roach, featuring Diane Monroe, Lesa Terry and Eileen Folson. Another ensemble was the “So What Brass Quintet,” a group comprised of five brass instrumentalists and Roach, no chordal instrumnent, no bass player. Much of the performance consisted of drums and horn duets. The ensemble consisted of two trumpets, trombone, French horn and tuba. Musicians included Cecil Bridgewater, Frank Gordon, Eddie Henderson, Steve Turre, Delfeayo Marsalis, Robert Stewart, Tony Underwood, Marshall Sealy, and Mark Taylor. Roach presented his music with orchestras and gospel choruses. He performed a concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He wrote for and performed with the Walter White gospel choir and the John Motley Singers. Roach performed with dancers: the Alvin Aily Dance Company, the Dianne McIntyre Dance Company, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In the early 80s, Roach surprised his fans by performing in a hip hop concert, featuring the artist-rapper Fab Five Freddy and the New York Break Dancers. He expressed the insight that there was a strong kinship between the outpouring of expression of these young black artists and the art he had pursued all his life. During all these years, while he ventured into new territory during a lifetime of innovation, he kept his contact with his musical point of origin. His last recording, “Friendship”, was with trumpet master Clark Terry, the two long-standing friends in duet and quartet. -End- ---- PHOTOGRAPHS CREDIT: Top and Bottom Left-Images from: https://www.gretschdrums.com/artists/max-roach Middle album cover image: LOC Top Right: Max Roach at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival at Columbia University in 2000. Credit : Ozier Muhammed/The New York Times. Bottom Right: Event and photographer unknown. From -https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/max-roach About Max Roach Source: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/max-roach Previous Next

< Back The Round That Changed A Town The Round That Changed A Town One afternoon in 1955, six Black men played golf on a whites-only course. What happened next pushed Greensboro toward integration and turned a local dentist into a civil rights icon. written by Jeremy Markovich/Our State Magazine--This story was published on July 31, 2018 Photo: The Greensboro Six-the men are standing in a group looking at the camera- (from left: Phillip Cooke, Samuel Murray, Elijah Herring, Joseph Sturdivant, Dr. George Simkins, Leonidas Wolfe) defiant round of golf sparked lasting change. Photograph By Greensboro News & Record Doc Simkins has been gone going on 17 years now. But at Gillespie Golf Course, he’s still very much alive. “Doc Simkins was the man,” Ralph Miller says over the clacking of dominoes. When the weather’s fine, Miller and a few other guys set up their tiles on the shaded, beat-up picnic tables overlooking the ninth hole. They call themselves the Tree Boyz. “Everybody went to him,” Miller says, keeping an eye on the game. “My play?” “You want to talk, you need to move to another damn table,” grouses another player. Miller waves him off. “Tennis, golf, Doc did it all,” he says. Politics, too. They called him Doc because he was a dentist, but he would become better known for something else. Something that started after the police came to this course to arrest him. “Sent him to jail,” Miller says with a slight, knowing smirk. “Heh.” Out in the parking lot, Jimmy Moore rolls up on his golf cart when he hears someone mention Simkins. “I knew Doc,” he says. “Caddied for him.” Caddies are long gone at Gillespie, but Moore’s still around, doing odd jobs for the course in retirement. He recalls how Simkins always had something funny to say: “Might rub you on the head and say, ‘How you doin’ today? You got a bag today?’ You’d say no, and he’d say, ‘I’m gettin’ ready to play, grab mine.’” Moore’s brother-in-law Fred Pritchett is playing Gillespie on this day, too. Growing up, he caddied the course, and he was here when Simkins was arrested on December 7, 1955. He remembers watching from the caddie shack as Simkins and five other black men walked to the sixth green. “The sheriff came up in front of them and said, ‘Don’t hit that ball,’” Pritchett recalls. “Doc told them, ‘Get out of the way.’ They hit that ball.” Dr. George C. Simkins Jr. was not the kind of person who just let people win. Not even his own son. Over the course of his life, Chris Simkins says, he only beat his father twice. At any sport. “Lots, lots of trash talk,” Chris says. Tennis was his father’s best game, but golf was often his focus. Chris remembers his father at the golf course, hitting practice shot after practice shot. Then he’d go to the putting green, then the driving range. At home, he’d chip in the backyard. He swung clubs in the living room, and he studied the pros on TV. As a result, the Simkins house was full of trophies; shiny tributes to Doc’s prowess filled a half-dozen cases and lined the stairway. “We ran out of room,” Chris says. But first and foremost, Simkins was a dentist, following his father into the profession. After graduating from Dudley High School in 1940, he left town for college and dental school, and returned nine years later. For five years, he worked for the Guilford County Health Department, and then opened his own dental office in 1954. Most of his customers were black, or white people who didn’t have much money. Sometimes they couldn’t pay. That was OK. “He would work on anybody,” Chris says. “Other dentists would not accept those patients. He would.” Every Wednesday at noon, without fail, Simkins closed his office, came home for lunch, changed into a polo shirt and slacks, and, by 2 o’clock, he was on the golf course. But not Gillespie. In the 1950s, Gillespie was for whites only. Designed by one of the men responsible for creating Augusta National and built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the course allowed black boys and men to caddie, but never to play. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that, in essence, separate accommodations for blacks were inherently unequal, municipal spaces like golf courses and tennis courts remained segregated across the South for a decade or more. For that matter, so did many public schools. “It took a long time to do what the Supreme Court said in 1954,” says Henry Frye, an acquaintance of Simkins, and a lawyer who would become the first (and so far the only) black chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Efforts to integrate Gillespie had started even before Brown. In 1949, a group of black golfers demanded the right, as taxpayers, to play the newly opened Gillespie Golf Course. In response, the city leased the property to a private company for a fee. The company made the course for members and their guests only. Those members were exclusively white. Over the years, more black golfers tested the waters at Gillespie, trying to sign up as members or asking to play, only to be turned away. And then came Doc Simkins. December 7, 1955, was chilly, 42 degrees with a light breeze, but Simkins and five friends were determined to play some golf. They could play Nocho Park Golf Course, the black course only a few blocks away. But Nocho was shabby. Long grass, rough greens. The stench from a nearby sewage plant was strong. So the six men walked into the Gillespie clubhouse ready to pay the fee. The man working the counter snatched the sign-in book before they could touch it. “You can’t play here,” he told them. Calmly, the men put their greens fees on the counter — 75 cents each — and walked outside to tee off. The irate pro caught up with them a few holes later. Simkins told him: “We’re out here for a cause.” “What damn cause?” the man asked. “The cause of democracy.” The pro, then the police, followed the men hole to hole. Instead of putting his club back in his bag between shots, Simkins kept it in his hand, ready to defend himself. He was rattled — pulling shots to the right — but he knew he had to continue. The group played through the ninth hole and then left. Hours later, a black policeman tracked down all six men and arrested them for trespassing. The real crime, it seemed, was golfing while black. To many people, including Pritchett, the young caddie who was watching, that moment of courage felt small at first. Bigger things were happening elsewhere: Rosa Parks had been arrested just a week before, and Emmett Till had been murdered in Mississippi four months before that. In context, a half-dozen arrests over a round of golf seemed to be a lot of fuss over a game. A month later, a city court judge told Simkins and the other men to plead guilty, pay a $15 fine, and forget about it. Instead, the group took their case to Superior Court, where they faced an all-white jury. During the trial, Simkins’s lawyer discovered that two jurors had played Gillespie, and called them as witnesses. The men said that they weren’t members or guests, but had played at the course without a problem. The attorney for Gillespie had argued that the club was members-only, and this new admission seemed to shoot a hole right through his argument. Even so, the six men were found guilty of trespassing and sentenced to 15 days in jail. Simkins’s lawyer kept appealing and eventually filed a federal complaint. A U.S. district court judge sided with the Greensboro Six, a moniker that had started to stick, and ordered that the course be integrated. Then, two weeks before the order was to take effect, the clubhouse at Gillespie mysteriously burned down. Rather than rebuild it, the City of Greensboro condemned the entire course. It also closed the course at Nocho Park. Moreover, the city removed the sod from the front nine at Gillespie and began to store parks and recreation equipment on the land. Greensboro’s best municipal golf course had been turned into a junkyard. “That’s how I got started in civil rights,” Simkins would later say. He joined the NAACP and became president of the local chapter in 1959. Soon after, a local businessman, Ralph Johns, suggested that Simkins take a seat at the local Woolworth’s in an effort to get served at the whites-only lunch counter. Simkins said no. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to get in any more stuff than I am right now,” he recalled to the Greensboro News & Record. “I’m catching hell with the lawyers, I’m catching hell with the whites, and I’m catching hell with the blacks, who think I’m going too fast,” he said. Johns found four freshmen at NC A&T who would do it. The sit-in movement born at that lunch counter on February 1, 1960, quickly spread across the South. Simkins gave the students the support of his NAACP chapter. “If I had gone up there and sat down,” he said later, “it wouldn’t have materialized like it did.” Meanwhile, the golf case had worked its way to the highest level of the legal system. In 1959, four years after the arrests, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear it. Simkins asked Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who’d argued Brown and would later go on to be a Supreme Court justice, to take his case. Marshall declined. The case, Wolfe v. North Carolina, would be a losing effort, Marshall said, since Simkins’s previous lawyers had forgotten to include information about their federal court judgment in their legal briefs. It was a glaring mistake, and Marshall didn’t want to sully his record with a case that he predicted, correctly, would lose in a 5-4 decision. But in a scathing dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wondered why North Carolina would want its citizens arrested and thrown in jail for enjoying its recreational facilities. That opinion was enough to shame Gov. Luther Hodges into commuting the sentences of the Greensboro Six in 1960, so they could avoid jail time. With that, the Gillespie golf case was over. Simkins had lost. And yet, because of that loss, Simkins turned his attention to a different way to win: voting. At the time, Greensboro only had about 5,500 registered black voters. So Simkins went to NC A&T, Bennett College, and Dudley High School, and registered teachers and students. Then he and others went house to house, registering black men and women, one at a time. Steadily, the number of registered black voters in the area more than doubled, to 12,000. Next, Simkins launched a letter writing campaign to tell those new voters whom they should elect. The councilmen who had voted to close down the city’s recreational facilities needed to go, he said. “Do you intend to open up Gillespie Park so that everybody can play there?” read one flyer. “Otherwise, we’re not going to vote for you.” The campaign worked. A new crop of politicians replaced members who had voted to close the golf courses, swimming pools, and other facilities. And, on December 7, 1962, seven years to the day after Simkins and his friends had played nine holes at Gillespie, the course finally reopened. To everyone. Simkins was the first one to tee off. Ralph Miller insists that while the golf story is important, the tennis story is even bigger. Everybody forgets about that, he says, but Simkins integrated the city pools and tennis facilities, too. Through court action, he desegregated Greensboro’s hospitals and schools as well. With his newfound political clout, Simkins also changed the makeup of the city council, guaranteeing that black neighborhoods had local representation. It helped that Simkins was a dentist, says former Chief Justice Frye, and didn’t have to answer to any boss but himself. Simkins’s competitive spirit, which Frye experienced regularly on the golf course, kept him pushing for more. “Once he made up his mind, I don’t care what anybody else said, he was right,” Frye says. “George wasn’t one of these people who believed in waiting for things to change.” Jim Melvin, who grew up across the street from Gillespie and would later become Greensboro’s mayor, says Simkins never ran for office himself because he believed it would have diminished his influence. “A lot of politicians are self-serving — he was not personally self-serving. He was trying to positively change the system,” Melvin says. “He was our Martin Luther King.” Through it all, Simkins continued to see patients, although he’d stop to talk politics from time to time. (“He’d get up to come talk to me and some poor soul would be sitting there for 20 minutes with his mouth open,” Melvin says.) And always, on Wednesday afternoons, the dentist would close up shop to play golf. He continued to play tennis tournaments, too, and was ranked fourth in the state in the men’s 65 division when he died in 2001. Persistence and dedication were hallmarks of his character. “Over and over, when the Greensboro Community sought to tackle its Jim Crow specters, the community’s cry was ‘Let George do it,’” one obituary began. “Over and over, George did it.” Gillespie Golf Course is only nine holes now, but it’s still cheap to play, and challenging. “That’s number seven, the hole that I hate,” Moore says, pointing from his golf cart. “But it’s a good hole.” He has a nickname for the top of the green, where dreams of birdies go to die: Hell. “If that’s where you are,” he says, “that’s what you’re in.” Many of the golfers puttering along the paths here are older black men who once caddied at courses around Greensboro. In some ways, it was a good job, Moore says. “You got to talk to doctors, lawyers, and they gave you some good advice about how to make it in the world,” he says. Now, these men pass along what they know to the kids who come here to learn. Back at the picnic tables, the Tree Boyz are wrapping up. Ralph Miller, it turns out, was talking too much. He lost the game of dominoes. But he can’t stop talking about Doc. Somebody asks: What if he’d never come along? What if he’d never golfed here? Never gotten involved? Miller thinks for a moment. “He would have come in time,” he says with certainty. “It was his time.” Note: In 2016, the City of Greensboro dedicated a statue of George Simkins on the grounds of the Old Courthouse. Source Link: https://www.ourstate.com/the-round-that-changed-a-town/ Previous Next

< Back Chatham's Patriots of Color Did you know that Chatham County can claim at least 30 free people of color who participated in the Revolutionary War? Sourced from: Chatham County Historical Museum Did you know that Chatham County can claim at least 30 free people of color who participated in the Revolutionary War? Learn more from a presentation delivered last year by David Morrow, in which he discussed the untold story of those Black Chatham Patriots. You can view Morrow's presentation on "Chatham's Patriots of Color," on the Chatham Community Library's YouTube channel. In the presentation, Morrow talked about several Chatham free men of color who served in the Revolutionary War and also about how he discovered this information while researching his own family's history. If you are researching free people of color or are interested in the Revolutionary War, you won't want to miss Morrow's presentation. The photo here shows Morrow's great grandparents, Thomas Bowden and Ruth Burnette, both of whom descend from Patriots of Color in Chatham County. Thanks to Chatham Community Library and the Chatham Community Remembrance Coalition for sponsoring this great talk and to David Morrow for this important contribution to Chatham history. Link to David Morrow's talk: "Patriots of Color in Chatham County: Untold Stories: A Community Discussion by David Morrow: https://youtu.be/fh9LnLQgVHc . Source link: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=660886019374254&set=pb.100063585852768.-2207520000.&type=3 Previous Next

< Back Ben E. King On September 28, 1938, soul and R&B singer Benjamin Earl Nelson better known as Ben E. King, was born in Henderson, NC. On September 28, 1938, soul and R&B singer Benjamin Earl Nelson better known as Ben E. King, was born in Henderson, NC. King at the age of nine left North Carolina with his family for Harlem in 1947, and started work in his father’s restaurants as a teenager. His remarkable ability to sing both bass and tenor made him appealing to choirs and led him to form a vocal group called the Four Bs with some friends. King began singing in church choirs, and in high school formed the Four B’s, a doo-wop group that occasionally performed at the Apollo In 1958, King (still using his birth name) joined a doo-wop group called the Five Crowns Later that year, the Drifters' manager George Treadwell fired the members of the original Drifters, and replaced them with the members of the Five Crowns. King had a string of R&B hits with the group on Atlantic Records. He co-wrote and sang lead on the first Atlantic hit by the new version of the Drifters, "There Goes My Baby" (1959). He sang lead on a succession of hits by the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, including "Save the Last Dance for Me", "This Magic Moment", and "I Count the Tears". King recorded only thirteen songs with the Drifters—two backing other lead singers and eleven lead vocal performances—including a non-single called "Temptation" (later redone by Drifters vocalist Johnny Moore). The last of the King-led Drifters singles to be released was "Sometimes I Wonder", which was recorded May 19, 1960, but not issued until June 1962. Due to contract disputes with Treadwell in which King and his manager, Lover Patterson, demanded greater compensation, King rarely performed with the Drifters on tour or on television. On television, fellow Drifters member Charlie Thomas usually lip-synched the songs that King had recorded with the Drifters. After the disputes over salary he embarked on a solo career in 1961 with the song “Spanish Harlem.” Later that year, he released “Stand by Me,” the hit for which he is best known. King’s feelings for his soon-to-be-wife Betty inspired the words and his performance, creating a heartfelt classic that remains fresh to this day. Broadcast Music, Inc., dubbed it the fourth most-played song of the 20th century.. In May 1960, King left the Drifters, assuming the stage name Ben E. King in preparation for a solo career. Remaining with Atlantic Records on its Atco imprint, King scored his first solo hit with the ballad "Spanish Harlem" (1961). His next single, "Stand by Me", written with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, ultimately would be voted as one of the Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America. King cited singers Brook Benton, Roy Hamilton and Sam Cooke as influences for his vocals of the song."Stand by Me", "There Goes My Baby", "Spanish Harlem", and "Save the Last Dance for Me" were all named in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll; and each of those records has earned a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. King's other well-known songs include "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", "Amor", "Seven Letters", "How Can I Forget", "On the Horizon", "Young Boy Blues", "First Taste of Love", "Here Comes the Night", "Ecstasy", and "That's When It Hurts". In the summer of 1963, King had a Top 30 hit with "I (Who Have Nothing)", which reached the Top 10 on New York's radio station, WMCA. King's records continued to place well on the Billboard Hot 100 chart until 1965. British pop bands began to dominate the pop music scene, but King still continued to make R&B hits, including "What is Soul?" (1966), "Tears, Tears, Tears" (1967), and "Supernatural Thing" (1975). King returned to the Drifters in late 1982 in England, and sang with them until the group's break-up and reorganization in 1986. From 1983 until the band's break-up, the other members of this incarnation of the Drifters were Johnny Moore, Joe Blunt, and Clyde Brown. A 1986 re-issue of "Stand by Me" followed the song's use as the theme song to the movie Stand By Me and re-entered the Billboard Top Ten after a 25-year absence. This reissue also reached Number 1 in the United Kingdom and Ireland for three weeks in February 1987. In 1990, King and Bo Diddley, along with Doug Lazy, recorded a revamped hip hop version of the Monotones' 1958 hit song "Book of Love" for the soundtrack of the movie Book of Love. He also recorded a children's album, I Have Songs In My Pocket, written and produced by children's music artist Bobby Susser in 1998, which won the Early Childhood News Directors' Choice Award and Dr. Toy's/the Institute for Childhood Resources Award. King performed "Stand by Me" on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2007. Ahmet Ertegun said, "King is one of the greatest singers in the history of rock and roll and rhythm and blues." As a Drifter and as a solo artist, King had achieved five number one hits: "There Goes My Baby", "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Stand By Me", "Supernatural Thing", and the 1986 re-issue of "Stand By Me". He also earned 12 Top 10 hits and 26 Top 40 hits from 1959 to 1986. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Drifter; he was also nominated as a solo artist. King's "I (Who Have Nothing)" was selected for the Sopranos Peppers and Eggs Soundtrack CD (2001). King was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009. On March 27, 2012, the Songwriters Hall of Fame announced that "Stand By Me" would receive its 2012 Towering Song Award and that King would be honored with the 2012 Towering Performance Award for his recording of the song. Later in his life, King was active in his charitable foundation, the Stand By Me Foundation, which helps to provide education to deserving youths. He was a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, from the late 1960s. King performed "Stand By Me" during a televised tribute to late comedian George Carlin, as he was one of Carlin's favorite artists. On November 11, 2010, he performed "Stand By Me" on the Latin Grammys with Prince Royce. King toured the United Kingdom in 2013 and played concerts in the United States as late as 2014, despite reported health problems. It was announced on May 1, 2015 that King had died at the Hackensack University Medical Center on April 30, 2015 at the age of 76. His agent said he had suffered from "coronary problems" at the time of his death. King was survived by his wife of 51 years, Betty, three children and six grandchildren. On May 17, two weeks after his death, American rock band Imagine Dragons performed "Stand By Me" at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards as a tribute to his memory. Ben E. King's Legacy King has been covered by acts from several genres. "So Much Love" was recorded by Dusty Springfield and many others. "I (Who Have Nothing)" was performed by Shirley Bassey in 1963 and also by Tom Jones in 1970, as well as a 1979 recording by Sylvester. "Till I Can't Take It Anymore" was revisited by peer Ray Charles in 1970 and "Spanish Harlem" was sung by Aretha Franklin in 1971. "Stand by Me" was covered by The Righteous Brothers, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Mickey Gilley, Florence + The Machine, Tracy Chapman, and Prince Royce. King also inspired a number of rock bands: Siouxsie and the Banshees recorded "Supernatural Thing" in 1981 and Led Zeppelin did a cover version of "Groovin'", more known under the title of "We're Gonna Groove". On May 19, 2018 King's "Stand By Me" was performed at the Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle by Karen Gibson and the Kingdom Choir. #ncmaahc #Irememberourhistory #TellTheWholeTruth #DontLetThemForgetUs #BenEKing #StandByMe #NCBlackHistory #afrocarolinahistory #ncmusic #ncBlackmusicians #AfroCarolinaMuseumOfHistory Source:http://www.beneking.info/ Previous Next

< Back Student pickets boycott Kress Student pickets boycott Kress, 1960-Orangeburg, SC Cecil J. Williams Photographer Previous Next

< Back Charles T. Norwood Charles T. Norwood was from Raleigh, NC, and was Raleigh's first Black soldier to die in WWI. The day an armistice was signed ending World War I was on Nov. 11, 1918 — 100 years ago today. We remember this war and the American soldiers that fought in this war on this day Veterans Day, every year. So much of the African American's of NC history and stories are not taught in our schools, not exhibited in the states museums, not written about or included in many of the books that White authors create, and is not shared or spoken about. As usual, it is purposely erased, colonized, buried, or only mentioned by other African Americans. Keeping with our main purpose, We here at #ncmaahc would like to remember Private Charles T. Norwood who was from Raleigh, NC, and was Raleigh's first Black soldier to die in WWI. We will continue to celebrate the lives of as many African American soldiers from NC that we can find information on. But, Today, we celebrate the Life of Private Charles T. Norwood. During WWI, 367, 710 African Americans were drafted and roughly 400,00 served in the still segregated military. More than 200,00 served overseas. An estimated 750 servicemen died in combat, and another 5,000 were wounded. Charles T. Norwood Bio BY: Post 157 - Raleigh, North Carolina Apr 15, 2018 The Charles T. Norwood American Legion Post 157 was chartered December 19, 1924, five years after the National American Legion received its Congressional Charter. The Post was named to honor Pvt. Charles T. Norwood who served with Company H, 365 Infantry, 92nd Infantry Division. Pvt. Norwood was wounded on November 11, 1918 just hours before the Armistice to end World War I was set to begin. Pvt. Norwood died from his wounds and Lobar Pneumonia on January 17, 1919 making him the first Black solider to be killed from Raleigh, North Carolina during World War I. Pvt. Charles T. Norwood was buried in the Raleigh National Cemetery on August 21, 1921. He is buried in Section 8 Site 1226 ------ Raleigh’s first Black soldier to die in WWI was wounded on the day the war ended The first African-American soldier from Raleigh to be killed in World War I was wounded on Nov. 11, 1918, which was Armistice Day. That commemoration is now part of Veterans Day. The Army soldier was Charles T. Norwood, who is buried in Raleigh National Cemetery. BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN November 10, 2018 04:56 PM Updated November 10, 2018 05:19 PM RALEIGH The day an armistice was signed ending World War I on Nov. 11, 1918 — 100 years ago — was also the day Raleigh soldier Charles T. Norwood was wounded. He later died, becoming the first African-American soldier from Raleigh who died in World War I. American Legion Post 157 in Raleigh is named for Norwood. Members of the post marched in the North Carolina Veterans Day Parade in downtown Raleigh on Saturday. According to the American Legion, Norwood was an Army private who served with Company H, 365 Infantry, 92nd Infantry Division. At the time he lived with his mother, Emmeline Norwood, on East Lane Street, according to a newspaper clipping. During World War I, African-American soldiers in the U.S. Army were segregated from white soldiers and assigned to units led by white officers, according to a war exhibit now on display at the N.C. Museum of History in downtown Raleigh. Two African-American combat divisions served in France: The 92nd Division, where Norwood was assigned, served in the American Expeditionary Force and fought in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, according to the museum. The other division was the 93rd Division, which served with the French army. Charles T. Norwood, 23, was wounded in France on Nov. 11, 1918, and died from his wounds and pneumonia on Jan. 17, 1919. The American Legion post in Raleigh was named for him when it was chartered in 1924. Norwood was buried in the Raleigh National Cemetery in 1921. “It’s just a great blessing to be here today to honor (Norwood),” said American Legion member Willie Pulley, who marched in the Veterans Day parade. Pulley, the post chaplain, is an Army veteran. Post member James Whitaker, also retired from the Army like Pulley, said that it means a lot to be in the American Legion post named for Norwood. Whitaker said the post, which meets at Martin Street Baptist Church, works to help families in the community at Thanksgiving and Christmas. In a ceremony on the N.C. Capitol grounds after the parade, U.S. Army Col. (ret.) Martin Falls noted that it was “on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent across Europe, and America’s doughboys started coming home.” The parade Saturday morning including high school marching bands, high school JROTC groups, the Triangle chapter of Veterans for Peace, Scouts groups and veterans groups. Source:https://www.newsobserver.com/.../article221422570.html... Source:https://centennial.legion.org/.../charles-t-norwood-bio Previous Next

< Back Nina Simone "She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. Nina Simone Born: February 21, 1933, Tryon, NC Died:April 21, 2003, Carry-le-Rouet, France ------- "She was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. She earned the moniker ‘High Priestess of Soul’ for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment. She was who the world would come to know as Nina Simone." ____ "Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert. This website captures milestones in a career that has had more than its share of peaks and valleys.After graduating valedictorian of high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default. To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret." Source: To read more about Nina Simone's life, please click the link: http://www.ninasimone.com/bio/ Previous Next

< Back Mary McLeod Bethune In the late 1800s, African American workers, tradesmen, and professionals who were excluded from all-White labor unions organized their own unions. Mrs. Bethune wrote in her 1936 speech “Closed Doors”: “My boy belonged to a labor union, but when there came the chance for the distribution of jobs, it was not until all white applicants had been supplied, and then even though he is a skilled laborer, nothing was offered him in his own field, but he was forced to accept a job as a common laborer.” Image description: Left is a portrait of Mary McLeod Bethune. Right image shows us one of the African American unions formed in the U.S. before the turn of the century. Images source: LOC To read about Mrs. Bethune's life, click this link: https://archive.org/.../marymcleodbethun00smit_djvu.txt Previous Next

< Back 1939, Negro sharecropper, Will Cole, picking cotton. The owner is Mrs. Rigsby, a White woman. About five miles below Chapel Hill, going south on highway toward Bynum in Chatham County, North Carolina. ​ 1939, Negro sharecropper, Will Cole, picking cotton. The owner is Mrs. Rigsby, a White woman. About five miles below Chapel Hill, going south on highway toward Bynum in Chatham County, North Carolina. Photographer: Marion Post Wolcott 1910-1990 Source: FSA/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Previous Next

"Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places." Romare Beardon Arts , Entertainment & Media Music/Musicians/Bands/Instruments/Comedians/Songs & Dancers 1/60 Music, dance, songwriting; all expressions of movement; all stem from the rich traditions of our African ancestors. North Carolina specifically has a tremendous amount of talented musicians, singers, songwriters, dancer etc., that have shaped, and continue to shape what we enjoy today. Newspapers and Magazines This is EBONY Magazine's first edition, which came out November 1, 1945. 1/15 We celebrate every facet of African American culture, and strive to keep the stories and legacies of great periodicals in hearts and minds of readers everywhere. Movies/Actors/Playwrights/Directors/Producers Mike Wiley JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell Actress Pamela Suzette Grier Mike Wiley 1/15 In this gallery, we showcase t he outstanding contributions made to Theater Arts by African American Actors, Playwrights, Directors and Producers from North Carolina. Artists, Sculptors, Photogr aphers and Painters Selma Burke in her studio. Part of the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Mus John Thomas Biggers (April 13, 1924 – January 25, 2001) Selma Burke in her studio. Part of the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Mus 1/34 In this gallery, we celebrate the artistry of North Carolina's African American sculptors, artists and painters. We invite you to discover the incredible creativity and artistic legacy of African American art community in North Carolina. Sports 1/20 In this gallery, we feature in-depth storytelling that brings to life the most significant events, people, and moments in North Carolina's sports history and explore how their sporting prowess has impacted the state and beyond. TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

Enter Here 1/5 1/4 I Remember Our History G.C. and Frances The Hawley Museum @IrememberOurHistory N.C. Black History

< Back Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta ​ The Banjo's Roots, Reconsidered "My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history." Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it. Jatta's father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn't think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students. "When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music," Jatta says. "I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father's akonting." That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo's connections with the instrument he grew up with. The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they're just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region. Over the next two decades, while he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the U.S., Jatta learned everything he could about the origins of the banjo. Eventually, he reached a conclusion. "Among all the instruments ever mentioned as a prototype of the banjo from the African region," he says, "the akonting to me has more similarities, more objective similarities than any other that has ever been mentioned." For one thing, the akonting looks like a banjo. It has a long neck that, like those of early banjos, extends through the instrument's gourd body. It has a movable wooden bridge that, as in banjos, holds the strings over the skin head. But for Jatta and other banjo scholars, most convincing is how the akonting is played. Players use the index finger to strike down on one of the long strings, and the thumb sounds the akonting's short string as the hand moves back upward. When Jatta looked at early banjo instruction books from the mid-1800s, he found that they described an almost identical playing style. "What struck me was when they mentioned the ball of the thumb and the nail of the index or middle finger, I knew straight away my father was using this same style," Jatta says. "This was never a surprise to me, because I have seen this since I was 5 years old." That early style of playing predates the three-finger style used today by nearly all bluegrass banjo players. Something similar is still used by folk and country musicians who play in a style sometimes called frailing or clawhammer. After doing 10 years of research supported by a Swedish university, in 2000, Jatta presented his findings first in Stockholm, and then a few months later at a banjo collectors' convention in Boston. Greg Adams is a banjoist and graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland; he says Jatta's findings on the akonting have forced many scholars to rethink their assumptions about where to look for information on the banjo's ancestors. "A lot of the emphasis up to that point was focused on griot traditions, which is extremely important as part of the conversation as we look to West Africa," Adams says. "But what the akonting did was open up a new line of discourse." The ngoni and xalam are instruments typically played by griots — praise singers who enjoy special status in many West African tribes. Adams says the akonting is a folk instrument, played not by griots, but by ordinary people in the Jola tribe. In terms of which tradition has the most direct connection to the banjo, Adams says it's a mistake to think of it as an either/or proposition: "Each of these traditions deserves to be explored, experienced, examined on their own terms." Jatta plans to continue his work, documenting the akonting musical tradition and its connections to the banjo and other areas of Jola culture, through a research and education center he's founding back home in Gambia. *Photo credit:Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta plays the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo. Courtesy of Chuck Levy Source:https://www.npr.org/.../139.../the-banjos-roots-reconsidered Previous Next

< Back Jean Moore Fasse (seated) Image: Jean Moore Fasse (seated) and other Special Services members participate in craft activities with two Army soldiers, circa 1955. Image: Jean Moore Fasse (seated) and other Special Services members participate in craft activities with two Army soldiers, circa 1955. Fasse joined the American Red Cross in 1944 and was sent to Washington, D.C., for training. She was assigned to a unit prepared for overseas duty and traveled to California to depart for Calcutta, India. Photo and narrative source: Gateway - Triad Digital History Collections M. Jean Moore Fasse Collection. . Mayme Jean Moore Fasse was born in Lillington, North Carolina, in 1908 and was raised on a farm nearby. She attended Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina, where she lived with families as a nanny until she graduated in 1931. She then worked in a tobacco factory and a local hospital. Fasse enrolled at Fayetteville State Teachers College (now Fayetteville State University) and earned a teaching degree. Her first teaching job was in a one-room school in Goldsboro, North Carolina. After deciding she didn’t want to teach, she returned to FSTC and attended summer school. She and a friend then decided to move to New York. After only a year she returned to Fayetteville and teaching. Fasse worked at the Robeson County Training School in Maxton, North Carolina, in the late-1930s and early 1940s . Fasse joined the American Red Cross in 1944 and was sent to Washington, D.C., for training. She was assigned to a unit prepared for overseas duty and traveled to California to depart for Calcutta, India. Fasse was stationed along the Lido Road, including a short time in Burma. After the jungle bases were closed, she became the head of the Cosmos Club, a Red Cross club in Calcutta. She returned to the United States in August of 1946, landing in New York City. Fasse immediately signed up for the U.S. Army Special Services in order to run recreation clubs in Europe. She was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, for training, she was assigned as a club director in Mannheim. Almost six years later she was transferred to Füssen for a few months, and then Höchberg, and then Munich. In the early 1950s Fasse was sent to France, where she worked in clubs in Tours and Toul. Fasse married in 1963 and left the Special Services. The Fasses remained in Europe until 1990. Jean Fasse died on 21 June 2008. Link to source: https://gateway.uncg.edu/islandora/object/wvhp%3AWV0390 Previous Next

< Back Benjamin Banneker ​ On October 9, 1806, Benjamin Banneker passed away in Oella, Catonsville, MD. He was born November 9, 1731 in Baltimore County, MD. During a time when most black people living in America were enslaved, Banneker built a name for himself as a self-taught mathematician and astronomer. In 1753, Banneker completed a wooden clock that struck on the hour and continued to work for the rest of his life. After rheumatism forced him to retire from cultivating tobacco in his fifties, he developed an interest in astronomy and went on to learn enough about mathematics and astronomy to create his own almanac. While white scientists expressed shock at Banneker’s accomplishments based on their perceptions of race, Banneker had a different perspective, as he stated, “I am annoyed to find that the subject of my race is so much stressed. The work is either correct or it is not. In this case, I believe it to be perfect.” ----- Benjamin Banneker was a largely self-educated mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs and writer. Synopsis Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731, in Ellicott's Mills, Maryland. A free black man who owned a farm near Baltimore, Banneker was largely self-educated in astronomy and mathematics. He was later called upon to assist in the surveying of territory for the construction of the nation's capital. He also became an active writer of almanacs and exchanged letters with Thomas Jefferson, politely challenging him to do what he could to ensure racial equality. Banneker died on October 9, 1806. Background and Early Years Born on November 9, 1731, in Ellicott's Mills, Maryland, Benjamin Banneker was the son of an ex-slave named Robert and his wife, Mary Banneky. Mary was the daughter of an Englishwoman named Molly Welsh, a former indentured servant, and her husband, Bannka, an ex-slave whom she freed and who asserted that he came from tribal royalty in West Africa. Because both of his parents were free, Benjamin escaped the wrath of slavery as well. He was taught to read by his maternal grandmother and for a very short time attended a small Quaker school. Banneker was primarily self-educated, a fact that did little to diminish his brilliance. His early accomplishments included constructing an irrigation system for the family farm and a wooden clock that was reputed to keep accurate time and ran for more than 50 years until his death. In addition, Banneker taught himself astronomy and accurately forecasted lunar and solar eclipses. After his father's passing, he ran his own farm for years, cultivating a business selling tobacco via crops. Interests in Astronomy and Surveying Banneker's talents and intelligence eventually came to the attention of the Ellicott family, entrepreneurs who had made a name and fortune by building a series of gristmills in the Baltimore area in the 1770s. George Ellicott had a large personal library and loaned Banneker numerous books on astronomy and other fields. In 1791, Andrew Ellicott, George’s cousin, hired Banneker to assist in surveying territory for the nation’s capital city. He worked in the observatory tent using a zenith sector to record the movement of the stars. However, due to a sudden illness, Banneker was only able to work for Ellicott for about three months. Popular Almanacs Banneker's true acclaim, however, came from his almanacs, which he published for six consecutive years during the later years of his life, between 1792 and 1797. These handbooks included his own astronomical calculations as well as opinion pieces, literature and medical and tidal information, with the latter particularly useful to fishermen. Outside of his almanacs, Banneker also published information on bees and calculated the cycle of the 17-year locust. Letter to Jefferson Benjamin Banneker's accomplishments extended into other realms as well, including civil rights. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson was secretary of state and Banneker considered the respected Virginian, though a slaveholder, to also be open to viewing African Americans as more than slaves. Thus, he wrote Jefferson a letter hoping that he would “readily embrace every opportunity to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevail with respect to us." To further support his point, Banneker included a handwritten manuscript of an almanac for 1792, containing his astronomical calculations. In his letter, Banneker acknowledged he was “of the African race” and a free man. He recognized that he was taking “a liberty” writing to Jefferson, which would be unacceptable considering “the almost general prejudice and prepossession which is so prevalent in the world against those of my complexion.” Banneker then respectfully chided Jefferson and other patriots for their hypocrisy, enslaving people like him while fighting the British for their own independence. Jefferson quickly acknowledged Banneker's letter, writing a response. He told Banneker that he took “the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet [secretary of the French Academy of Sciences]...because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them.” Banneker published Jefferson’s letter alongside his original piece of correspondence in his 1793 almanac. Banneker's outspokenness with regard to the issue of slavery earned him the widespread support of the abolitionist societies in Maryland and Pennsylvania, both of which helped him publish his almanac. Below is a letter from Jefferson to Banneker dated August 30, 1791 from the Library of Congress: I thank you sincerely for your letter of the 19th. instant and for the Almanac it contained. no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, Sir, Your most obedt. humble servt. Th. Jefferson Later Life and Death Never married, Benjamin Banneker continued to conduct his scientific studies throughout his life. By 1797, sales of his almanac had declined and he discontinued publication. In the following years, he sold off much of his farm to the Ellicotts and others to make ends meet, continuing to live in his log cabin. On October 9, 1806, after his usual morning walk, Banneker died in his sleep, just a month short of his 75th birthday. In accordance with his wishes, all the items that had been on loan from his neighbor, George Ellicott, were returned by Banneker’s nephew. Also included was Banneker’s astronomical journal, providing future historians one of the few records of his life known to exist. On Tuesday, October 11, at the family burial ground a few yards from this house, Benjamin Banneker was laid to rest. During the services, mourners were startled to see his house had caught on fire, quickly burning down. Nearly everything was destroyed, including his personal effects, furniture and wooden clock. The cause of the fire was never determined. Benjamin Banneker’s life was remembered in an obituary in the Federal Gazette of Philadelphia and has continued to be written about over the ensuing two centuries. With limited materials having been preserved related to Banneker's life and career, there's been a fair amount of legend and misinformation presented. In 1972, scholar Sylvio A. Bedini published an acclaimed biography on the 17th-century icon—The Life of Benjamin Banneker: The First African-American Man of Science. A revised edition appeared in 1999. Previous Next

< Back Back to Arts, Entertainment & Media Kenneth Edmonds Kenneth Edmonds, the current publisher of The Carolina Times. Photograph: Carolina Times publisher Ken Edmonds is pictured in Solite Park Saturday next to the Louis E. Austin History Grove marker honoring his grandfather, Austin, the founder of the newspaper. Bernard Thomas- The Herald-Sun-JUNE 10, 2017 DURHAM Pioneering civil rights activist and newspaper publisher Louis E. Austin purchased The Carolina Times in 1927 — transforming the newspaper, which still publishes today, into one of the most powerful voices for black North Carolinians during an era of intense racial segregation. The Museum of Durham History honored Austin’s legacy of being a voice for the black community in Durham on Saturday with the dedication of the Louis E. Austin History Grove at Solite Park, located at 4704 Fayetteville Road. Austin, who ran The Carolina Times from 1927 until his death in 1971, gave the paper the motto “The Truth Unbridled” — and he used the paper as a mouthpiece of the civil rights struggle. The Carolina Times was the most important African-American newspaper in North Carolina, and it was often distributed across the state and to the rest of the South, said Jerry Gershenhorn, a professor of history at North Carolina Central University. “The black press in general kept the civil rights movement alive. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the white press wouldn’t write about the black community except for, the most part, crime,” said Gershenhorn, who is also the author of a forthcoming book about Austin. “Louis Austin was the voice of the black freedom struggle, I would say, in the state of North Carolina.” Besides his role as publisher, Austin was a noted activist and community leader — spearheading influential boycotts as well as suing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over segregation in 1933. In addition, he helped start the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs — later renamed the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People — and was the president of the Durham chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This is the 12th history grove that the Museum of Durham History has helped erect across the Bull City. The museum has placed other historical markers for Durham residents such as Mechanics and Farmers Bank President Richard Fitzgerald, historian John Hope Franklin and politician Becky Heron, among others. “One of the aspirations of the museum is to recognize individuals, organizations and neighborhoods that have made Durham a better place,” said Steven Channing, a founding board member of the Museum of Durham History. “Louis Austin has to be in the top tier of those who had a better vision for Durham — a Durham of equal rights for all citizens.” The event was attended by members of Austin’s family, former Carolina Times employees and a host of local politicians, including Mayor Bill Bell, County Commissioners Chairwoman Wendy Jacobs and N.C. Rep. Mickey Michaux Jr., D-Durham, among others. Addressing those gathered, Michaux told a story about the time he and Austin invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak to the Durham Business and Professional Chain, the black chamber of commerce, in 1956. Michaux told Austin he wanted to invite King — who at the point was a rising figure in the civil rights movement — and the newspaper publisher helped arrange a phone call. “Sure enough, Dr. King called back and said, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to come Durham anyway because I’ve heard you’ve made great progress, and I want to see if I can learn something,’” the longtime state representative recalled. King’s visit to the black chamber in 1956 was the first of five appearances he would make to the Bull City in his lifetime. “Louis Austin was a man of history, Louis Austin was a man of destiny — and had it not been for him, many of the things that have happened in Durham would not have happened,” Michaux said. “I think he would be proud of the Durham of today because of the progress that we have made over the years. “You’ve got to remember we came up during the days of deep, deep, deep segregation, and the division between the people of the town was immense. He would be extremely proud, but he would also warn us that we still have a long way to go.” Kenneth Edmonds, the grandson of Austin and the current publisher of The Carolina Times, said the historical marker was good to have. “He’s being remembered for the things he did,” Edmonds said. “He continued a fight for justice and equality. “It was his Christian upbringing that gave him the fortitude to say, ‘If we are all equal in the eyes of God, then we are all equal in the eyes of God right now —and segregation be damned.’” Source:https://www.heraldsun.com/.../durha.../article155493769.html Previous Next

< Back Stephen, an enslaved Black man ​ excerpt of essay on historical account for marker: North Carolina, 1839, An enslaved Black man named Stephen discovered the process which created the “bright leaf” yellow variety of tobacco. Stephen was enslaved on the farm of slaver Abisha Slade near the Virginia border in Caswell County, North Carolina. He worked as a blacksmith on the Slade farm. Another of his jobs was overseeing the curing process of the tobacco crop. On one occasion, due to the warmth created by the fire, Stephen fell asleep during the process. A few hours later, he woke up to find the fire almost completely out. To try to keep the heat going, he rushed to his charcoal pit (part of his blacksmithing operation) and threw hot coals on the fire which created a sudden, immense heat. The heat from the charred logs cured the tobacco quickly, leaving it with a vivid yellow color. Source: North Carolina Highway Historical Markers/North Carolina Office of Archives & History — Department of Cultural Resources. . Full Essay: Essay: In 1839, a twist of fate led to one of the most important breakthroughs in North Carolina agriculture history. Tobacco had always been a major crop for the region, but not until the accidental development of the “bright leaf” variety did the market for the product really start booming. Stephen was a slave on the farm of planter Abisha Slade near the Virginia border in Caswell County. He worked as a blacksmith on the Slade farm. Another of his jobs was overseeing the curing process of the tobacco crop. On one occasion, due to the warmth created by the fire, Stephen fell asleep during the process. A few hours later, he woke up to find the fire almost completely out. To try to keep the heat going, he rushed to his charcoal pit (part of his blacksmithing operation) and threw hot coals on the fire which created a sudden, immense heat. The heat from the charred logs cured the tobacco quickly, leaving it with a vivid yellow color. The trade press in the late nineteenth century investigated the discovery of the process, interviewing those still living with firsthand knowledge of the events. The account is one which has fascinated North Carolinians for generations. The flue-cured tobacco became known as bright leaf tobacco and the variety became popular with smokers. Other farmers learned of and used the new process as well. Although the discovery took place on a piedmont plantation, farmers in the coastal plains soon adopted the process and constructed curing barns by the hundreds. By 1857, Abisha Slade was harvesting 20,000 pounds annually and making some of the highest profits ever. Bright leaf tobacco led North Carolina to a dominant position in the tobacco industry. . References: Nannie May Tilley, The Bright-Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929 (1948) Southern Planter (May 1876); Gold Leaf, November 10, 1887, and other articles cited by Nannie May Tilley Letters from Nannie May Tilley, December 10, 1971; O. A. Smith, January 13, 1972; Dot Slade, September 10, 1973 (marker files, Research Branch, North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh) Point of View (PBS) website: http://www.pbs.org/.../brightleaves/special_tobacco.html . Source: North Carolina Highway Historical Markers/North Carolina Office of Archives & History — Department of Cultural Resources. Previous Next

< Back Halifax County Plantation Owners' Wills ​ North Carolina has 100 counties, Halifax is one of those. It is difficult to wrap one's head around the amount of enslaved Black people that are in Slaver's wills "giving" them to other family members for all 100 counties. Below is a small portion of the list of Halifax County's recorded wills of slavers "giving" their enslaved people to other family members, or requesting that their enslaved people be sold and the money given to family members. As we are able to find this research for other counties in NC, we will post them. This is a very long list which includes the years 1758-1854. We will include the link so others are able to access this list for further research. . . Slaves Named in Wills -Halifax County, North Carolina, 1758-1854. Halifax County Will Book Volume 1, 1758-1774. p.1, I George Huling...to my son John Huling one Negro fellow named Jerry and a Negro boy named Dick...Daughter Elizabeth Huling one Negro fellow named Frank(? writing faded) and a negro woman named Agge & her child Ben...1759. pp.9-10, Benjamin Sherrod...son Benjamin a tract of land in Northampton County...his choice of all my negroes that is to say one negroe and one iron pot, one bed three cows and calves and five head of sheep...son Richard land in Johnston or Dobbs County containing 100 acres and all the stock of cattle living there on and their future increase, one negroe his choice, one bed, one iron pot, five head of sheep...all the rest of my personal estate of what kind or nature to be rent by my executors for the use of my wife Patience and support of my children...5 June 1759. (signing). June Court 1760. pp. 17-18, Martha Davis 20 November 1760...I give to my cozin Nathan Whithead 5 shillings... cozin Lewis Lewis...iron tools, cart and wheels, cart horse. To my cozin Sarah Whithead living with me my Negro Woman Rose, my looking glass, one smoothing iron... September Court 1760. pp. 28-9, I Joshua Williams...give to my Eldest son Thomas Williams Five negroes that is to say Abraham, Isaac, Jenney, Betty & Judith with their increase...also...my Distill, one horse called Derick, a sorel mare colt, one bed & furniture also three sows & twelve shoats also 200 acres also one gun. To my daughter Temperance two negroes named Peter & Nanny, one mare called Jenney and a woman saddle, eight head of cattle, one bed & furniture, one trunk. To my daughter Sarah, two negroes named Cezar & Amey, one horse called Prince & four pounds five shillings to buy her a saddle, eight head of cattle, a black walnut chest. To my son Elisha Williams the plantation where I now live with all the land...four negroes named Nan, Jacob, James & tom, one mare & colt, a young horse named Parrot, one bed and furniture, one horse called Blase. To my daughter Martha one negro called Hager. To my loving wife one negro named London during her life of widowhood, also one bed and furniture, seven cows & calves and a three year old stear, one gray mare called Jenney & a horse called Diment, two dishes, four plates, two basons and one desk. To Celea Dickens one negro called Cezar which she is to be possest of when she arrives to the age of twenty one years...but she dieing before she comes of age the negro to fall to my son Elisha Williams...the negro to be hired out and the money converted to the said girl... Joshua Williams. Proved October 1761 court, Sarah Williams widow p.31, Barnaby McKinny, Jnr, parish of Edgecombe lend to my Beloved wife Ann during her natural life a negro woman called Moll and three negro children to wit Chesser, Gibb and Juno and after my wife's decease I will that my wife's son Isaac Ricks have the afsd negro named Gibb to negro Woman Moll afsd to my sister Patience McKinnie...the negro called Juno afsd to my wife's daughter Mary Ricks...the negro called Chesser afsd to my sister Martha McKinnie...(other bequests of cattle etc.) 15 March 1761.Barna McKinnie (signed) p.32, James Vaulks...lend to my wife Mary the land whereon I now live During her Widowhood together with the negros and stock household stuff...provided she shall take care to raise & maintain my children. I give to my son Daniel the land where on I now live and three negroes to wit Will and Nan and Sall after my wife's decease or marriage...my negro man and my negro woman named Cate and her increase may be equally divided among my daughters after my wife's decease. My land in Virginia to be sold at publick sale. 10 January 1761. James Vaulx (signed) p.33, William Dugliss gives tracts of 275 acres, 375 acres, 50 acres, 200 acres, and his plantation and tract of land to several persons, divides his estate between his brothers and sisters but does not name any slaves. William x Dugliss. June court 1761. p.41, I Robert Ronard...to my well beloved Mother Barbery Ronard one negro woman slave known by the name of Frank during her Widowhood and if she should Marry or decease the said slave to return to my brother James Ronard...I likewise lend to my Mother Barbery Ronard two negro Boy slaves one Samson and the other Jack during her Widowhood and if she should Marry or Decease then the two Boys Samson and Jacob (sic) to return to my brother William Ronard...10 February 1757. Robert Ronard (signed). September court 1761. p. 43, I Henry Haws...I give and bequeath to Henry Haws Tucker and all my negros in General with my land and plantation and all my stock Hogs, Cattle and Horses and that his Mother Sarah Tucker have the Labour of the said negros and the use of the plantation and stock to help her raise her children as long as she lives a single life...Anne Tucker 25 pounds...Dianah Tucker 25 pounds...Mary Tucker 25 pounds. 10 March 1761. Henry (H) Haws. September Court 1761. p.44, I Benjamin Merrit of Edgecombe County...I lend to my Loving Mother Mary Merrit my Negro Man Dick and also my Moveable Estate to be Possessed by her and used at her Decretion...after her Deceas to be Equally divided Between my two Brothers Nathaniel and Ephraim and my two sisters Sarah and Mary...9 July 1755. Benjamin (B) Merrit. September Court 1761. pp.45-6, I James Jackson, Senr., ...lend to my daughter Lucy one Negro Girl Named Sue During her Natural live and the afsd Negro Girl shall be raised upon my Estate till such time as my afsd Daughter shall think fit to take her to her self and after her decese the afsd Negro and her increase should be Equally Divided amongst her children...Lend to my Dear Wife Ann Jackson all the remainder of my estate Real and personal...if my wife Ann Marries or dies...to my daughter Elizabeth Jackson a Negro Boy Named Charles...to my son Richard Jackson a Negro Boy namd Davie. 9 February 1761. James (J) Jackson. September Court 1761. p.47, I Barnaby McKinnie of Edgecombe Parish...my land and plantation to my nephew William Coupland...and all my Negro slaves, Segar and Sarah excepted...my two Negro slaves excepted and undisposed of...to be sold to pay debts. 9 November 1761. Barnaby (his mark) McKinnie. December Court 1761. p.49, I William Andrews...son Henry Andrews...twenty shillings...daughter Jean Bryant twenty shillings...daughter Amey Bailey twenty shillings...son William Hill Andrews twenty shillings...son Abrm Andrews twenty shillings....son Isam Andrews twenty shillings...son Micajah Andrews 240 acres...one walnut Desk, one feather Bed and furniture...six cows and calves, one Bay Horse called Pompey...daughter Sarah Andrews four cows and calves, one feather bed and furniture, Black Mare which is commonly called her Mare, two ewes and lambs one black Walnut Chest and twenty shillings. To my loving Wife Catherine Andrews the use of my plantation and all my stock of Horses, Cattle Hoggs sheep & household furniture that is not given in Legacies and one Negro Man named Charles during her Natural life...20 October 1761. William Andrews (signed). December Court 1761. p.50, John Waller...lend to my loving wife Ann Waller during her natural life three Negroes as follows Charles, Pocorvan Jack, and Lucy & after her decease then Charles to return to my son Hardress other two...after my wife's decease they & their increase to be equally divided between all my children...I give to my Loving Wife & her Heirs for Ever as followeth Sam, Pheby, Ned & Linder & their increase for ever...(further disposal of household goods and instruction on raising his children)...my Negro Man Goliah or Long as is called that is now hired to my Brother Robert Waller in Norfolk Town shall be kept in his possession if he chuses to keep him until his Wages pays him what I'm in debted to him & if he refuses to keep him then my son Hardress to take him in possession and hire him out until he raises the Money & that to be added to my estate for the Children. Then I give him to my son Hardress...20 January 1762. John Waller (signed).March Court 1762. p.54-5, I John Corlen...to my Loving Wife Keziah Corlen the use of my several dwelling houses which are now on the plantation...son Philip Corlen a piece of land on the south side of Quanque Creek...and also give him my Negro Mann called Billey over and above what I have already given to him...son William Corlen the land I now live upon on the north side of Quankey Creek...bed & furniture, four head of Black Cattle, 27 head of Hoggs, one iron Pott & two pewter basons, one half of my crop of corn & tobacco & also together with my Negro Mann Call'd Tom...to my daughter Elizabeth Jackson...other lower half of my land on Quankey Creek...also my Negro Man Called Paul over & above what I have already given her. All the rest of my goods and chattels not already mentioned to be sold in order to pay my debts...Surplus to be divided between my children. 27 October 1761. John Corlen (signed). March Court 1762. p.57, I Drew Smith...lend to my Loving wife Elizabeth Smith five Negroes (to wit) one Fellow Named Dick another Named Mingo, another named Jacob, one Wench Nam'd Rose, another Namd'd Hannah, during her life & then they and their increase to be equally divided among my four Daughters...to my Daughter Millea the land whereon Nathan Marley now lives...one Negro Girl Nam'd Lucy...to my Daughter A__ the plantation where on Francis Besthel Haynes now lives...also I give to my daughter Ann one Negro Girl Named Olive...22 February 1762. Drew Smith (signed). March Court 1762. p.62-3, 26 February 1759, Thomas Matthis Senr. ...to my Grandson Charles Matthis one hundred acres of land...Beloved son Thomas my Fellow Named Peter & my part of the Water Mill...my son Thomas Matthis my Negro fellow Named Cork. James (J) Matthis. March Court 1762. p.64, I Thomas Pope...to my Son Amos Pope the plantation where on I now live and all the land belonging to it & the Still...the residue of my estate to be sold to the highest Bidder for six months credit that is my Negro fellow & every thing else within. 7 March 1762. Thomas Pope (signed). March Court 1762. p.70, 3 January 1762, I James Smith...lend to my Loving Wife Francis Smith during her life or Widowhood the land I now live on two Negroes Ceasar and Pris, two White Mares, to wit, Benny and Jenny, half the Black Cattle, Hoggs and sheep, two feather beds & furniture, one Brandy Still, Worm & Tub, two Iron Potts one Bras Kettle, one half the pewter, the new gun, one large pine chest, six chairs, two axes, four hoes, six knives & forks, one frying pan, one Butter Pot, one case of Bottles...my Negro Girl called Aggy, one Black Walnut Table all the spinning wheels & cards, one cart and wheals...to John Smith son of James Smith one Negro woman called Rachel, one gun...and the bed whereon I now lie with a silk Rugg...to Mary Norwood wife of Samuel Norwood one Negro girl called Nan...to James Killingsworth son of William Killingsworth a Negro called Pris after the death or marriage of my wife...unto Sarah Spann wife of John Spann one Negro man named Ben...to James Smith son of John Smith after the decease or marriage of my said Wife Frances, my Negro Man called Ceasar and the great Looking glass...James (J) Smith. June Court 1762. p.72, William Taylor (gives over a thousand acres of land to children) son Thomas Teackle Taylor the following Negroes (to wit) Ceasar, Cudgo, Nan & her child named Boatswain & a Negro Boy Named Will...to son Joshua Taylor one Negro Boy Named Jacob...son John Taylor one Negro Boy Named Jeffrey...Daughter Elizabeth Taylor...one Negro girl Named Patt & her increase and one Negro Boy named George...Daughter Ester Taylor one Negro Girl Named Lid and her increase...Daughter Catherine Negro child named Diner and her increase...Daughter Mary Taylor 25 pounds sterling...Lend the rest of my Negroes...25 March 1762. William Taylor (signed). June Court 1762. p.75-6, I James Lovell...to son James Lovell five Negroes, to wit, Will, Murron, Ralph, Nan and Cato. to my son William Lovell two Negroes Philip and Nathaniel and all the rest of my slaves I give to my four youngest children Elizabeth Lovell, Jane Lovell, Malachi Lovell and Ann Lovell all the rest of my slaves and not to be Divided only as they Marry. 16 November 1761. James Lovell (signed). June Court 1762. p.83, I Barnabas Lane...lend to my Dear and wife During her Natural life the plantation whereon I now live with all the land...also lend the Labour of my Negro Wench Rachell to my Loving Wife During her life and also the Labour of my Negro fellow Mingo until my son Martin Lane shall come to full age and then the said Negro fellow and all the Increase of the Negro wench aforesd to be equally divided amongst all my children. 30 May 1762. Barnabas Lane (signed). September Court 1762. p.85, I Winefred Pope...to my Loving Brother Jesse Pope my Negro Girl Vilate and my Negro man Peter & one small chest...17 February 1762. Winefred (her mark) Pope. September Court 1762. p.90, I Samuel Gaines...(gives plantations and cattle to his children)...Leave my Negro Woman Sue to Labour for my three children...8 January 1763. (signing) January Court 1763. p.92, I Jordan Thomas...(gives use of plantation to wife Ann Thomas and other plantations to sons)...to my son John one Negro Boy & one Negrra girl when he shall attain to age of twenty one years...giving to each of my daughters that is to say Nanney, Mary & Susanah each of them a Negro girl such as my wife shall think fit...my Negro man Mingo & Negro Woman Patt be at their Liberty to chuse either my wife or which of the children they think fitt for their master or mistress & the children to accept them as so much toward their part of their estate. 23 June 1762. (signing). January Court 1763. p.98, 21 June 1763, I James Bynam...to son William Bynam one feather bed & furniture...to my Grandson John Bynam son of William Bynam one Negro man Named Jacob...my Daughter Agnes Whitney five cows...my son Nicholas Bynam one feather bed and furniture...my grandson James Bynam son of Nicholas Bynam one Negro wench Named Cate...my Daughter Mary Dill wife of Philip Dill one Negro man named samul...James (his mark) Bynum. April Court 1763. p.101-2, I Joseph Bulter...my executors sell 400 acres in Cumberland County in Virginia...Daughter Sarah Butler one Negro Woman named Easter with her Increase...Daughter Jude one Negrra Girl named Easter and her increase...Daughter Annice(?) Butler one Negrra Girl named Amey with her increase...Daughter Mary Ann Butler one Negrra Girl named Jenny with her increase...Daughter Elcie Butler one Negrra Girl named Milley with her increase...Daughter Susanna Butler two Negrra boys Daniel & James...son Samuel Butler one Negrra man Named Harry...son Joseph Butler one Negrra man named Jack ...son Stephen Butler one Negrra boy named sam...my Loving Wife Dolathy Butler during her life...all my Negrras to which is not already Given and all my stock of all kinds...30 October 1760 (signing). April Court 1763. p.119, I Mary Lattimore...to m two sisters Ann and Marget Lattimore My Negro girl Grace and her increase to be equally divided between them. My other Negro Girl sue and her increase I give to my friend Jeane Crooker. (her mark) 3 July 1763. January Court 1764. p.121, I James Martin...to my loving son William Martin one Negroe Girl known by the name of Nanny...Loving Daughter Susannah the now wife of John Goodloe one gold ring of the price of twenty shillings...to my loving son James Martin one Negroe girl known by the name of Winney...Daughter Mary Martin one Negroe Girl known by the name of Violet...son Henry Layne Martin one Negroe Girl known by the name of Judy...loveing son Patrick Martin one Negroe Girl known by the name of Rose...loving Daughter Lucy Martin one Negroe girl known by the name of Sarah...in case any of the Negroes Bequeathed as above mentioned should happen to die before the time of the Division of my Estate then my Meaning is that such son or Daughter to have another Negroe out of My estate of the value of the one Deceased. My Negro Man Toby to be hired out till the Division of my Estate for the support and education of my children. My tract of land in Culpeper to be sold...to my loveing wife Mary Martin the use of my Dwelling house and lott...and one Negroe Girl named Lilly...loveing son James Martin one Negroe Boy Called Hamp shire...Remainder of my Estate to be sold...1 October 1763. Jas Martin (signed). January Court 1764. pp.125-6, Henry Robertson....to my son Peter my Negroe man Tom...two cows and one feather Bed and furniture and my Bay horse Colt and my smooth Hand Gun...to Daughter Suckey the land and plantation whereon I now live ....my Negroe wench Phillis...to my son Henry my plantation on south side of Mush Island Creek...my Negroe Boy Dick...two cows and my rifled gun...one feather bed and furniture...8 May 1763. (signed). January Court 1764. p.129, 15 March 1764. Robert Williamson...unto my Son George Williamson my Negro Boy Brutus and three pounds cash...to my Daughter Frances Williamson two Negroes, Hannah and Judah...lend to my Daughter Susannah Hackett my Negro Girl called Lucy...after Susannah's decease to my Granddaughter Elizabeth Hacket...and if the said Negro girl should have issue...her second child should descend to my grandson Thomas Hackett...to my Son John Williamson my Negro fellow called Willm and a Negro man called Frank and a Negro Girl called Sillah...(signed). June Court 1764. p.131, I Jane Williams...My Negro woman Bandy be sold at public sale and I give the money that shall arise to my son William Williams. 4 September 1761. (signed). July Court 1764. p.136, I George Goodwin...lend to my loving Wife Martha Goodwin one third part of my plantation also one Negroe Man Jack & 80 pounds...to my dutiful son Josiah Goodwin all my tract of land with two Negroes namely Robert & James...be hired out for the schooling & Maintenance of my son...to my dutiful Daughter Molly two Negroes namely Freeman & Hagar also twenty pounds...7 March 1764. (signed). April Court 1764. p.144, I Henery Pope...to my loving wife Tabitha Pope one Negroe named Joe and all my household furniture, all my livestock and all my debts due to me...to my oldest son Burrel Pope one plantation...209 acres & also one negroe Girl named Patt...my younger sons Willis, John, Henry Austin and Wiley Pope all ye rest of my lands & negroes not bequeathed before. 2 January 1764. (signed). April Court 1764 p.146, 16 August 1764, I Thomas Kearny...to my loving wife Sarah Kearney three Negros that is Sharper, Didchers & Fennll as also ten cows, six sows, two of the old Work Horses & half of all my household furniture...loving Son Edmund Kearney four Negroe Fellows nam'd Scipio, Cato, Pompey & Lowil(?) which he has now in his possession and also two Negroe Girls nam'd Sarina & Hester...to son Philip Kearney six Negroes Viz Jack Brutus Kingall(?), Trusa(?), Cyrus & Anakil that is now in his possession as also all the Negroes that is at the home plantation that is not already bequeathed, all my stock of cattle and hogs...(signed). April Court 1764. pp. 153-4, I Thomas Davis...(bequeaths thousands of acres of land)...to my Nephew Dioclecian Davis son of Lewis Davis one Negroe Girl named Tolar her increase...Daughter Sally Davis one Negroe nam'd Pink and her increase...the use of four Negroes to Wit Dick & David, Rose and Clary to my loving wife during her natural life also the use of the increase of the said Negroes...all the rest of my personal estate not before disposed of may be kept together and...profits applied to support of my loving wife and maintenance of my children. 16 September 1764 (his mark). January Court 1765. p.156-7, October 15, 1764, I Thomas Mathis...to my son James Mathis my Negroe fellow Will....to my son Isaac Mathis my plantation...Benjamin Mathis 150 acres...loving wife three Negroes Cook, Rachel and hannah during her life...to son Isaac I give Dinah and Daniel after my wife's decease...to son Benjamin I give Nell and David after my wife's decease...(his mark). April Court 1765. p.158, 26 January 1765. I Jennings Hackney...to my beloved son William Hackney all and singular my lands, messuages and tennements also five Negroes known by the names as followeth: Viz. George, Cato, Lucy and Jude and all my stock of cattle Hoggs & also my household furniture. (signing). April Court 1765. p.159-60, Robert Hill....to my Beloved wife Tabitha Hill the use of three Negroes to wit Sambo, Sarah and Bess...I also lend her six cows and calves and all the household goods...two horses...to my son William Hill a Negroe girl called Dealse...to my son Green Hill a Negroe called Simon that he is now possessed with....to my son Sion Hill the plantation ...also two Negroes one called Toney the other called Pompey...to son Abner Hill a Negroe called Peter and a girl called Bibby...to Daughter Tabetha Chapman a Negro fellow called Jammy that she is now possessed with...Daughter Agnes Arrington a negroe called Jack that she is now possessed with...Daughter Ann Steel a Negro girl called Tuggy...Daughter Mary Bryant a negro girl called Daffeny that she is now possess'd with and also I give her a negroe wench called Jenny...Daughter Milbry my plantation...two Negroes one Named Hannah the other named Barbey and all the cattle I have given her. 18 June 1762. signed. April Court 1766. -End of this sample list- Source link: https://freeafricanamericans.com/halifax.htm Previous Next

< Back Margret Woods-Bullock's "CHAOS IN A PERFECT WORLD" "CHAOS IN A PERFECT WORLD" by Margret Woods-Bullock This is a lost society. We need to pray. Prayer gets us through a lot of things. Our Faith has kept us strong. Machine and hand quilted.. — in Warrenton, NC. Previous Next

< Back “Annie Barnes, 'About 43', Says She Is Mother Of 31; Thirteen Now Living,” - The Daily Reflector, 9 May 1949. An African American woman and wife of a Pitt County tenant farmer standing on her porch with six children. Photograph description: An African American woman and wife of a Pitt County tenant farmer standing on her porch with six children. Date from article: “Annie Barnes, 'About 43', Says She Is Mother Of 31; Thirteen Now Living,” - The Daily Reflector, 9 May 1949. The children in the photo L-R are, Kent Best (neighbor, in door way), Christene, Richard Jr, Maggie Lee, William Henry and Cory Bell. Source: ECU Digital Collections Previous Next

< Back 60th Sit-In Anniversary Breakfast Celebration "You don't need permission to stand up': Journalist Roland Martin speaks at N.C. A&T's Feb. 1 commemoration Roland Martin, a TV commentator who now hosts his own daily YouTube show, says elder black Americans deserve respect for their efforts. But younger African Americans don't need their permission to push for more change. Photos: The 60th Sit-In Anniversary Breakfast Celebration at N.C. A&T Friday January 31, 2020 *All Photos taken by Woody Marshall/News & Record* N.C A&T held the 60th Sit-In Anniversary Breakfast Celebration at its Greensboro campus on Jan. 31, 2020. The event commemorates the first downtown Greensboro NC sit-in on Feb. 1, 1960, and celebrates the four A&T freshmen who led the effort to integrate whites-only lunch counters. Previous Next

< Back Rosanell Eaton In the 1940s, Rosanell Eaton became one of the first African Americans in North Carolina to successfully register to vote since Reconstruction. In her 90s, she became a vocal opponent of the state's voter ID laws, which disproportionately affected black voters. Remembering Rosanell Eaton, An Outspoken Advocate for Voting Rights December 12, 2018 By Leslie Ovalle - Code Switch-NPR When the Supreme Court shot down a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act — which required that certain places with a history of discriminating against voters get federal approval before making new changes to their voting laws — lawmakers in North Carolina wasted little time in passing sweeping new rules around voting. The state issued requirements for specific kinds of photo identification, cut back on early voting and preregistration. Supporters of the new laws, who were overwhelmingly Republican, insisted that the measures were necessary to prevent voting fraud. But voting rights experts and advocates said that voter fraud was extremely rare and that the rules would make it much harder for younger voters, poorer voters, and black people — groups that were more likely to vote for Democrats and less likely to have official identification — to cast their ballots. To Rosanell Eaton, the restrictive new laws seemed familiar. Eaton was the granddaughter of enslaved people who grew up under Jim Crow in Louisburg, N.C., and had been fighting against rules meant to keep black people from voting for nearly as long as she was legally eligible to cast a ballot. In the early 1940s, after she turned the legal voting age, Eaton traveled by mule wagon to register to vote at the Franklin County courthouse. But she found herself before three white men, who confronted her and tried to stop her. They demanded that she recite the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States — a common "literacy test" used to discourage and block and turn away black people from voting voters. Eaton, unshaken, recited the entire thing. The men conceded and allowed her to register, making Eaton one of the first black voters in North Carolina since Reconstruction. Eaton, who died on Saturday at the age of 97, was a well-known advocate for voting rights among Carolinians — she was a member of the NAACP, a county poll worker and a special registrar commissioner, helping thousands of people register to vote — but it wasn't until she became the face of the lawsuit against the voting rules that North Carolina adopted in 2013 that she gained national prominence. Eaton, then 92, used her biography to place her state's new rules into a larger history of disenfranchisement. "We have been this way before, but now we have been turned back and it's a shame and a disgrace, and absolutely disgusting," she said to a crowd at voting rights rally. "She would often tell us the story that the reason she had to fight now, because she had to fight then," the Rev. William Barber told NPR's Audie Cornish. It was Barber who asked Eaton and her daughter, Armenta, to join the lawsuit against the state as its lead plaintiffs. Eaton traveled, gave speeches and marched — with her walker — to have North Carolina's laws changed. "I went up to her [during a rally] and said, Miss Rosanell, you don't have to do this," Barber said. "'I know what I'm doing,'" Barber said she told him. "You don't have to tell me what I don't have to do. I do have to do this." Under the state's new voter I.D. rules, Eaton was likely to have been among those who would have difficulties casting a ballot. She had the necessary documents — a birth certificate, drivers' license and voter registration card — but her name varied on each, making it likely that her contradictory documentation would have been honored. Eaton and her daughter would testify over and over in the case during the next three years. In 2016, a federal court found that North Carolina lawmakers had specifically asked about racial differences in voting behavior as they were crafting the new rules, and said that the measures amounted to an unconstitutional "target on African-Americans with almost surgical precision." The judges said the "legislature crafted the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans" and that the bill "retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess." The court struck down much of the law and sided with the plaintiffs. A later effort by North Carolina to revive the case was refused by the Supreme Court in 2017. Laws like the one Eaton fought against were a central issue in November's midterm elections. Georgia's "exact match" voter ID law left about 53,000 voter registration applications in limbo, the vast majority of those application belonged to black voters, a AP analysis found. In North Dakota, a voter ID law required a residential address on the document, making it more difficult for Native Americans, who do not have fixed street addresses on the reservations there, to cast their ballot. And in Texas, student IDs do not serve as identification, a policy that discourages younger voters. In total, 34 states have laws that require voters to show some sort of identification. Seven of those states have what the National Conference of State Legislatures refers to as "strict photo ID" laws, similar to those Eaton challenged. "She taught us that you can't just get fed up with what's going on in a democracy, that you just to work for it. It's hard. And when things are going wrong, it should fire you up. It should make you more willing to engage, " Barber said. In a 2015 op-ed in the New York Times, President Obama cited Eaton's story and praised her. "I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality," he wrote. In 2016, he invited her to visit him in the White House. But Eaton's daughter told the Charlotte Observer that her mother only agreed to go after she found out the visit wouldn't conflict with an upcoming primary election. Source:https://www.thelily.com/rosanell-eaton-a-lifelong-ardent.../ Source: https://www.npr.org/.../remembering-rosanell-eaton-an... Previous Next

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" Unknown Black Foodways Culinary Traditions & Practices 1/25 In this Gallery, we are posting books and documentaries that have been written about African Americans from North Carolina, We are also including resources about the lives of African Americans who are not native to NC. Resources to help our community in your quest to learn about African American Experiences in NC, in America, and around the world. Chefs, Bakers, & Cooks Chef Edna Lewis b.April 13, 1916 – d.February 13, 2006 Edna Lewis was born in Virginia, but did live in Chapel Hill, NC for a time. From 1983 to 1984 she served as guest chef of The Fearrington House Restaurant located in Pittsboro, just outside Chapel Hill. She introduced the chocolate soufflé dessert to the menu, and it has remained on the menu to this day. The dessert appeared on the cover of Gourmet magazine in April 1984 and helped launch the Restaurant, then three years old. “Every group Chef Edna Lewis b.April 13, 1916 – d.February 13, 2006 Edna Lewis was born in Virginia, but did live in Chapel Hill, NC for a time. From 1983 to 1984 she served as guest chef of The Fearrington House Restaurant located in Pittsboro, just outside Chapel Hill. She introduced the chocolate soufflé dessert to the menu, and it has remained on the menu to this day. The dessert appeared on the cover of Gourmet magazine in April 1984 and helped launch the Restaurant, then three years old. “Every group 1/7 North Carolina is home to some of the most talented African American chef bakers and cooks. Their culinary skills are a reflection of the rich cultural heritage of the state. From traditional southern dishes to modern fusion cuisine, these chefs are masters of their craft. Explore the diverse flavors of North Carolina through the eyes and taste buds of these talented culinary artists. Food Equity 1/1 North Carolina has a long history of racial disparities in access to healthy food. African Americans in particular have been disproportionately affected by food insecurity and lack of access to fresh, nutritious food. However, there are many individuals and organizations working to address this issue and promote food equity in the state. From community gardens to food banks to policy advocacy, these efforts are making a difference in the lives North Carolinians. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

< Back Back to Arts, Entertainment & Media Orgen Printing Company Raleigh's first Black American weekly newspaper. Pictured in the middle, is the Orgen Printing Company that was located at 115 East Hargett Street, Raleigh, NC, ca. 1917. This was Raleigh's first Black American weekly newspaper. The left and right photos are of Mr. Lawrence Macauga Cheek. The Orgen Printing Company was established in 1916 by Lawrence Macauga Cheek, he is standing on the far right of the middle image, leaning on a countertop. Mr. Cheek was born in Warren County Nov 20th 1886. He moved to Raleigh, NC when he was accepted into Shaw University in 1910. Mr. Cheek graduated from Shaw magna cum laude. Shortly after graduating, he moved to Houston, Texas in 1912 to accept the position of chair of Latin and Greek department at Houston College. In 1915 he moved back to Raleigh to establish the printing company seen in the middle photograph. Out of this venture grew the Raleigh Independent newspaper, a weekly African American publication, now known as the Carolinian. In 1919, Cheek and businessman/architect Calvin Lightner, and Dr. Manassa T. Pope who was a Spanish War veteran and one of the first licensed doctors in NC, all ran for Raleigh City Council to motivate their communities to participate more in the political process. They knew they wouldn't win, because of the highly racial divides in Raleigh and the state of NC at that time. According to Lightner, their motives for running for office during a particularly racially charged time were to “wake our people up politically.” Sadly, Cheek died at the young age of 35 from kidney disease in 1921. He and Ellean Elizabeth Whitaker married on June 24, 1914, she was the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. William Whitaker of Raleigh, NC. Mrs. Ellean Elizabeth Whitaker Cheek was born in Wake county on Sept 15, 1887, and she died in Raleigh on Sept 27th 1956 at age 69. They are both buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh, NC. The Orgen Printing Company continued to operate at 115 East Hargett until 1929, becoming the Capital City Barber Shop in 1931. Source: .96.7.47 From the General Negative Collection, State Archives of NC. Source: History of the American Negro, North Carolina Edition Link to Hill's Raleigh City Directory 1928 http://www.ancestraltrackers.net/.../hills-raleigh-city... Previous Next

< Back "The Kissing Case," "The Kissing Case," as it came to be known, drew international media attention to Monroe, N.C. October 28, 1958. Two Black Boys, Seven and Nine Years Old, Arrested and Jailed for Over Three Months After White Girl Kissed Them on Their Cheeks. "Earlier in the day, a group of children including James and David were playing together outside when they started a “kissing game,” during which a white girl their age named Sissy kissed James on the cheek. After the girl mentioned the kiss to her parents, her father grabbed a shotgun and arranged a mob to go to the Thompsons’ home, where they threatened to lynch James, David, and their mothers. The boys were not home when the mob arrived but the police found them shortly thereafter and “jumped out with their guns drawn” before taking them into custody, where they were beaten by the police." ----- "Even the Thompson family rarely talked about it. Recently, James Hanover Thompson sat down with his younger brother, Dwight, and told him what happened. "We were playing with some friends over in the white neighborhood, chasing spiders and wrestling and stuff like that," James says. "One of the little kids suggested that one of the little white girls give us a kiss on the jaw," he says. "The little girl gave me a peck on the cheek, and then she kissed David on the cheek. So, we didn't think nothing of it. We were just little kids." But the little girl mentioned the kiss back home, and her parents were furious; the police set out in search of the boys. "The police car pulled up, and they said, 'We're taking y'all to jail,'" James says. "I didn't know what was going on. But when we got down to the police station, we understand that they said that we had raped a little white girl." The two boys — James, 9, and David, 7 — were charged with molestation. And their punishment started immediately. "They uh... took us down in the bottom of the police station to a cell. And they had us handcuffed — they started beating us," James says. "They was beating us to our body, you know? They didn't beat us to the face, where nobody could see it; they just punched us all in the stomach, and back and legs. We was hollering and screaming. We thought they was gonna kill us." James says that he and David were held in jail for about six days before they were allowed to see their parents. And soon after, they were sent to reform school, with the possibility that they might be released before they turned 21." ---- The Kissing Case is the arrest, conviction and lengthy sentencing of two prepubescent African-American boys in 1958 in Monroe, North Carolina. A white girl kissed each of them on the cheek and later told her mother, who accused the boys of rape. The boys were then charged by authorities of molestation. Civil rights activists became involved in representing the boys. The boys were arrested in October 1958, separated from their parents for a week, beaten and threatened by investigators, then sentenced by a Juvenile Court judge. Leaders and members of the local NAACP, including Robert F Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, and other civil rights organizations, such as the New York-based The Committee to Combat Racial Injustice (CCRI), protested the charges, trial and sentencing. The United States was embarrassed by protests from other governments, demonstrations in major cities, and strong criticism in the international press. North Carolina Governor Luther H. Hodges finally granted clemency to the boys, releasing them from the reformatory in early 1959 after they had been there for three months. Neither he nor authorities in Monroe ever officially apologized to the boys or their families. INCIDENT In late October 1958, Sissy Marcus, a 7- or 8-year-old white girl (sources vary), told her mother she had kissed 9-year-old James "Hanover" Thompson, and 7-year-old David "Fuzzy" Simpson, on their cheeks. She had seen them while with other children and recognized James as a friend from earlier childhood. The two had played together when James accompanied his mother to her work as a domestic for the Marcus family. The boys were African American. When Sissy told her mother Bernice Marcus about the encounter, the woman became enraged and washed her daughter's mouth with lye. She called the police and accused the boys of raping her daughter. Local officials unlawfully detained the two young boys, who were arrested in October 1958, and for a week refused to allow them to see their parents or legal counsel. Police beat the boys and threatened them with more injury in an attempt to extract confessions. After being jailed for three months, the boys were charged by Juvenile Judge Hampton Price and convicted of molestation. Price sentenced them to reform school, perhaps until the age of 21 CONTEXT As was happening in other cities and towns across the South, in the postwar period African Americans began to press to regain their civil rights and social justice. Many men had served the United States during World War II and, especially in the South, they resented returning to find out they were expected to submit to being second-class citizens. In Monroe, North Carolina, Marine veteran Robert F. Williams agreed to be president and Dr. Albert E. Perry, a physician and veteran, to be vice-president of the local chapter of the NAACP. They conducted meetings and demonstrations while seeking integration in the city of public facilities legally segregated by the state legislature after it had disenfranchised most blacks in the state at the turn of the century. In the late 1950s, they were still excluded from politics, although there had been some voter registration drives. Williams and Perry specifically called for integration of the swimming pool at the Monroe Country Club; although located on private grounds, the pool was a public facility, built with federal funds during the Great Depression. It was operated with city funds raised by taxes on all residents. Perry and Williams argued that since all citizens in Monroe were taxed for the pool's operation, all should be able to use it. Following these activities, a "large, heavily-armed" Ku Klux Klan motorcade, led by James W. "Catfish" Cole, had attacked Perry's home. Harry Golden, in a 1959 article entitled "Monroe, North Carolina and the 'Kissing Case,'" said that such attempts to desegregate the pool were 'unwise', 'naive' and 'unrealistic' because of the "crude emotions of a small agricultural community." In Monroe, white parents did not want their children to swim or play with black children. EVENTS After Sissy Marcus told Bernice Marcus about seeing James and David, her father and neighbors picked up shotguns and went looking for the boys and their parents. That evening, police arrested Thompson and Simpson on charges of molestation. The young boys were detained for six days without access to their parents or legal counsel. They were handcuffed and beaten in a lower-level cell of the police station. A few days later Juvenile Judge Hampton Price found them guilty, saying "since they just stood silent and didn't say nothin', I knew that was a confession of guilt." Price sentenced the boys to indefinite terms in reform school. The boys, still denied legal counsel, were told they might get out when they were 21 years old. The boys were imprisoned in the North Carolina state reformatory in Hoffmann in October 1958. The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP raised funds to hire an experienced lawyer and appeal their case. The national office had not wanted to enter the case, as they were working on litigation challenges to law, such as barriers to voter registrations. Following the boys' arrests, their mothers had been fired from their jobs as domestics, and the NAACP relocated them to nearby towns for their safety. Civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, head of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP, raised protests about the arrests and sentencing. Williams called Conrad Lynn, a noted black civil rights lawyer from New York, who came to aid in the boys' defense. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt tried to talk with the North Carolina governor. At first the local and state governments refused to back down in the case. Governor Luther H. Hodges and state attorney general Malcolm B. Seawell, who was appointed by Hodges, traveled to Monroe to prosecute the boys. He rejected Lynn's writ (on behalf of Williams) to review their detention. The mothers of the two boys were not allowed to see their children for weeks. It became an international cause célèbre: Joyce Egginton, a journalist with the London Observer (United Kingdom), got permission to visit the boys and took their mothers along. She smuggled in a camera and took a photograph of the mothers hugging their children. Due to the alleged crime, the boys had not been allowed any contact with them for weeks. Egginton's photograph was published, "showing the boys had been severely beaten and abused by the arresting police." Her story of the case and the related photo were printed throughout Europe and Asia; the London Observer ran a photograph of the children's reunion with their mothers under the headline, "WHY?" The United States Information Agency reported receiving more than 12,000 letters regarding the case, with most people expressing outrage at the arrests. An international committee was formed in Europe to defend Thompson and Simpson. Huge demonstrations against the US over this case were held in Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Rotterdam; in the latter city, protesters stoned the US Consulate. The US government suffered international embarrassment and shaming. In February 1959, North Carolina officials asked the boys' mothers to sign a waiver to obtain the release of their children. It would have required the boys to admit to being guilty of the charges, and the mothers refused to sign. Two days later, after the boys had spent three months in detention, the governor pardoned Thompson and Simpson without conditions or explanation. The state and city never apologized to the boys or their families for their treatment. Their lives were overturned. Commenting on it in 2011, Brenda Lee Graham, Thompson's sister, said that he was never the same after these events. Ku Klux Klan During this time, no judge from North Carolina would overrule Price. Members of the local Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in front of the boys' families' houses, and some people shot at the houses. The Monroe KKK chapter was strong and an estimated 7,000 Klan members attended a Klan meeting near Monroe, a city with total population of only 12,000. In a National Public Radio interview in 2011, members of the Thompson family said they still remembered "sweep[ing] bullets off [their] front porch" and the "burning crosses" in their yards. COMMITTEE TO COMBAT RACIAL INJUSTICE In December 1958 the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice (CCRI) was formed in New York City with NAACP's Robert F. Williams as Chairman and civil rights activist George Weissman – pen name George Lavan – as secretary. On behalf of the two boys, they conducted "fund-raising, helping to secure legal counsel, and soliciting public and private moral support." These efforts contributed to the pressure for the boys to be freed and their pardon early in 1959. The committee's founders included Dr. Albert E. Perry, v-p of the Monroe NAACP chapter; L. E. Austin, editor of the Carolina Times; Conrad Lynn, New York attorney active in civil rights cases; and Reverend C. K. Steele of Tallahassee, Florida. Weissman's account of the case was published in The Nation on January 17, 1959. ROLE OF NORTH CAROLINA GOVERNOR LUTHER H. HODGES Although he was "embarrassed by the international press coverage to eventually pardon the children, Governor Hodges "refused to apologize for [the State of North Carolina's] harsh treatment" of the children. Source: https://www.npr.org/.../the-kissing-case-and-the-lives-it... Source: EJI calendar, On This Day October 28, 1958 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissing_Case Previous Next

< Back Robert Lee Vann Robert Lee Vann was an African-American newspaper publisher and editor. He was the publisher and editor of the Pittsburgh Courier from 1910 until his death. Born: August 29, 1879, Ahoskie, NC, Hertford County. Died: October 24, 1940, Philadelphia, PA Education: University of Pittsburgh at Titusville Known for: Pittsburgh Courier He was born in Ahoskie, North Carolina, the son of Lucy Peoples and an unknown father. He graduated as valedictorian of Waters Training School in Winton, North Carolina, in 1901, and attended Wayland Academy and Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, from 1901 to 1903. He then attended Western University of Pennsylvania, (now the University of Pittsburgh) and graduated from its law school in 1909. He passed the bar examination in 1909 and married Jessie Matthews from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on February 17, 1919. Vann was one of only five black attorneys in Pittsburgh in 1910, a city with more than 25,000 African Americans. In early March 1910, Vann drew up incorporation papers for the Pittsburgh Courier and began writing contributions. Through Vann's connections, the paper was able to attract wealthy investors, including Cumberland Willis Posey Sr.. On May 10, 1910, the Pittsburgh Courier was formally incorporated, with Vann handling the legal means.. During the summer, the paper grew from four to eight pages, but struggled with circulation and financial solvency due to a small market and lack of interested advertisers. In the fall of 1910, original founder Edwin Nathaniel Harleston left the paper for financial and creative reasons,[8] and Vann became editor. The Courier under Vann prominently featured Vann's work as a lawyer and public figure. As editor, Vann wrote editorials encouraging readers to only patronize business that paid for advertisements in the Courier and ran contests to attempt to increase circulation.[9] In his Christmas editorial at the end of 1914, Vann wrote of the paper's intent to "abolish every vestige of Jim Crowism in Pittsburgh." In the 1920s, Vann made efforts to improve the quality of the news included in the growing paper. Under Vann, the "Local News" section of the Courier covered the social lives of the upper- and middle-class members of the Hill District. This included accounts of vacations, marriages, and parties of prominent families and the goings on of local groups, such as the Pittsburgh Frogs. Vann legitimized the Courier with a professional staff, national advertisements, a dedicated printing plant, and wide circulation. Vann stirred up controversy and 10,000 new readers by hiring George Schuyler in 1925, whose editorials and opinions made him famous as the "black H.L. Mencken" (who was a Courier subscriber). Under Vann, the Courier also worked as a tool for social progress. Most significantly, the paper extensively covered the injustices on African Americans perpetrated by the Pullman Company and supported the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Vann wrote to gain support for causes such as improved housing conditions in the Hill District, better education for black students, and equal employment and union opportunities.. However, Vann often used his Courier editorials to publicly fight with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and W. E. B. Du Bois over issues such as President Calvin Coolidge's grants of clemency to black soldiers involved in the Houston Riot and Vann's allegations that James Weldon Johnson embezzled money for personal use from the NAACP and the Garland Fund. This disharmony was resolved in 1929 by published apologies by Vann, Du Bois, and Johnson, and within the decade, Du Bois became a regular Courier contributor. But in 1938, Vann's Courier ended up at odds with the NAACP once again. Vann, through national campaigns and contact with President Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued inclusion of African-American units in the United States Armed Forces. Vann saw this as an achievable step on the path to integration of the military, but the NAACP leadership, primarily Walter White, publicly disagreed with this half-measure, despite the protests of Thurgood Marshall. As a result of the Courier′s influence and Vann's political clout, New York Congressman Fish successfully added an amendment prohibiting racial discrimination in selection and training of men drafted to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. In 1932, Vann officially put the Courier behind the party realignment of African Americans. He urged readers to vote for Democrats, writing, "My friends, go home and turn Lincoln's picture to the wall." After achieving prominence as the head of the Courier, Vann served as Special Assistant to U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings from 1933 until 1935. Largely neglected and even ill-treated (staff stenographers often refused to take dictation from him because he was black), Vann could not get an appointment to see the Attorney General and in fact may never have met the man while in Washington. Vann resigned in 1935 to return to the Pittsburgh Courier; by 1938 the paper was the largest American black weekly, with a circulation of 250,000.. In 1939, Vann founded Interstate United Newspapers, Inc., an agency formed to sell advertising to the black press. Vann's widow succeeded him as president of Interstate United Newspapers. Source: http://www.ncmarkers.com/Markers.aspx?MarkerId=A-85... Source: :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Vann Previous Next

< Back Robert Lee Weaver Photo and information credit: Mrs. Denise Hester (daughter). SALUTE! WORLD WAR II VETERAN My father Robert Lee Weaver served in the US Army in combat in the South Pacific/Philippines warfront. He attained the rank of Sergeant before being honorably discharged. Photo and information credit: Mrs. Denise Hester (daughter). SALUTE! WORLD WAR II VETERAN My father Robert Lee Weaver served in the US Army in combat in the South Pacific/Philippines warfront. He attained the rank of Sergeant before being honorably discharged. Originally from Greenville NC and born in 1919, he migrated to Durham with the Weaver family. He was a 1937 graduate of Hillside High School, attended North Carolina College and played on the tennis team. He and other family members worked in Durham's dry cleaning industry and finally at Weaver's Cleaners on historic Fayetteville Street. Previous Next

< Back Pea Island Life-Saving Station Pea Island Life-Saving Station was a life-saving station on Pea Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was the first life-saving station in the country to have an all-black crew, and it was the first in the nation to have a black man, Richard Etheridge, as commanding officer. Pea Island Life-Saving Station was a life-saving station on Pea Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was the first life-saving station in the country to have an all-black crew, and it was the first in the nation to have a black man, Richard Etheridge, as commanding officer. On August 3, 2012, the second of the Coast Guard's 154-foot Sentinel-Class Cutters, USCGC Richard Etheridge (WPC-1102), was commissioned in his honor Richard Etheridge was born into slavery on January 16, 1842, the property of John B. Etheridge on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Large plantations didn't exist in the Outer Banks; African Americans were relatively few and slavery limited. During his early life, Richard Etheridge, like most Outer Bankers, learned to work the sea, fishing, piloting boats and combing the beach for the refuse of wrecks. Even though it was illegal to do so, his master also taught him to read and write. After the fighting began between the States in April 1861, the Outer Banks were the site of one of the first Northern invasions, in February 1862. General Ambrose Burnside, the Union commander, employed black labor to build fortifications for his armies, and the island soon became a refugee camp for fugitive slaves. The Union eventually realized the potential that the active recruitment of Southern blacks offered their forces, not only by bolstering the Union ranks but by simultaneously diminishing the opposition's labor supply. Black troops began being enlisted by the summer of 1863; Richard Etheridge joined on August 28 of that year. The 36th United States Colored Troop, in which Etheridge enlisted, spent much of its first year of active duty like most of the other black units in the Union Army—playing secondary roles. After limited anti-guerilla actions in North Carolina, the soldiers of the 36th served as guards at the prisoner-of-war camp at Point Lookout, Maryland, occasionally raiding into neighboring Virginia for contraband goods: supplies, horses, cattle or slaves. Necessity eventually allowed the 36th to play a more prominent role in the fight for freedom and union. The 36th distinguished itself during the September, 1864 Battle of New Market Heights, Virginia. During the fighting, the Union forces overran Lee's strong position and won an important victory on the road to taking the Confederate capital at Richmond. Etheridge was promoted to sergeant two days after the battle. While fighting on the front to end slavery, Etheridge was also active in the struggle behind Union lines to end the mistreatment of blacks. During his duty in Virginia in 1865, he and William Benson drafted the following letter to General Oliver O. Howard, the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, protesting the mistreatment that blacks on Roanoke Island were suffering at the hands of the occupying army. "[T]he white soldiers break into our houses act as they please steal our chickens rob our gardens and if any one defends their-Selves against them they are taken to the guard house for it, so our families have no protection when Mr. Streeter is here to protect them and will not do it." Etheridge and Benson's letter was not merely a cry of grievance, but was also a call for action. "General we the soldiers of the 36th U.S. Co Troops having families at Roanoke Island humbly petition you to favor us by removing Mr. Streeter the present Asst Supt at Roanoke Island under Captain James." Etheridge signed the letter, "in behalf of humanity." At the War's close, Etheridge, now a Regimental Commissary Sergeant, and the black troops of the Army of the James were regrouped into the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and sent to Texas. These units would become known as the "Buffalo Soldiers." Instances of abuse against blacks soldiers were rife in the period immediately following the fighting between the States. The men were due ten months back-pay, had had their rations cut in half, and were unruly over the continued reports of mistreatment that were coming from their families back home First African American Crew Richard Etheridge was the first African American to hold the rank of keeper of a life-saving station. This meant that, under the racial standards of the times, the entire crew under his command would have to be black. Although other black men had served as surfmen at Pea Island and other stations, Pea Island Station came to be manned entirely by a black keeper and crew. The other LSS stations, in North Carolina as well as throughout the nation, would be manned and run by whites. Five months after Etheridge took charge, arsonists burnt the station to the ground Flawed Rescue In December 1866, Etheridge left the service at Brazos Santiago, Texas. He returned to the Outer Banks, where he married. Etheridge made his living fishing and serving in the newly formed Life-Saving Service, first at Oregon Inlet in 1875, then at Bodie Island. In the early years, nepotism and political cronyism tainted many Life-Saving Service appointments. A series of highly publicized maritime disasters off the North Carolina coast appeared to be leading to the annexation of the LSS into the Navy. In two months, 188 lives and more than a half million dollars in property was lost off the Outer Banks, within sight and with little or inexpert assistance from the lifesavers on shore. The New York World reported, "It begins to be painfully clear that the terrible loss of Human life … on the North Carolina coast … must be attributed directly to the inefficiency of the Life-Saving Service." In 1879, the commander of the Pea Island station (called a "keeper") was a white man and he had a crew of both white and black men. A rescue effort in November 1879 was bungled, and the keeper and some of the crew were held responsible. The Revenue Cutter Service investigated the situation, fired the white keeper, and appointed in his place Richard Etheridge, one of the best surfmen on the North Carolina coast, to serve as keeper. In order to address the issue of inefficiency in the service, the best lifesavers would need to be put in charge of stations. Etheridge, one of only eight African Americans in the entire Life-Saving Service, was promoted from the lowest ranking surfman at neighboring Bodie Island station to take over the incompetently run station at Pea Island. The LSS inspector, 1st LT Charles F. Shoemaker; despite warnings from locals, recommended Etheridge to the position, wrote: "[Etheridge] is thirty eight years of age, [of] strong robust physique, intelligent, and able to read and write sufficiently well to keep the journal of a station. [He is] one of the best surfman on this part of the North Carolina coast". The report concluded: "[I am] aware that no colored man holds the position of keeper in the Life-Saving Service, and yet such as are surfmen are found to be among the best on the coast of North Carolina" "I am fully convinced that the interests of the Life-Saving Service here, in point of efficiency, will be greatly advanced by the appointment of this man to the Keepership of Station No. 17 Rescue Of The E.S. Newman Given the scrutiny he and his men were under, Etheridge knew that the slightest error could result in his or one of his crewmen's dismissal, that inadequacies, no matter how small, could result in the reinstatement of a white keeper and crew. So he ran the station with military ardor. All of his vigorous and exacting preparation paid off on the terrible night of October 11, 1896 when the schooner E.S. Newmangrounded south of the station. The captain of the vessel had his wife and three-year-old daughter on board when it was driven ashore during a hurricane on October 11, 1896. The storm was so bad that Keeper Etheridge had suspended beach patrols. Still, from the station, a surfman, Theodore Meekins, thought he saw a distress signal, and fired off a Coston flare to see if there would be a response. Meekins and Etheridge watched carefully, then saw the schooner acknowledge with a flare of her own. The Pea Island crew with the help of a mule team then pulled the beach cart with the rescue equipment and surfboat along the beach towards where the distress signal had been seen. Huge waves washing ashore made this especially difficult. Finally, when the crew arrived at the scene of the wreck, they found that the wave conditions were so great that the surfboat could not be launched, nor could a breeches buoy be used because the beach was so inundated by waves that the anchor for the buoy line could not be placed in the sand. Two surfmen volunteered to swim out in the waves to attempt to reach the wreck. They eventually did reach the schooner and managed to heave a line aboard. Nine times the surfmen went into the water and one by one the passengers and crew were all rescued, starting with the captain's three-year-old daughter. According to local lore, Meekins, who was reputedly the best swimmer of the group, made every voyage out to the Newman. In the following days, the Newman's captain searched for and found the piece of the side that held the vessel's name and donated it to the crew as an offering of his thanks. For a century, this would be the only award the Pea Island crew received for their efforts. The 1896 Pea Island crew voted to give the wooden sideboard of the Newman to Theodore Meekins, the young surfman who first spotted the distress signal and who swam out to the wreck several times during the rescue. (Fifth from left in photo.) Meekins took the board to his farm on Roanoke Island and nailed it to the top of his barn. He served at Pea Island for 21 more years, until his death in 1917, when, while boating home on leave, a storm came up at Oregon Inlet, and he drowned trying to swim to shore Later Years Etheridge served as the keeper at Pea Island for twenty years. In January 1900, as Orville and Wilbur Wright were planning their voyage to Kitty Hawk to experiment with human flight, Etheridge, at the age of 58, fell ill and died at the station. Pea Island continued to be manned by an all-black crew through the Second World War. The station was decommissioned in 1947. One of the last surviving surfmen to serve at the station, William Charles Bowser, died at age 91 on June 28, 2006. Herbert Collins, who served in the 1940s and put the locks on the station when it was closed, died Sunday, March 14, 2010. In 1996, the Coast Guard awarded the Gold Life-Saving Medal posthumously to the keeper and crew of the Pea Island station for the rescue of the people of the E.S. Newman. Etheridge and his family are buried at the Pea Island Life Saving Station memorial on the grounds of the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. Source: http://www.rescuemenfilm.com/The_Story.html Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_Island_Life-Saving_Station Previous Next

< Back Adeline Alston Plantation ​ Adeline Alston Owner and Manager of One of Chatham County’s Largest Plantations by Steven E. Brooks, Jim and Beverly Wiggins November 2020 Chatham Historical Museum . Note: Our focus in on the enslaved Black people owned by Josh and Adeline Alston and their heirs. Below are excerpts from different pages of the research done and compiled by Steven E. Brooks, Jim and Beverly Wiggins -Nov. 2020. -End Note- . Chatham County, North Carolina. What was John and Adeline’s plantation like early in their marriage? Unlike most Chatham County farms, which were worked by the farm owner and his family, John and Adeline’s plantation was a large-scale operation, dependent upon enslaved labor. Although smaller than many coastal plantations, their plantation was large for the central Piedmont, and certainly for Chatham County. Such farms were multi-crop producers, growing corn, tobacco, cotton, and a variety of garden produce for plantation consumption and requiring structures in addition to the main house, such as stables, storehouses, granaries, and barns. John and Adeline’s plantation consisted of the main house, kitchen, pig-boiling pit, hand-dug well, smokehouse, cabins for enslaved workers, barns, and likely additional specialty structures such as a laundry or craft cabins. Some of these are still preserved on the property, along with sections of farm roads that would have served traffic from Pittsboro to the west, as well as for getting plantation products to market.9 Many of the enslaved persons on the plantation would have engaged in agriculture, but others may have been crafts persons. Receipts in the Alston archive suggest that crafts persons enslaved by Chatham Jack Alston likely produced clothing and shoes and other leather goods. An 1830 receipt suggests that gun manufacture or repairs may have been among the skills practiced on John and Adeline’s plantation. Receipts for cotton and wool cards suggest that some cotton and wool may have been spun and woven into cloth on the plantation. Purchased fabrics, including “linen, negro cottons, flannel, silk, calico, and muslin, edging, ribbons, and needles,” indicate that clothing was being made on the plantation.10 The living quarters for John and Adeline’s enslaved workers would have been constructed of logs with chimneys of local fieldstone. Several cabins were near the main house— probably the living quarters of enslaved workers who worked in the main house or in crafts. Other cabins were located near the fields, so that agricultural workers would be near their work. We assume that John and Adeline’s relationship followed the expectations of their time for marriages. When women married, their rights and interests were absorbed into those of their husbands. Wives had no independent right to own, purchase, sell, or contract for property. As a result, during the twenty years of their marriage, Adeline likely had little to do with the business dealings of the family and operation of the plantation. During this time, she is mostly “out of sight” to us—surviving documents provide few references to her activities.11 Much of the wealth of the Alston’s planter class at this time consisted of enslaved people. As early as 1810, at age 18, John enslaved fifteen persons. (His father, Chatham Jack, enslaved 168 at that time.) In 1820, John had enslaved 34 persons, of whom 12 were under fifteen years of age. Eighteen of the enslaved workers were employed in agriculture; two in commerce. The 1830 census (after John and Adeline’s marriage) lists the number of persons enslaved by John at 74, putting him among the largest slaveholders in the county. It is probable that some of this increase was due to a “dowry” that Adeline brought into the marriage, given the wealth of her own family.12 The plantation was a large producer of cotton and tobacco during the 1830s. Such produce was hauled by wagon over rough, muddy dirt roads to Fayetteville or to Raleigh. There were tolls on many of these rough roads. From Raleigh, tobacco was shipped on the railroad to Petersburg, Virginia. High freight costs and spoilage of the produce due to inadequate transportation to major markets were major challenges. Transportation costs reduced profits and were, in part, why Chatham County, along with other Piedmont counties, relied on corn as a major crop for local sales, rather than tobacco and cotton. In fact, corn substituted for cash in many economic transactions. John Alston, however, was able to diversify his agricultural products and use cash for some business transactions. 13 *Pages 4 & 5/19 --- An overseer was a common feature of plantation business as a means of providing the owner with a more leisurely life. In 1836, John made a contract with William Yearns to be overseer, likely not the first such contract and certainly not the last. Yearns was to be responsible for crop growth, husbandry, and the enslaved “hands.” He was to be paid $200 and “800 weight of pork, two barrels of corn, two bushels of wheat, and two milk cows.” 14 By 1840 John Jones Alston owned more than 4,000 acres in Chatham and Moore counties. The census schedule lists 106 enslaved persons for John Jones Alston—sixty working in agriculture and two in manufacturing and trade. In April, 1841, John’s father, Chatham Jack died, leaving John Jones Alston “a tract of 300 acres lying on Harland Creek including the house in which he lives…” 15 Only now did John and Adeline own the house and property where they had been living since their marriage.16 Only a year and a half later, John suffered a sudden stroke and died at age 50. At the time John died, he and Adeline, now 37 years old, had been married 20 years. Adeline had eight children and was pregnant with a ninth. She likely had no experience running the business affairs of the plantation in which she was abruptly thrust as owner, or perhaps even how to relate to the overseer to whom she would give orders. But she did have many of John’s relatives17 close by from whom she could seek advice about managing the plantation as well as raising nine children. She also had the labor of many enslaved persons and the management of an overseer at her disposal. John’s very sudden and rapidly failing health did not allow time for him to make a written will, so he made an oral statement, as sworn in court by two witnesses, that “I give all my property to my wife [Adeline] to do with as she pleases.” 18 This was an unusual circumstance that resulted in much subsequent litigation involving Adeline. Legally, an oral will could convey only personal property (such as enslaved persons and household goods)—not real estate, and widowed women were entitled only to a “dower share” of 1/3 of a husband’s estate. (See Appendix B for John’s obituary.) *Pg 6/19 --- Page 8/19 - Rives argued that the younger Adeline should be given one-tenth part of her father’s personal estate. In this case, John’s personal estate would consist largely of enslaved persons, the source of significant wealth. The lawyer for Adeline the elder stated that Adeline did not know the law and sought the advice and assistance of the court in resolving this matter. In December 1850, Judge Nash ruled that the younger Adeline was entitled to one-tenth of the personal estate owned by John at his death. She was awarded nine enslaved persons valued at $2,833 in an 1854 settlement. Adeline the elder was allotted the remaining enslaved persons valued at $25,691.14.26 These sums, in 2020 dollars illustrate the wealth of Adeline’s family at this point in time. Adeline’s share of the enslaved persons, for example, was valued at $25,691.14 in 1854. In 2020 dollars $25,691 would be $792,448. [See Appendix D for the names and valuations of individual enslaved persons listed in the accounting of John Jones Alston’s estate as of 1844.] ----- Page 9/19 Adeline reported that her 1850 farm was valued at $10,000.30 There was a change in crops from cotton and tobacco to wheat, Indian corn, oats, hay, peas and beans, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes. More emphasis was placed on husbandry—and the extent of the working plantation is suggested by Adeline’s livestock holdings: 5 horses, 6 asses/mules, 18 milk cows, 4 working oxen, 22 other cattle, and 115 swine. 31 Adeline’s home manufactures were valued at $225.32. Her slaveholdings appear to have decreased since her husband’s death, but with 58 enslaved workers, she was still a large slaveholder for the area.33 Adeline’s involvement with managing her enslaved workers is evidenced by an 1855 letter in which John McKay assures her that her concerns about the health of the enslaved persons she rented him and who are working at his river farm both in farming and in turpentine were unwarranted.34 It would be comforting to interpret Adeline’s concern about the health of the enslaved persons she rented to Mr. McKay as evidence of her concern for them as human beings. Seen in the context of renting them, however, we cannot discount that her concern may have been for her property. --- Page 11/19 In 1860, Adeline’s household as listed in the census consisted of herself and three of her children, Nathaniel Macon (22), Marina (24), and Adeline Eugenia (17). Several of her other children lived nearby.40 In this period just before the start of the Civil War, Adeline owned fewer acres of land and she listed the cash value of her farm as just $4,000.41 She raised a large quantity of a number of crops, and tobacco again became one of her dominant crops though this was not so for the entire county. The value of her livestock increased. The value of homemade manufactures was listed at $900, indicating that the plantation produced items for sale. According to the 1860 schedule enumerating enslaved persons, there are three separate listings for “A. Alston,” and it is impossible to sort out whether all of these are Adeline. The number enslaved by Adeline is therefore between 40 and 119 persons. There is little doubt that she was one of only 9 (out of 769) slaveholders in the county who enslaved more than 50 persons.42 --- Sections of Pgs. 12-15/19 After the war and emancipation, Adeline lost much of her wealth— which had consisted largely of land and enslaved workers. Without workers to do the work, land had lost much of its value. An entry in one of her account books reads: “All of the negroes who have not quit work before the 24th of Oct 1865 quit on that day except Henry Betsy & Bethiah.” 50 The same account book indicates that after the enslaved Black people were emancipated, Adeline hired sharecroppers to keep some income coming from the plantation. For example, a contract dated February 18, 1868 between Adeline and Madison Alston, a freedman, 51 stipulated that she furnish the land and provide Madison Alston with a house for which he was to pay her “when the crop is gathered.” He was to haul and cut wood and keep up the fences. Adeline was to provide him with five barrels of corn, and was to receive one-third of all the crops, except the garden produce. Madison agreed to “not keep liquor to sell and to behave himself in an orderly manner.” 52 Additionally, Adeline’s oldest son, John, signed an agreement with freedman Samuel Leach, which among other things stipulated that “Sam's wife agreeing to do the washing, ironing, cooking and milking of the said John Alston's mother.” It appears from this same document that Sam Leach’s wife Emmeline actually lived in the house with Adeline, since Sam agreed to board the rest of his family.53 The war caused a decrease in wealth of owners of plantations and businesses and an increase in their debts. In response, the new 1868 state constitution included a bankruptcy article that protected some of the property of debtors from those threats by their creditors. The protected property included the debtors’ (1) “homestead and the dwellings and buildings used therewith” and (2) “things other than shelter necessary for existence.”54 Almost immediately, Adeline filed for bankruptcy under the new provisions.55 A remarkable letter from son John’s wife, Mary, to her sister, Sarah Clark Butts, dated January 10, 1869 gives insight into the lives of the Alston family after the end of the Civil War and the disruption their loss of enslaved labor had created. Mary went on to describe herself as teaching school to earn enough money to pay “our servants.” She was taking pupils from the immediate neighborhood. Clearly accustomed to having her every need satisfied during slavery, Mary complained about the state of servants after the war, saying, “I have been doing … my own cooking & cleaning up & this kept me busy all the time.” She had been unsuccessful in hiring good household staff, as “I would get a white woman & think I was doing wonderfully for a while then would be compelled to discharge her, then cook for three or four weeks & try another & rest – a week or so, then try another. The last one I thought would certainly do, but she was so lazy, ignorant, roguish & filthy, her skull as thick as a horseblock! I could not stand her.”58 So, she was quite happy when “a nice negro woman came along & I hired her and her family at $3½ for month & board.” She goes on to describe this new hire as “a first rate cook, washer & ironer, wool & cotton spinner, knitter & seamstress” who “has a grown daughter who cleans up the house & waits on table &c &c & can sew, knit & spin; she will work in the field when spring comes.” Additionally, “the woman has 3 other children, two little boys, the largest of which can hoe corn & chop cotton….I am perfectly delighted with my servants.” She continued to state that “they have no free-negro airs at all, behave just exactly like our slaves used to, & seem as well satisfied as we are. I really think a great deal of them, I respect them for their principles. They cordially hate ‘poor white trash,’ as they call them & seem to look up to us as their best friends.” Continuing to exult in her fortune in finding these new household servants, Mary stated “they seem to feel as if they have been wandering about for a long time, & had just got back home. They say they despise to wait on poor white folks, & seem to think it an honor and privilege to wait on us, so different from most of them.”59 The key to this sentiment is clearly the word “seem,” but it does convey the feelings of Adeline’s family, stripped of the enslaved people they had long been accustomed to having, trying to find some certainty in a world turned upside down. -End of Excerpts- . . Source link: https://chathamhistory.org/.../AdelineAlstonChathamPlanta... Previous Next

< Back Wes Cris ​ Farmers at a cane mill in Carr in Orange County, NC. 1939 - The Black property owner, Wess Cris, received every sixth gallon for making the sorghum syrup. Source: LOC Photographer: Marion Post Wolcott. Previous Next

< Back Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy Jailed in Birmingham On this day, Oct 30, 1967 On October 30, 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy were arrested and forced to begin serving sentences in Birmingham jail because they led peaceful protests against unconstitutional bans on race mixing in Birmingham in 1963. In April 1963, a series of civil rights protests occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, to challenge segregation in Birmingham's public accommodations. Pro-segregation White residents and local police, led by the city's notorious public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, responded to the protests with violence and legal suppression. On April 10, 1963, a state judge granted city officials an injunction banning all anti-segregation protest activity in the city of Birmingham. Rev. Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy chose to lead a march in defiance of the injunction and were arrested on April 12, 1963. Dr. King spent eight days in jail before being released on bail, and during that time wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail." Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy were still prosecuted after posting bail, and on April 26, 1963, they were convicted of contempt of court. Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy unsuccessfully appealed and, on October 30, 1967, returned to Birmingham to each serve five-day jail sentences. Dozens of supporters protested outside of Birmingham's jail for the duration of their incarceration. Source: eji https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/oct/30... Previous Next

< Back JUNETEENTH IN NORTH CAROLINA Lincoln Signed the Executive Order to Emancipate The Enslaved Black People of the U.S. In Jan 1863! The Enslaved Black People in Texas did not find out Until 21/2 years later, in 1865 that they had been freed. ------------ JUNETEENTH IN NORTH CAROLINA: SEARCH ROOM EXHIBIT AND RELATED RESOURCES by Alex Dowrey This month, the exhibit case in our search room features records related to emancipation and Juneteenth celebrations in North Carolina. Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of Texas slaves on June 19, 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger arrived to occupy Galveston, Texas and issued General Order Number Three. This occurred almost two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and is “considered the date when the last enslaved Americans were notified of their new legal status” as free Americans.[1] Although Juneteenth started as a Texas holiday, the celebration spread to other states including North Carolina. Those who visit the exhibit in the search room will note that we have included two Juneteenth proclamations from our holdings, one given by Governor Perdue in 2010 and the other by Governor McCrory in 2013. The 2010 proclamation declares June 19, 2010 as Juneteenth Day in North Carolina [2] and the 2013 proclamation announces June 19, 2013 as Juneteenth National Freedom Day in North Carolina .[3] Records of the current governor’s administration are not yet in the State Archives. These proclamations are only one example of the resources available for users seeking information on Juneteenth in the State Archives of North Carolina. Juneteenth also appears in records from the North Carolina General Assembly. The General Assembly passed a joint resolution in 1999 and a bill in 2007, the former to commemorate and honor “the memory of the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who were enslaved in this country,” and the latter to recognize the nineteenth of June as a state holiday, “Juneteenth National Freedom Day,” pending recognition of Juneteenth as a holiday on the national level.[4] Users can access information about these pieces of legislation in the Session Laws and Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly in 1999 and 2007, as well as trace the passage of legislation in the published Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly volumes. These are available online in North Carolina Digital Collections. The General Assembly Record Group (MARS Id: 60) also contains session records of the General Assembly. These records, however, currently stop at the year 1999. More information on legislation and bills from the General Assembly can be found on the North Carolina General Assembly website, where users can search legislation going back to the 1985-1986 session of the General Assembly: https://www.ncleg.net/Legislation/Legislation.html. For more information or research assistance, please contact the reference staff at archives@ncdcr.gov or (919) 807-7310 and be sure to stop by and see our exhibit case in the search room. [1] North Carolina General Assembly, “An Act Recognizing Juneteenth National Freedom Day in North Carolina,” House Bill 1607, https://www2.ncleg.net/BillLookup/2007/H1607 (Accessed 4 June 2018). [2] Perdue, Bev. Proclamation, 2010-06-09, Juneteenth Day: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/.../p16062coll5/id/10812/rec/4 [3] McCrory, Pat. Proclamation, Juneteenth National Freedom Day, June 19, 2013: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/.../p16062coll5/id/20701/rec/5 [4] Session Laws and Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly, 1999, p. 1970: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/.../p249901coll22/id/376295/rec/23; Session Laws and Resolutions Passed by the General Assembly, 2007, p. 1331: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/.../p249901coll22/id/478857/rec/1 Source:https://ncarchives.wordpress.com/.../juneteenth-in-north.../ Previous Next

< Back Skimming the boiling cane juice to make sorghum syrup at cane mill near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina, September 1939. ​ Photograph title: given by photographer: Skimming the boiling cane juice to make sorghum syrup at cane mill near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina, September 1939. Possibly connected to photograph: A portable cane mill. The owner gets every sixth gallon for making the sorghum syrup. This is on the property of a Negro owner, Wes Cris, a tobacco farm of about 165 acres in a prosperous Negro settlement near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina. Additional title given by NY library: [Two African American women skimming the boiling cane juice to make sorghum syrup at sugar cane mill near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina, September 1939.] United States. Farm Security Administration (Sponsor) Marion Post Wolcott, 1910-1990 (Photographer) Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division Shelf locator: Sc Photo Farm Security Administration Collection. Previous Next

< Back Environmental Racism PCB landfill protest in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (Jerome Friar/UNC Libraries) ​ Photo: PCB landfill protest in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (Jerome Friar/UNC Libraries) -- Warren County, NC Is The Birthplace of The Environmental Justice Movement Dolly Burwell is considered the Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement Against Environmental Racism. Her daughter, Kim Burwell who was nine years old looked at her mother and said, "mom, this seems like environmental racism" Environmental Justice --Warren County, NC- The Dumping of Toxic PCP In/near Black Communities Was Fought Against By The Grassroots Organizing Of The African Americans Who Lived In And Near The Areas Where Dumping Occurred. Looking to skirt costly new environmental laws, the Ward Transformer Company began dumping toxic waste along the shoulders of North Carolina roads in 1978. From June to August, a team of men used the cover of night to spray transformer oil — laced with hazardous chemicals such as dioxin, dibenzofurans, and polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — onto the ground, polluting lakes, farmland, and groundwater. In final tally, some 31,000 gallons of transformer oil were dumped, contaminating 60,000 tons of earth along 240 miles of highway. Ironically, the toxic dumping travesty in Warren County, North Carolina, owed its existence to a separate environmental disaster. The same year Robert Ward and Robert Burns began dumping their waste along the highway, the town of Love Canal, New York made headlines as its citizens fell ill from the toxic landfill beneath their feet. Reacting to the crisis, in August, 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a disaster area, and the EPA moved to prevent a similar catastrophe from happening again. It was this subsequent regulation — which made toxic waste disposal more expensive — that the surreptitious dumpers were looking to avoid. Robert Burns and his sons released the valves of tanker trucks to spray tens of thousands of gallons of waste along tracts of highway in 14 counties. The oil left dark stripes on the grass, generating the swift attention of law enforcement. The dumpers, as well as company owner Robert Ward, were briefly jailed and fined under the new Toxic Substance Control Act, drafted in the wake of the Love Canal disaster. That same law also stipulated that the soil, contaminated by an abundance of PCBs, had to be put in a landfill. Where does one put a heap of toxic earth, laced with a chemical reputed to cause birth defects, skin and liver problems, and cancer? The state decided on the politically neglected Warren County, North Carolina— the population of which was 65 percent black. It ranked 97th of 100 for GDP by county statewide. As of the 1970 census, 40 percent of the county’s homes lacked indoor plumbing. A public hearing on the Warren County landfill was held in January, 1979. Around 800 people attended to protest the dump site, which residents worried would pollute the water and deter new investment in what was an already vulnerable local economy. Governor Jim Hunt’s administration was unfazed, and one official that the construction of the landfill would continue, “regardless of public sentiment.” Residents and sympathizers opposed the Warren County landfill for nearly four years. They suggested an already active chemical waste site in Emelle, Alabama, but shipping contaminated soil there was estimated to cost $8.8 million. Reverend Joseph Lowry called it “an assault on the life and dignity of the citizens of Warren County.” Organizations and community leaders, including the NAACP and a black Baptist church, mounted a lawsuit against the dump, which they argued chose the town of Afton because its residents were “few, black, and poor.” ‘’These folks believe that they’re fighting for their lives, more so now than ever,’’ said Ken Ferrucio, the president of a 400-member group established to fight the PCB disposal site. ‘’People believe that PCB’s are just the beginning. That’s what frightens them.’’ But the state yielded little. And when a delegation from the community visited Washington to meet with the EPA, where they discovered that the agency was actually working to loosen requirements about a landfill’s proximity to groundwater to enable the dump’s construction. Governor Jim Hunt had also loosened state laws concerning public hearings, which were required to precede major civil projects. In 1982, the EPA Superfund, headed by Anne Gorsuch Burford (mother of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch), allocated $2.5 million to create the Warren County landfill. Workers were to scrape up soil along the roads in three-inch-deep, thirty-inch-wide tracts, turning up enough to fill 10,000 truckloads. In late summer, the project officially began. Even before the first trucks rolled in the atmosphere was tense. In August, a vandal used a knife to cut a slice into the plastic liner of the dump site. Taking it as a promise of violence, the state assigned 200 patrol officers to the area and put the National Guard on alert. But protesters were almost entirely peaceful. They marched and held signs asking for the protection of their community. Many lay on the road to prevent the trucks from dispatching their loads of PCB-laden soil. High-profile names, like Walter E. Fauntroy, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, were among the protesters taken into police custody. Ken Ferrucino, president of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCB, was arrested, and staged a 19-day hunger strike in prison. During the six weeks of protest, police arrested over 500 people. The protest efforts did not stop the landfill’s construction, but they did, in 1982, lead to the election of local black officials, as well as galvanize the cause of environmental injustice. Duke University’s student newspaper called the protest “the largest civil disobedience in the South since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marched through Alabama.” It tied black leaders, especially in the case of the Congressional Black Caucus, to the cause of toxic waste disposal, which almost always affected poor communities, and often impacted African American ones. Following the impetus set by the Warren County protests, in 1987 the United Church for Christ released a report detailing how minority communities bear the brunt of hazardous chemical sites. It found three out of every five African Americans and Hispanics live in a community housing toxic waste, and confirmed the intuitive conclusion that the government was most likely to dispose of dangerous materials in poor and politically marginalized neighborhoods. As the issue of environmental justice gained traction, in 1994 President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring the federal government to account for the harm posed to minority communities by new hazmat disposal sites. With Warren County, environmentalism became not just about whales, or acid rain, or holes in the ozone, but also about people protecting their own homes. Source:https://timeline.com/warren-county-dumping-race-4d8fe8de06cb Source: https://www.wral.com/.../wral_investigates/story/10928637/ Source: http://www.avoiceonline.org/environmental/history.html Previous Next

< Back Fred L. Brewer Jr. Image: Remains uncovered in Italy after World War II have been identified as Second Lieutenant Fred L. Brewer Jr., a Charlotte, North Carolina native and Tuskegee Airman. Brewer graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh in 1942. He enlisted in the Army the following year and trained as a pilot at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Tuskegee, Alabama. Image: Remains uncovered in Italy after World War II have been identified as Second Lieutenant Fred L. Brewer Jr., a Charlotte, North Carolina native and Tuskegee Airman. Brewer graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh in 1942. He enlisted in the Army the following year and trained as a pilot at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Tuskegee, Alabama. The Pentagon and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Brewer's identity was confirmed on Aug. 10, 2023. . Lt. Fred L. Brewer Jr. was a Tuskegee Airman from North Carolina, he's been Identified as unknown soldier 79 years after vanishing in WWII By WTVD Charlotte, NC Sunday, September 3, 2023 11:46PM Remains uncovered in Italy after World War II have been identified as Second Lieutenant Fred L. Brewer Jr., a North Carolina native and Tuskegee Airman. The Pentagon and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Brewer's identity was confirmed on Aug. 10, 2023. Brewer went missing while piloting one of 57 fighter planes escorting bombers on a mission to Regensburg, Germany, on Oct. 29, 1944. The airplanes ran into heavy cloud cover in southern Italy, forcing 47 of the fighters to return to base. Brewer was not among those who returned. He had reportedly been attempting to climb his airplane out of the cloud cover when he stalled and fell into a spin. His parents, Fred and Janie Brewer of Charlotte, were told he had been declared dead two weeks later. Their son, a second lieutenant, was 23. Remains were recovered after the war in a civilian cemetery in the area, but technology at the time was unable to identify the remains. So they were interred as an unknown. New techniques allowed scientists with the Department of Defense to reexamine the remains and identify them as belonging to Brewer. According to our newsgathering partners at the News & Observer, Brewer was a native of Charlotte who graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh in 1942. He enlisted in the Army the following year and trained as a pilot at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Tuskegee, Alabama. A cousin of Brewer told The Washington Post that funeral arrangements had not yet been made, but she wanted to see Brewer properly buried in Charlotte. . Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Conflict: WORLD WAR II Service: UNITED STATES ARMY AIR FORCES Status: Was unknown, Changed to Accounted For Date of Identification: 08/10/2023 On August 10, 2023, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) identified the remains of Second Lieutenant Fred L. Brewer Jr., missing from World War II. Second Lieutenant Brewer, who joined the U.S. Army Air Forces from North Carolina, was a Tuskegee Airman and member of the 100th Fighter Squadron, 332nd Fighter Group. On October 19, 1944, he piloted a single-seat P-51C Mustang (tail number 43-25108, nicknamed "Traveling Light") out of Ramitelli Air Field in Italy as one of fifty-seven fighters on a bomber escort mission over enemy targets in Regensburg, Germany. The flight left Ramitelli and split into three groups over the Udine area of Italy to continue on to the target area. However, heavy cloud cover forced nine fighters to return to Ramitelli early, and none of the other fighters could locate their bomber aircraft or the target. Forty-seven fighters eventually returned to base, and 2nd Lt. Brewer was not among them. Reports from other pilots on the mission indicate that 2nd Lt. Brewer had been attempting to climb his aircraft out of the cloud cover but stalled out and fell into a spin. After the war, a body was recovered by U.S. personnel from a civilian cemetery in the area, but the remains could not be identified using techniques available at the time and were interred as an unknown. In 2011, researchers examined the case of those unknown remains and discovered that an Italian police report indicated they were recovered from a crashed fighter plane on the same day as 2LT Brewer's disappearance. German wartime records corroborated this information. In June 2022, the remains were disinterred and sent to a DPAA laboratory for further study. The totality of evidence allowed a positive identification of the remains as those of 2LT Brewer. Second Lieutenant Brewer is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Florence American Cemetery in Impruneta, Italy. . Military information source link: https://dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/dpaaProfile... . Article link: https://abc11.com/tuskegee-airman-unknown.../13733258/ Article source link: https://www.newsobserver.com/.../local/article278935269.html Previous Next

< Back Henry Frye #OnThisDay , February 3, 1983, Henry Frye became the first African American to serve on the North Carolina Supreme Court! Henry Frye: Was The First African-American On The N.C. Supreme Court Photograph: Henry Frye being sworn into the N.C. Supreme Court. ( State Archives, courtesy of the News & Observer) Henry Frye was born August 1, 1932 in Ellerbe, Richmond County, North Carolina. He was 8th of 12 children, born to Walter Atlas and Pearl Motley Frye. He went to the Ellerbe Colored High School, but by accident he obtained a diploma from Ellerbe High School, the white one. After graduating with honors from North Carolina A&T State University, Frye reached the rank of captain in the United States Air Force, serving in Korea and Japan. Upon returning to North Carolina, Frye was inspired to become a lawyer when he was denied the ability to register to vote by Jim crow racist "literacy" tests. He graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law. Frye became an assistant U.S. Attorney in 1963, one of the first African-Americans to hold such a position in the South. When Frye was elected to the North Carolina General Assembly as a state representative in 1968, he was the only black North Carolina legislator, and the first elected in the 20th century. Frye helped eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow from North Carolina law. He was re-elected several times to the state House, serving until 1980, and served one term in the state Senate from 1981 to 1982. During this time, he was also an instructor at North Carolina Central University's law school. In 1983, Governor Jim Hunt appointed Frye to the North Carolina Supreme Court as an associate justice, the first African-American to hold that position in North Carolina history. Elected in 1984 to the court and re-elected in 1992, Jim Hunt appointed Frye to the state's highest judicial post, chief justice, in 1999 to replace the retiring Burley Mitchell. He was defeated for election to a full term in 2000 by Associate Justice I. Beverly Lake. Frye currently practices law with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro, North Carolina Married to Shirley Taylor on August 25, 1956. they had two children. One of Frye's children, Henry Frye Jr., also became a lawyer and judge. Frye is the uncle of professional basketball player Channing Frye Previous Next

< Back Feggen Jones and family Arthur Rothstein made a photo-study of the Jones family—an example of a successful farm loan recipient. He noted that, “Mr. and Mrs. Feggen Jones live with their 14 children on an 86-acre farm purchased with assistance from the Farm Security Administration. The farm’s electricity is supplied by the Rural Electrification Administration.” These New Deal initiatives were creating a healthy small farming population by transforming the old system of sharecropping cotton that had exhausted the land, and the people. Farmer Jones was formerly a sharecropper in this area. Rothstein’s photo-captions documented the result of this modest government loan. “He now has 2 cows, 3 mules, 4 hogs, and 200 chickens. He owns a Ford truck and an Oldsmobile sedan. His cash crop is 7 acres of tobacco. He also farms 5 acres of cotton, 7 acres of wheat, 12 acres of corn, and 2 acres of vegetable garden.” Rothstein’s pictures also showed Mr. and Mrs. Jones curing meat and canning vegetables to provide healthy meals throughout the year. Photo & narrative source: The Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project Previous Next

< Back Howard University, 1868. ​ Photo: Howard University, 1868. (Credit: NYPL/Smith Collection/Getty Images). Charlotte E. Ray’s Brief But Historic Career as the First U.S. Black Woman Attorney During the 19th century, women were largely barred from the legal profession, but that didn't stop Ray from trying to break in anyway. By Erin Blakemore August 14, 2018 Martha Gadley’s marriage was a nightmare. When her husband drank, he turned increasingly violent. One night, he used an ax to chop a hole in the floor and threatened to push her into the room below. He refused to bring her water when she was sick. When she left the house, he nailed up the entrance and put padlocks on the door. Martha had had enough. She decided to file for divorce—a gutsy move for an illiterate black woman. But it was 1875, and the law cared little about domestic violence. Her petition was turned down and her case dismissed. So she took the unusual move of taking her divorce to a higher court—and found a champion in an equally unusual attorney, Charlotte E. Ray. Ray wasn’t just any lawyer. She was one of just a handful of women who practiced law in the United States. She wasn’t just one of the first female lawyers, either: She is thought to be the country’s first black woman lawyer. In a vividly wordedpetition, Ray took Martha’s plea to the District of Columbia Supreme Court, and managed toscore a rare victory on Martha’s behalf. Though little is known about Charlotte E. Ray’s life, what historians do know is peppered with the same kind of courage. During the 19th century, women were largely barred from the legal profession. They were forbidden from obtaining licenses to practice law in many areas and couldn’t join the professional associations that would allow them to advance in their careers. As historian Susan Erlich Martinnotes, law was controlled by white men who kept women and people of color from studying law, practicing it and finding jobs within the profession. That didn’t stop pioneering women from trying to break in anyway. These groundbreaking women challenged precedent by showing that they were capable of learning and practicing law. That presented another hurdle: Few women had access to a university education and many colleges with law schools overtly forbade women from entering. For Charlotte Ray, who was raised in a progressive family, education was the key to her dream of becoming a lawyer. Her father, Charles Bennett Ray, was a prominent abolitionist and clergyman who edited The Colored American, one of the first newspapers published by and for African-Americans. Charles knew the value of education and enrolled his daughter in the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth, one of the only schools that would teach young black women. Though theschool taught domestic skills, it was also focused on training teachers and Charlotte went on to enroll in Howard University as a teacher trainee. But Ray had other dreams. What she really wanted was to practice law. Since Howard didn’t discriminate on any basis, she was able to take law classes, even though she knew that women weren’t allowed on the bar of the District of Columbia, where she wanted to practice. And so, according to at least one source, she took her bar exams and applied anyway. “I have been told that her admission to the bar was secured by a clever ruse, her name being sent in with her classmates as C.E. Ray,” wrote Lelia J. Robinson in 1890, “although there was some commotion when it was discovered that one of the applicants was a woman.” Robinson’s claim has been disputed by other historians, who say that the bar had recently decided to admit women, and it’s still not clear just how Ray was admitted to the bar. But she was, making her not just Howard’s first black woman legal graduate, but one of just a small handful of women who practiced law at the time when she gained admission in 1872. Little is known about Ray’s legal practice—only that it ended quickly due to prejudice against both black people and women. Shortly after her victory in Martha Gadley’s case, Ray was forced to close her practice. Being a black, female lawyer was so novel at the time that Ray faced prejudice and could not secure enough clients. By the 1880s, she moved to New York and became a public school teacher. She remained active in public affairs, though, as an ardentsupporter both of women’s suffrage and equality for black women. Despite Ray’s pioneering accomplishments, the legal profession remained largely hostile to black women over the years. Even today, 85 percent of attorneysare white, and just 5 percent are black. And minority women still face a significantwage gap compared to their white male counterparts.Source:https://www.history.com/.../charlotte-e-ray-first-black... Previous Next

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" Unknown Activism, Civil Rights, Law, Politics & Social Justice Activism A narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchings. After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots In this important study, former United States primary patent examiner Patricia Carter Sluby pays homage to the inventive spirit of African Americans. Beginning with the contributions of enslaved Africans brought to American shores, Sluby introduces inventors and patent holders from all fields up to and including the leading edge of today's technology. Along with such recognizable figures as George Washington Carver and Madam C. J. Walker, readers will discover little-known or forgotten pioneers When and Where I Enter is an eloquent testimonial to the profound influence of African-American women on race and women's movements throughout American history. Drawing on speeches, diaries, letters, and other original documents, Paula Giddings powerfully portrays how black women have transcended racist and sexist attitudes--often confronting white feminists and black male leaders alike--to initiate social and political reform. From the open disregard for the rights of slave women to examples of A narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchings. After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots 1/4 In this Collection, we explore the brave North Carolinians who put their lives on the line as activists, protesting segregation, women's rights, labor inequality and more. Find out about the key role North Carolina activists played in serving people in North Carolina and the entire U.S. Law EBONY was focused on redefining the American narrative about daily American life being a Black person. Ebony was founded to provide positive images for Blacks in a world of negative images and non-images. It was founded to project all dimensions of the Black personality in a world saturated with stereotypes. — John H. Johnson "Publisher’s Statement," November 1975 Describe your image Describe your image EBONY was focused on redefining the American narrative about daily American life being a Black person. Ebony was founded to provide positive images for Blacks in a world of negative images and non-images. It was founded to project all dimensions of the Black personality in a world saturated with stereotypes. — John H. Johnson "Publisher’s Statement," November 1975 1/3 North Carolina has a long and storied history of African American lawyers who have made significant contributions to the legal profession. From pioneers like Julius Chambers, who fought tirelessly for civil rights, to modern-day trailblazers like Anita Earls, who continue to advocate for justice and equality, these lawyers have left an indelible mark on the state's legal landscape. Despite facing numerous obstacles and challenges, these individuals have persevered and made a lasting impact on North Carolina and beyond. Social and Environmental Justice The Registry looks at the origins of the Chanteys in 1882. A Chantey is a style of choral singing associated with black slave labor in the early United States. Historical records mention celebrations of Jonkonnu taking place near Edenton, N.C., as early as 1824. And, except for a single 19th-century historical reference to a Jonkonnu celebration in Suffolk, VA, historians have been unable to uncover any evidence that it was ever part of the culture in North America outside of North Carolina. In periods with good weather, the slaves on most slave ships would be brought up on deck in the mornings. Normally the women and children would be allowed to move freely around the deck. The men would be chained together, because it was commonly believed that they would be the ones that would cause violence and resistance. The Registry looks at the origins of the Chanteys in 1882. A Chantey is a style of choral singing associated with black slave labor in the early United States. 1/4 Music, dance, songwriting; all expressions of movement; all stem from the rich traditions of our African ancestors. North Carolina specifically has a tremendous amount of talented musicians, singers, songwriters, dancer etc., that have shaped, and continue to shape what we enjoy today. ​ Civil Rights Mike Wiley is a North Carolina-based actor, playwright, and director of multiple works in documentary theatre. His dramas relay the stories of fugitive slaves, civil rights game-changers, sports heroes and freedom fighters. Dynamic multi-character portrayals offer penetrating views into parallel lives whose roles within African American history have shaped a richer total American experience. Wiley’s remarkable one-man “cast” sometimes introduces dozens of characters over the course of a single "In the Inaugural Bull City Black Theatre Festival, Underserved African-American Theater Artists Go Straight to the Audience They Richly Deserve" By Byron Woods JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell has to stop and catch her breath for a moment. I've caught her between appointments on a busy day, moments before she rushes into a rehearsal for PlayMakers Repertory Company's upcoming world premiere of Leaving Eden. Over the last month, Holloway-Burrell has been assistant director for that production while als Jester Hairston was an African American choral composer and actor. Hairston was the grandson of slaves from the Hairston plantation at Belew's Creek, North Carolina, Mike Wiley is a North Carolina-based actor, playwright, and director of multiple works in documentary theatre. His dramas relay the stories of fugitive slaves, civil rights game-changers, sports heroes and freedom fighters. Dynamic multi-character portrayals offer penetrating views into parallel lives whose roles within African American history have shaped a richer total American experience. Wiley’s remarkable one-man “cast” sometimes introduces dozens of characters over the course of a single 1/4 North Carolina natives played a key role in the fight for Civil Rights in the United States. This Collection explores the people and the events that were central to the national fight for Civil Rights. Politics 1/3 Despite facing numerous obstacles and challenges, African Americans have made significant contributions to the political landscape in North Carolina. From the first African American elected to the state legislature in 1868 to the current representation in Congress, the story of African Americans in North Carolina politics is one of resilience, determination, and progress. TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" L.D. Edwards Cemeteries & Graveyards Cemeteries & Graveyards 1/5 North Carolina is home to many historic African American cemeteries and graveyards that hold significant cultural and historical value. These cemeteries serve as a reminder of the contributions and struggles of African Americans throughout the state's history. From the historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh to the Mount Hope Cemetery in Asheville, these sacred grounds offer a glimpse into the past and honor the lives of those who have passed on. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! TESTIMONIALS AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE THAT UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN GEMS ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS RICH HISTORY AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO NORTH CAROLINA. DEMETRIA TUCKER - FACEBOOK THIS IS A MUCH-NEEDE RESOURCE NOT ONLY FOR THOSE OF US IN NORTH CAROLINA BUT FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONSIDERABLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN/BLACK PEOPLE - ESPECIALLY IN OUR STATE. VALERIE ANN JOHNSON - FACEBOOK LOVE THE EFFORT TO SHARE AND HIGHLIGHT NC BLACK HISTORY! THE HISTORIC DETAILS SHARED HERE ARE A TREASURE! CHRISTINA ROOSON - FACEBOOK

< Back Cotton field, Greenfield Farm, NC, c.1905. (PhC_96_16) African American woman worker in cotton field. (Likely a sharecropper.) Greenfield Farm, Chowan County, NC, c.1905. Cotton field, Greenfield Farm, NC, c.1905. (PhC_96_16) African American woman worker in cotton field. (Likely a sharecropper.) Greenfield Farm, Chowan County, NC, c.1905. (N.2000.11.99) Source: From the Ross and Frances Inglis Photograph Collection, PhC.96, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC. Previous Next

< Back Gianna Floyd. Gianna Floyd. George Floyd's daughter. George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, NC. Much of his large family still calls North Carolina home, including his sister Bridgett Floyd, a Hoke resident. Image description: Gianna is a young Black girl with brown skin. She has black hair. She is smiling and happy. She is holding a photograph of her father, George Floyd holding her when she was about one year old. Previous Next