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< Back Pea Island Lifesaving Station N.C. Aquarium Will Highlight Keeper Of Pea Island Lifesaving Station By Jeff Hampton / The Virginian-Pilot -Feb 07, 2015 AT 12:00 AM Image description from article about painting: Top Image is a painting of Richard Etheridge, keeper of the first all-Black U.S. Lifesaving Station at Pea Island, stands with his crew at the far left. His portrait has been enlarged to the right in this painting. the painting is by Outer Banks artist James Melvin. N.C. Aquarium Will Highlight Keeper Of Pea Island Lifesaving Station By Jeff Hampton / The Virginian-Pilot -Feb 07, 2015 AT 12:00 AM Image description from article about painting: Top Image is a painting of Richard Etheridge, keeper of the first all-Black U.S. Lifesaving Station at Pea Island, stands with his crew at the far left. His portrait has been enlarged to the right in this painting. the painting is by Outer Banks artist James Melvin. -End of Description about Painting. -Second image: The grave of Richard Etheridge at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. Photo credit: North Carolina ECHO (Project) -Third image: Photograph of the Graves in the Richard Etheridge Cemetery is encircled by a fence and features interpretative signage. The headstones are flat on the ground. Photo credit : Catherine Kozak Begin Article - MANTEO, N.C. The remains of the keeper of the nation's first all-Black lifesaving station (on Pea Island) are buried in the front yard of the North Carolina Aquarium. Visitors often wonder about the grave's peculiar placement and the man interred there - Richard Etheridge. An exhibit inside the aquarium answers much of the mystery. But a recently uncovered document found deep in the archives of the nearby Dare County Airport reveals why Etheridge and his family's headstones lie flat rather than upright and were discovered beneath a building. The aquarium plans to fence the graveyard and erect more explanatory panels to tell the formerly enslaved Richard Etheridge's story. (Note- the bottom photo in the collage above shows that this has been done since this article was written) End Note. The site has been significant since Colonial days, said Kitty Dough, the media technician who works with aquarium exhibits. She found a January 1942 letter written to Melvin Daniels, then chairman of the Dare County Airport Commission. The county was building an airport at the north end of Roanoke Island as World War II began. Daniels sought guidance on what to do with burial plots of whites and Blacks in the way of the proposed runway and facilities. The graves on the runway site had to be removed, wrote Army Corps of Engineers Maj. R.A. Sharrer. Other graves on the property could remain, but the headstones "may be replaced flat on the ground" and built over, he wrote. "That was my answer, right there," Dough said. The Navy took over the airfield during the war and built an infirmary over Etheridge's grave, Dough said. Dare County got the land back after the war. The building was used as a 4-H camp recreation hall, among other things, she said. In the 1970s, the buildings were torn down to make way for the Marine Resources Center, predecessor to the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. Aquarium Director Rhett White and others researched Etheridge in the 1980s and erected signs by the graves. "It turned out we had a hero buried on our doorstep," Dough said. Etheridge was born (enslaved) on Roanoke Island and was a young, expert waterman when the Union captured the region early in the Civil War. He joined the 36th U.S. Colored Troops serving in Maryland, Virginia and Texas and rose to the rank of sergeant, according to a history provided by Dough. (Click link at end of this article to learn more about Richard Etheridge's life) He returned home to farm and fish and eventually went into business with his former enslaver. Part of Roanoke Island was set aside as the Freedmen's Colony, where formerly enslaved people established a village. Etheridge joined the U.S. Lifesaving Service in 1875, a year after it was formed. The documents describe him to be "as good a surfman as there is" and "a man among the men," according to the history. He was made keeper of the Pea Island Station in 1880. When white surfmen would quit, he would recruit blacks from his home on Roanoke Island. Etheridge instilled a military discipline at the station. He and his men made daring rescues, including saving the crew and passengers of the schooner E.S. Newman in 1896. Etheridge died in 1900 - possibly of malaria - while still at the station, Dough said. Outer Banks artist James Melvin painted Etheridge and his crew in the 1980s from old photos. That painting and others of subsequent Pea Island station keepers hang in the aquarium. The Coast Guard awarded Etheridge and his crew Gold Lifesaving Medals in 1996 - 100 years after the famous rescue. Soon, roughly 250,000 annual visitors to the aquarium will learn more about Etheridge and why his gravestone lies flat in the front yard. Article Source: https://www.pilotonline.com/.../article_c4692fbc-b44c... Read More About Richard Etheridge Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.1900559283.../348900379167884 Previous Next

< Back The Clouds of Joy Gospel Group This is the Clouds of Joy gospel singing group that sang at the local radio station as well as other places in Chatham. Sourced from: Chatham Historical Museum This is the Clouds of Joy gospel singing group that sang at the local radio station as well as other places in Chatham. Pictured are C.B. Gray, Charles Gray, Buster White, J.R. Gray, Lawrence Horton, and Gene Goldson (seated). Jon Hearn provided this information about the group: The Clouds of Joy gospel group is mentioned many times in The Chatham Record and The Chatham News papers from 1976 to 2004. They celebrated their 42nd anniversary on Oct. 17, 2004 at Pine Hill United Church of Christ on Silk Hope Liberty Road. [source: The Chatham Record (Pittsboro), 14 Oct. 2004, pg 7). The obituary of Mr. Larry Junior Fox (died 07-15-2017) mentions that he sang many years with The Clouds of Joy. [source: The Chatham Record, 27 July, 2017, pg 10) This photo was contributed to the CCHA collection by Duane Hall. . Source link: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=659200036209519&set=pb.100063585852768.-2207520000.&type=3 Previous Next

< Back 371st Infantry Band 371st Infantry Band, c.1917, likely at Camp Jackson, SC,. 371st Infantry Band 1917 371st Infantry Band, c.1917, likely at Camp Jackson, SC,. Copied from postcard. N.2009.4.162a is the back of the postcard. Alonzo J. Reaves, originally from Pittsboro, NC, is in front row, with trumpet, 2nd from the left. Postcard copies courtesy Barbara Perry of Pittsboro, a descendant of Reaves. Source: N_2009_4_162 General Negative Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC. Previous Next

< Back First Negro Nurses Land in England. First Negro Nurses Land in England. England, 1944. August 21. First Negro Nurses Land in England. Photograph published, August 21 1944. Cite: (1944) First Negro Nurses Land in England. England, 1944. August 21. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/98501418/. Accompanying caption reads: Twenty-four of the first contingent of Negro nurses assigned to the European Theater of Operations. Front row, left to right: Second Lieutenants Alice Simpson, Atlanta, Georgia, Vernice Eizer, Portsmouth, Virginia, and Catherine L. Harris, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Captain Mary L. Petty, Chicago, Illinois, (Commanding), First Lieutenant Ida E. Smith, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Second Lieutenants Dorcas Taylor, Omaha, Nebraska and Estella Smith, Cincinnati, Ohio. Second row, left to right: Second Lieutenants Arlayne Hall, Los Angeles, California, Rubye Collins, Castonia, North Carolina, Dorothy Guy, Newark, New Jersey, Doretha Wadley, Cordele, Georgia, Catherine Randle, Galveston, Texas, and Lucille Scales, St. Louis, Missouri. Third row, left to right, Gussie Danials, Valdosta, Georgia, Julie James, Richmond, Virginia, Doris S. Heath, Cleburn, Texas, Gwendolyn Sykes, Goldsberg, North Carolina and Melba Franklin, Sugartown, South Carolina. Fourth row, left to right: Second Lieutenants Sarah Johnson, Greensboro, North Carolina, Elizabeth L. Williams, Memphis, Tennessee, Anna Collins, Portsmouth, Virginia, Margaret Lipscomb, Opelika, Alabama and Marion Ridgely, Washington, D.C. Previous Next

< Back Richard Etheridge Keeper Richard Etheridge (on left) and the Pea Island Life-Saving crew in front of their station, circa 1896. Pea Island, NC 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. Keeper Richard Etheridge (on left) and the Pea Island Life-Saving crew in front of their station, circa 1896. Pea Island, NC 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 enslaved 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 Irma Mills ​ Irma Mills and her students from the Green Mountain School, Fruitland. Henderson County, NC. Source: The Heritage of Black Highlanders Collection, UNCAsheville Ramsey Library. Previous Next

< Back Excerpt of a letter from First Lieutenant James W. Alston to H. H. Brimley on November 1, 1918 about being only Black officer in a hotel in France. James William Alston was a First Lieutenant in the 372nd Infantry, an all-Black regiment, during World War I. Alston was born in Wake County, NC on January 16, 1876. In 1907, he started working as a janitor and messenger for the State Museum, later the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. During the war, Alston wrote several letters to H. H. Brimley, who was White. Brimley was a curator and the first director of the State Museum. Image: Excerpt of a letter from First Lieutenant James W. Alston to H. H. Brimley on November 1, 1918 about being only Black officer in a hotel in France. From the collection of the State Archives of North Carolina. James William Alston was a First Lieutenant in the 372nd Infantry, an all-Black regiment, during World War I. Alston was born in Wake County, NC on January 16, 1876. In 1907, he started working as a janitor and messenger for the State Museum, later the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. During the war, Alston wrote several letters to H. H. Brimley, who was White. Brimley was a curator and the first director of the State Museum. . Below is a transcript of First Lieutenant James W. Alston's letter to H. H. Brimley. Transcript: Nov. 1st 1918 My Dear Mr. Brimley: You will probably think that I am a long time getting back to the front, but the [[object Object]] here is the boss and won't let me go, but promised this morning that I could go in about ten days. My wound is all healed and with the exception of a very little stiffness I am as good as ever. There is so much talk of peace I want to get back and have another try at Fritz before the finish. I think I have pretty well [[object Object]] evened the score with him but I want to give him some more for good measure. Fritz can fight like the very devil when he is under cover and has the most men, but can't stand the Yankee steel and these Yankees, white and black sure love to use their bayonet whenever they can get near enough to him. I am in the southern part of France in the town of Vichy and quartered in one ------- [[object Object]] of the best hotels in the town. There are about one hundred officers at the hotel and I the only colored one so you know I am lonesome. I was as hungry as a dog the first night that I was here but walking in the dinning room seeing about one hundred white officer and no colored officers I lost my appetite - but it came back by morning and has stayed with since. I am treated fine by all the officers but most of them say I am [[object Object]] a damn fool for wanting to get back to the front. I met Mr. Thos. F Ryan's son he is a Sgt. in the Medical Corps he is sure one fine man, and is crazy to go to the front but the Col. won't let him. I wish you would send me Mr. Garland Jones, and Bob's address so if any time I am near their outfit I can look them up. I see lots of people from the state but none from Raleigh [[object Object]] but perhaps [[object Object]] I will have luck enough to see some one before I come [[object Object]] back to the good old U.S.A. There is no news except Fritz is catching the very devil. My best regards to Mrs. Brimley, Mr. & Mrs. Adickes [[object Object]] and all friends Yours very respectfully James W Alston 372 R. I. U. S. S.P. 179 France Source: Digital Public Library Of America - African American Soldiers -End Of Transcript- . . NOTE: Below is information about the life of First Lieutenant James W. Alston. James William Alston 18 Jan. 1876-14 Dec. 1940 Written by Matthew M. Peek, State Archives of North Carolina, 2015 James William Alston served in the U.S. Army during both the Spanish-American War and World War I. He was one of the first officers to be trained at the newly created African American officer's training school created at Fort Dodge, Iowa in the spring of 1917 and served as a First Lieutenant in the Army's 372nd Infantry, an all-Black regiment, during World War I. James William Alston was born in Wake County, North Carolina, on January 16, 1876. He attended common school for two years, followed by two years in a normal school. Alston would attend the historically-black school St. Augustine’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina, but he did not graduate from that institution. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Alston enlisted in the U.S. Army. Alston served with the 48th Volunteer Infantry, U.S. Army, from October 1898 to June 1901. Around 1907, Alston went to work for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture as a janitor and messenger. The Department of Agriculture housed in the early 1900s the State Museum (present-day North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences), to which Alston was assigned, working for $480 a year. When Alston was posted to Europe in World War I, he would exchange letters with Herbert Brimley, then director of the State Museum. James Alston re-enlisted in the U.S. Army on June 15, 1917, after the United States entered World War I. Now forty years old, Alston was sent to the first all-African American officers’ training school at Fort Dodge, near Des Moines, Iowa. On October 15, 1917, Alston was commissioned as a First Lieutenant in the 372nd Infantry, 93rd Division, U.S. Army. Alston served overseas from March 30, 1918, through January 19, 1919. Upon arriving in France, Alston was sent to one of the British Army’s training schools—the Fourth Army Infantry School—where he attended a five-week officer’s training course. He would serve under French command in the Meuse-Argonne sector, and later the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, in France. In an October 6, 1918, letter, Alston mentions that he was lying in a hospital bed either in France or Belgium, with “a machine gun bullet through my right shoulder.” Evidently, Alston was also severely wounded on October 24, 1918. He returned to the United States in January 1919, and was discharged in February 1919 without any disability being listed. Alston returned home to his wife and their daughter, and began work as a messenger and clerk in the Revenue Building for the North Carolina Department of Buildings and Grounds. James W. Alston died on December 14, 1940, in Wake County, North Carolina, and was buried in the Raleigh National Cemetery (United States National Cemetery located in the eastern part of Raleigh, North Carolina). Previous Next

< Back John Withers Lieutenant John Withers had every reason to say no. The army, though segregated, was his only realistic shot at a better life. As an aspiring professor, Withers hoped the GI Bill would help him get a Ph.D., and maybe — just maybe — escape the fate that America had written for him. He fled Jim Crow — Then Risked His Future For Two Holocaust Survivors By Matthew Taub/The Forward-August 17, 2020 Photo collage description: Top left image-Salomon, a soldier in Company 3512 possibly named Dave, and Pee Wee, 1945. Image by Courtesy of John Withers. Top right image-Lieutenant John Withers, Image by Courtesy of John Withers. Bottom image - on left Martin Weigen (“Pee Wee”) and Lt. John meet again on April 27, 2001 in Hartford, Connecticut. Image by Edward Weigen ----- Lieutenant John Withers had every reason to say no. The army, though segregated, was his only realistic shot at a better life. As an aspiring professor, Withers hoped the GI Bill would help him get a Ph.D., and maybe — just maybe — escape the fate that America had written for him. But a dishonorable discharge would make the GI Bill a non-starter. And for a Black man from Jim Crow North Carolina, the consequences likely wouldn’t stop there. So it was with everything to lose that Withers faced Shlomo Joskowicz and Mieczyslaw Wajgenszperg, young Jewish men who’d survived Dachau and the liberation, and told them they could stay with his all-Black Army unit in the Flak-Kaserne barracks outside Stuttgart. Housing displaced persons, or DPs, was strictly against military protocol, lest the refugees spread disease to American soldiers. Withers, and his men, understood this. They knew that, as low-ranking members of Truck Company 3511, they had no room for error. Their job was to pick up supplies and transport them wherever they were needed — and to not let anything, or anyone, pull them off-course. Ultimately, Withers’ decision just came down to “the fundamental humanity of that moment,” said John Withers II, Lieutenant Withers’ son and the author of “Balm in Gilead: A Story from the War,” published earlier this year. The men Withers oversaw hadn’t necessarily expected such humanity from him. In secluded rooms at the edge of the barracks, they’d sheltered the boys for over two weeks before sharing the secret with their Lieutenant, afraid he’d send the young Holocaust survivors back into postwar homelessness. But Withers saw what his men saw: kids, their ribs clearly outlined, sores dotting their skin. They would stay. Joskowicz and Wajgenszperg — 20 and 16, respectively, in the summer of 1945 — would live with Withers for about a year. They even moved with him, under cover, when he was transferred to another unit further north, in Staffelstein. The soldiers of Truck Company 3511, who struggled with the boys’ Polish names, called them Salomon and Pee Wee. And though the bases Withers brought them to were surely preferable to the DP camps, where food was scarce and conditions grim, the boys could not yet lower all of their defenses. Salomon and Pee Wee had to hide from inspectors while living with the Black soldiers. Only these inspectors weren’t Germans, but white officers of the American Military Police (MPs). There were close calls. Once, Pee Wee laid flat beneath a tarp — and the soldier sitting on it — when inspectors took the unit’s trucks by surprise. On occasion, the boys would retreat to the barracks’ closets and stay put for as many hours as necessary. When they first wandered onto the base, looking for food, Pee Wee and Salomon were likely not too familiar with America’s racial dynamics, but these experiences provided a swift education. “They very quickly understood,” Withers II explained: “MPs? White? Bad guys.” They must have decided it was worth the trouble. There were, in theory, other options: Not just DP camps, but also Jewish relief organizations and the Red Cross. These would’ve furnished the boys with food, but not necessarily with community or friends. Withers II, or Jr., says his father was “providing the psychological foundation for them to believe again.” Growing up in Depression-era Greensboro, North Carolina, Withers read avidly, finishing every title in the small, local Black library. Wanting more, he wheeled a red wagon to collect books the white library had thrown out, which he often had to tape back together. Once, he accompanied an older family friend on a home-repair job in an affluent white neighborhood. On their way home, they were confronted by a group of white teenagers who demanded to know why Black men were in the area. Knowing the situation could turn violent, Withers’ adult chaperone became completely submissive before the teens: shaking, calling them “sir,” and begging them to read his employer’s note detailing the repair work. Withers told his son that the man subsequently stopped visiting his family, likely ashamed of letting a Black child see him cowed by such fear. After graduating from North Carolina’s all-Black Agricultural and Technical State University, Withers moved north to pursue a Master’s degree in Economics at the University of Wisconsin. His perfect grades allowed him to attend tuition-free, and he was shocked to meet white students who welcomed him into study groups — even if, as Withers Jr. describes it, their understanding of racism was marked by a “Pete Seeger”-style naïveté. If Withers spoke about experiencing racism, his well-intended white classmates would ask, “why didn’t you write your Congressman? Why didn’t you take him to court?” All things considered, Withers felt he was headed in the right direction, until his father spent all of the savings that Withers had stashed at home. The family was poor, and needed the money — and beyond that, John’s father was skeptical of what integration could realistically offer his son. From his father’s perspective, a degree wouldn’t save John from the racist system, from what Withers Jr. called the “poison in the ground.” Withers still graduated, but his father’s words echoed when he was shortly thereafter drafted into a segregated army. “His convoy can get shot up by the Germans, but he can’t vote,” Withers Jr. explained. “Every time it seemed that he got some little opportunity, the door was shut on him.” Lieutenant Withers knew he might be shutting his last, best door by helping Salomon and Pee Wee. But when the boys asked about America, he chose to feed their fantasy— to assure them that in America, things were OK. He later told his son that he felt an obligation to keep the boys hopeful, to lift them up from the despair of the death camps. To do that, says Withers Jr., “he had to tell them about an America that didn’t exist.” The boys were never found out. John Withers returned home to North Carolina in 1947, and lived more of that elusive American dream than he or his father might have thought possible. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and rose through the ranks in the Foreign Service, eventually leading the U.S. Agency for International Development’s mission to India. He had two sons with his wife, Daisy, and the family moved between posts around the world. Withers Jr. remembers hearing about Pee Wee and Salomon as a child in Vientiane, Laos, when his father would tell war stories at night. He grew up to follow in his father’s Foreign Service footsteps, serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Albania from 2007 to 2010. In 2000, Withers was diagnosed with cancer, a diagnosis that triggered a concurrent struggle with depression. “Look,” Daisy told Withers Jr., “we’ve got to show him that he has led a good life.” His many titles wouldn’t do it. Withers Jr. understood that, if his father were to find peace, he would have to know what became of Salomon and Pee Wee. After much detective work and correspondence, including some reporting from Staffelstein while he was stationed abroad, Withers Jr. delivered the answers: Salomon had passed away in Israel, in 1993, but Pee Wee was living in Connecticut. He’d Anglicized the name Mieczyslaw Wajgenszperg to Martin Weigen — but once he was reunited with Withers in 2001, he insisted that the man who sheltered him all those decades ago still call him Pee Wee. Though Weigen passed away just two years later, in 2003, a friendship had flowered between the families, and Withers delivered a eulogy at Weigen’s funeral. Withers passed away in 2007, after his reunion with Pee Wee prompted Hebrew Union College to award him their prestigious President’s Medal — just one of many honors he received from various institutions. At his funeral, a cousin sang one of Withers’ favorite African-American spirituals, whose title comes from the Old Testament’s Book of Jeremiah. “There is a balm in Gilead / To make the wounded whole,” she sang. For Withers Jr., that summed everything up. Just before he died, his father told him, “I’ve achieved everything I wanted in my life.” Source: https://forward.com/.../john-withers-holocaust.../... Previous Next

< Back Dr. Anna .Julia Cooper ​ Portrait of Dr. Anna .Julia Cooper taken circa 1902 - C.M. Bell, photographer. [between February and December 1903] Source: Library of Congress, Notes - Caption label from exhibit of digital copy in Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote More to the Movement: Anna Julia Cooper, activist and teacher at M Street High School in Washington, D.C., is well known for articulating a black feminist stance in her book, A Voice from the South (1892). Cooper argued for the importance of black women's rights central to education, self-determination, and racial uplift. - Title is from handwritten label on negative sleeve or negative. - Date from photographer's logbook. - Gift; American Genetic Association, 1975. ------ The 19th Amendment turns 100 years old this summer 2020. As American women ready for the celebrations of this 100 year anniversary, we are lifting up Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, Teacher, Scholar, and Timeless Womanist. Black women fought for the right to vote, along with White women. The suffrage groups were also filled with racist White American women which divided Black and Native American women into their own groups. Though the 19 Amendment was ratified, and gave American women the right to vote, the Jim/Jane Crow laws, white supremacy and systemic racism restrictions prevented Black women in North Carolina from voting until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which opened the way for Black Americans to be able to vote in America. While we do present some of her "life story" background, we also want to present and understanding that she was not just born in slavery. Her life was more than being an ex-slave, she went on to write scholarship, theories about being a Black woman and her commitments as an educator and activist Cooper asserts that the white man cannot speak to Black men's experiences and furthermore, that Black men cannot speak to Black women's experiences. She elaborates on this position in “Womanhood, A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race.” ---- Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, was born enslaved in 1858 in Raleigh, NC. She died February 27, 1964 at the age of 105.in Washington, D.C. She and her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, were held in bondage by George Washington Haywood (1802–1890) who was one of the sons of North Carolina's longest serving state treasurer John Haywood, who helped found the University of North Carolina, but whose estate was later forced to repay missing funds. Either George, in whose household her mother worked in bondage, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, in whose household her older brother Andrew was enslaved, were probably Anna's father; Anna's mother refused to clarify paternity. George became state attorney for Wake County and with a brother owned a plantation in Greene County, Alabama. Cooper worked as a domestic servant in the Haywood home and had two older brothers, Andrew J. Haywood and Rufus Haywood. Andrew, enslaved by Fabius J. Haywood, later served in the Spanish–American War. Rufus was also born enslaved and became the leader of the musical group Stanley's Band Dr. Cooper was one of North Carolina's early, outspoken Black woman suffragists. She attended Saint Augustine's College before going on to study at Oberlin College , Columbia University, and the Sorbonne, in Paris .where she earned her PhD in history from the Sorbonne in 1924, which she wrote in French. . Dr. Cooper was the fourth Black American woman to earn a doctoral degree in the country. She advocated for civil rights for African Americans, and her 1892 book, "A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South," is considered the first Black feminist publication. Dr. Cooper made contributions to social science fields, particularly in sociology. She is sometimes called "The Mother Of Black Feminism." Previous Next

< Back Leonora Tecumseh Jackson ​ Words on image: Leonora Tecumseh Jackson was also known as "Mother Jackson" (1859-1950), Was An Early Asheville, NC School Teacher. She was born enslaved in Halifax County , NC to Caroline Garrett and Andrew Joshua Jackson. - Photograph source: The 1946 Fayetteville State Teachers College Yearbook. . Lenora T. Jackson 1859-1950 Leonora Tecumseh Jackson died in Asheville in 1950 at the age of 91. Her brief obituary mentioned the schools where she had taught and simply stated that she was “a teacher of 62 years.” Leonora was born in 1859 in Halifax County to Caroline Garrett and Andrew Joshua Jackson. She had two siblings, Casca, a teacher and Andrew Thomas a lawyer and graduate of Howard University. Prior to emancipation, her father, Andrew Joshua Jackson was owned by Mr. George Washington Barnes who apprenticed Andrew to a blacksmith. Leonora would have been 4 years old in 1863. Leonora graduated in 1881 from Shaw University, a Freedmen School in Raleigh, N.C. and was teaching there from 1878 through 1882. She also studied at the University of Chicago and Hampton Institute, a Freedmen school in Virginia, founded in 1868 by Black and White leaders of the American Missionary Association. In 1883 she began teaching at Garfield Graded School in Raleigh. In 1887 the Raleigh Signal newspaper wrote, “We hear with pleasure of the appointment of Miss Leonora T. Jackson, of Halifax, to the principalship of the Normal School.” Her work for the last five years at Garfield Graded School “has made a very enviable reputation there as a teacher. It is said by those in the city of Raleigh, that she is the finest teacher of primary classes in the State.” With the establishment of the Asheville City School system in 1888, Leonora came to Asheville in 1891 and began teaching the first grade at Mountain Street School, which opened in August 1890 taking the place of Beaumont Academy. Edward S. Stephens was principal. With the opening of the Catholic Hill School in 1892 (the precursor to Stephens-Lee), Leonora began teaching first grade there through 1907. In 1901-02 she served as principal of Hill Street School. She is also listed as principal at Hill Street in the 1907 Asheville City Directory. After being listed in the Asheville City Directories for the next several years as teaching in a private school, one document says that she also taught in Missouri which is where she may have been during the 1930s. [Hill Street School was listed as a private school in the 1907 directory, so that may have been where she was at after 1902.] The 1940 census lists Leonora as the Directress of Boys at Cross Creek, Cumberland, N.C. This reference refers to Fayetteville State Teachers College. Her yearly salary was $1,030. In the same year, she gave a speech at the 75th anniversary for Shaw University along with Governor-elect J. Melville Broughton and others. She is also listed as a teacher. In 1941 she was elected vice president of the Shaw University Alumni Association. The Fayetteville State Teachers College Yearbook for 1946 included the photograph used here above and this notice; “Miss Leonora T. Jackson, known to all graduates and students of Fayetteville State Teachers College as “Mother Jackson, “is now Honorably retired after having served the State for more than sixty years.” Leonora returned to her home at 45 Grail Street in Asheville in 1947. When she died in 1950, her services were held at the Nazareth Baptist Church and she was buried in Violet Hill Cemetery. After Leonora Jackson graduated from Shaw University, it seems apparent that she could have taught anywhere she wanted to. Why did she come to Asheville? Leonora is listed in the American Baptist Home Mission Society 50th Annual Report for 1882, where it gives the name of the missionary, the state they’re working in, their profession, and in what institution. She is listed as a missionary teaching at Shaw University. For this reason, it seems probable that Leonora came to the rugged mountains of western North Carolina to teach as a missionary in a new public school system. -End- Click this link to read about her father, Rev. Andrew Joshua Jackson https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=840459148082778&set=a.170087133715877 Previous Next

< Back The 57th Anniversary Of The March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom Today, August 28, 2020 is The 57th Anniversary Of The March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom - August 28, 1963 The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism. The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who built an alliance of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations that came together under the banner of "jobs and freedom." Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 to 300,000, but the most widely cited estimate is 250,000 people. Observers estimated that 75–80% of the marchers were black. The march was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, was the most integral and significant white organizer of the march. The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and preceded the Selma Voting Rights Movement which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. BACKGROUND Although African Americans who were prior slaves had been legally freed from slavery, elevated to the status of citizens and the men given full voting rights at the end of the American Civil War, many continued to face social, economic, and political repression over the years and into the 1960s. In the early 1960s, a system of legal discrimination, known as Jim Crow laws, were pervasive in the American South, ensuring that African-Americans remained oppressed. They also experienced discrimination from businesses and governments, and in some places were prevented from voting through intimidation and violence. Twenty-one states prohibited interracial marriage. The impetus for a march on Washington developed over a long period of time, and earlier efforts to organize such a demonstration included the March on Washington Movement of the 1940s. A. Philip Randolph—the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO—was a key instigator in 1941. With Bayard Rustin, Randolph called for 100,000 black workers to march on Washington, in protest of discriminatory hiring by U.S. military contractors and demanding an Executive Order.Faced with a mass march scheduled for July 1, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25. The order established the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and banned discriminatory hiring in the defense industry. Randolph called off the March. Randolph and Rustin continued to organize around the idea of a mass march on Washington. They envisioned several large marches during the 1940s, but all were called off (despite criticism from Rustin). Their Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, held at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957, featured key leaders including Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins. Mahalia Jackson performed. The 1963 march was an important part of the rapidly expanding Civil Rights Movement, which involved demonstrations and nonviolent direct action across the United States. 1963 also marked the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. Members of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference put aside their differences and came together for the march. Many whites and blacks also came together in the urgency for change in the nation. Violent confrontations broke out in the South: in Cambridge, Maryland; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Goldsboro, North Carolina; Somerville, Tennessee; Saint Augustine, Florida; and across Mississippi. Most of these incidents involved white people retaliating against nonviolent demonstrators. Many people wanted to march on Washington, but disagreed over how the march should be conducted. Some called for a complete shutdown of the city through civil disobedience. Others argued that the movement should remain nationwide in scope, rather than focus its energies on the nation's capital. There was a widespread perception that the Kennedy administration had not lived up to its promises in the 1960 election, and King described Kennedy's race policy as "tokenism". On May 24, 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited African-American novelist James Baldwin, along with a large group of cultural leaders, to a meeting in New York to discuss race relations. However, the meeting became antagonistic, as black delegates felt that Kennedy did not have an adequate understanding of the race problem in the nation. The public failure of the meeting, which came to be known as the Baldwin–Kennedy meeting, underscored the divide between the needs of Black America and the understanding of Washington politicians. However, the meeting also provoked the Kennedy administration to take action on the civil rights for African-Americans. On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy gave his famous civil rights address on national television and radio, announcing that he would begin to push for civil rights legislation—the law which eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That night, Mississippi activist Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway, further escalating national tension around the issue of racial inequality. PLANNING A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin began planning the march in December 1961. They envisioned two days of protest, including sit-ins and lobbying followed by a mass rally at the Lincoln Memorial. They wanted to focus on joblessness and to call for a public works program that would employ blacks. In early 1963 they called publicly for "a massive March on Washington for jobs". They received help from Amalgamated Clothing Workers unionist Stanley Aronowitz, who gathered support from radical organizers who could be trusted not to report their plans to the Kennedy administration. The unionists offered tentative support for a march that would be focused on jobs. On May 15, 1963, without securing the cooperation of the NAACP or the Urban League, Randolph announced an "October Emancipation March on Washington for Jobs". He reached out to union leaders, winning the support of the UAW's Walter Reuther, but not of AFL–CIO president George Meany. Randolph and Rustin intended to focus the March on economic inequality, stating in their original plan that "integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persists." As they negotiated with other leaders, they expanded their stated objectives to "Jobs and Freedom" to acknowledge the agenda of groups that focused more on civil rights. In June 1963, leaders from several different organizations formed the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership, an umbrella group which would coordinate funds and messaging. This coalition of leaders, who became known as the "Big Six", included: Randolph who was chosen as the titular head of the march, James Farmer, president of the Congress of Racial Equality; John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP; and Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League. King in particular had become well known for his role in the Birmingham campaign and for his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Wilkins and Young initially objected to Rustin as a leader for the march, because he was a homosexual, a former Communist, and a draft resistor. They eventually accepted Rustin as deputy organizer, on the condition that Randolph act as lead organizer and manage any political fallout. About two months before the march, the Big Six broadened their organizing coalition by bringing on board four white men who supported their efforts: Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers; Eugene Carson Blake, former president of the National Council of Churches; Mathew Ahmann, executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; and Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress. Together, the Big Six plus four became known as the "Big Ten."[38][39] John Lewis later recalled, "Somehow, some way, we worked well together. The six of us, plus the four. We became like brothers." On June 22, the organizers met with President Kennedy, who warned against creating "an atmosphere of intimidation" by bringing a large crowd to Washington. The civil rights activists insisted on holding the march. Wilkins pushed for the organizers to rule out civil disobedience and described this proposal as the "perfect compromise". King and Young agreed. Leaders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), who wanted to conduct direct actions against the Department of Justice, endorsed the protest before they were informed that civil disobedience would not be allowed. Finalized plans for the March were announced in a press conference on July 2. President Kennedy spoke favorably of the March on July 17, saying that organizers planned a peaceful assembly and had cooperated with the Washington, D.C., police Mobilization and logistics were administered by Rustin, a civil rights veteran and organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the first of the Freedom Rides to test the Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel. Rustin was a long-time associate of both Randolph and Dr. King. With Randolph concentrating on building the march's political coalition, Rustin built and led the team of two hundred activists and organizers who publicized the march and recruited the marchers, coordinated the buses and trains, provided the marshals, and set up and administered all of the logistic details of a mass march in the nation's capital. During the days leading up to the march, these 200 volunteers used the ballroom of Washington DC radio station WUST as their operations headquarters. The march was not universally supported among civil rights activists. Some, including Rustin (who assembled 4,000 volunteer marshals from New York), were concerned that it might turn violent, which could undermine pending legislation and damage the international image of the movement. The march was condemned by Malcolm X, spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, who termed it the "farce on Washington". March organizers themselves disagreed over the purpose of the march. The NAACP and Urban League saw it as a gesture of support for a civil rights bill that had been introduced by the Kennedy Administration. Randolph, King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) saw it as a way of raising both civil rights and economic issues to national attention beyond the Kennedy bill. CORE and SNCC saw it as a way of challenging and condemning the Kennedy administration's inaction and lack of support for civil rights for African Americans. Despite their disagreements, the group came together on a set of goals: Passage of meaningful civil rights legislation; Immediate elimination of school segregation; A program of public works, including job training, for the unemployed; A Federal law prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring; A $2-an-hour minimum wage nationwide (equivalent to $17 in 2019); Withholding Federal funds from programs that tolerate discrimination; Enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by reducing congressional representation from States that disenfranchise citizens; A broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to currently excluded employment areas; Authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when constitutional rights are violated. Although in years past, Randolph had supported "Negro only" marches, partly to reduce the impression that the civil rights movement was dominated by white communists, organizers in 1963 agreed that whites and blacks marching side by side would create a more powerful image. The Kennedy Administration cooperated with the organizers in planning the March, and one member of the Justice Department was assigned as a full-time liaison. Chicago and New York City (as well as some corporations) agreed to designate August 28 as "Freedom Day" and give workers the day off. To avoid being perceived as radical, organizers rejected support from Communist groups. However, some politicians claimed that the March was Communist-inspired, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) produced numerous reports suggesting the same. In the days before August 28, the FBI called celebrity backers to inform them of the organizers' communist connections and advising them to withdraw their support. When William C. Sullivan produced a lengthy report on August 23 suggesting that Communists had failed to appreciably infiltrate the civil rights movement, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rejected its contents. Strom Thurmond launched a prominent public attack on the March as Communist, and singled out Rustin in particular as a Communist and a gay man. Organizers worked out of a building at West 130th St. and Lenox in Harlem. They promoted the march by selling buttons, featuring two hands shaking, the words "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom", a union bug, and the date August 28, 1963. By August 2, they had distributed 42,000 of the buttons. Their goal was a crowd of at least 100,000 people. As the march was being planned, activists across the country received bomb threats at their homes and in their offices. The Los Angeles Times received a message saying its headquarters would be bombed unless it printed a message calling the president a "Nigger Lover". Five airplanes were grounded on the morning of August 28 due to bomb threats. A man in Kansas City telephoned the FBI to say he would put a hole between King's eyes; the FBI did not respond. Roy Wilkins was threatened with assassination if he did not leave the country. Convergence Thousands traveled by road, rail, and air to Washington D.C. on Wednesday, August 28. Marchers from Boston traveled overnight and arrived in Washington at 7am after an eight-hour trip, but others took much longer bus rides from places like Milwaukee, Little Rock, and St. Louis. Organizers persuaded New York's MTA to run extra subway trains after midnight on August 28, and the New York City bus terminal was busy throughout the night with peak crowds. A total of 450 buses left New York City from Harlem. Maryland police reported that "by 8:00 a.m., 100 buses an hour were streaming through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel." The United Automobile Workers financed bus transportation for 5,000 of its rank-and-file members, providing the largest single contingent from any organization. One reporter, Fred Powledge, accompanied African-Americans who boarded six buses in Birmingham, Alabama, for the 750-mile trip to Washington. The New York Times carried his report: The 260 demonstrators, of all ages, carried picnic baskets, water jugs, Bibles and a major weapon - their willingness to march, sing and pray in protest against discrimination. They gathered early this morning [August 27] in Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park, where state troopers once [four months previous in May] used fire hoses and dog to put down their demonstrations. It was peaceful in the Birmingham park as the marchers waited for the buses. The police, now part of a moderate city power structure, directed traffic around the square and did not interfere with the gathering ... An old man commented on the 20-hour ride, which was bound to be less than comfortable: "You forget we Negroes have been riding buses all our lives. We don't have the money to fly in airplanes." John Marshall Kilimanjaro, a demonstrator traveling from Greensboro, North Carolina, said: Contrary to the mythology, the early moments of the March—getting there—was no picnic. People were afraid. We didn't know what we would meet. There was no precedent. Sitting across from me was a black preacher with a white collar. He was an AME preacher. We talked. Every now and then, people on the bus sang 'Oh Freedom' and 'We Shall Overcome,' but for the most part there wasn't a whole bunch of singing. We were secretly praying that nothing violent happened. Other bus rides featured racial tension, as black activists criticized liberal white participants as fair-weather friends. Hazel Mangle Rivers, who had paid $8 for her ticket—"one-tenth of her husband's weekly salary"—was quoted in the August 29 New York Times. Rivers stated that she was impressed by Washington's civility: The people are lots better up here than they are down South. They treat you much nicer. Why, when I was out there at the march a white man stepped on my foot, and he said, "Excuse me," and I said "Certainly!" That's the first time that has ever happened to me. I believe that was the first time a white person has ever really been nice to me. Some participants who arrived early held an all-night vigil outside the Department of Justice, claiming it had unfairly targeted civil rights activists and that it had been too lenient on white supremacists who attacked them Click Source Link To Read More. Source Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/.../March_on_Washington_for_Jobs... Previous Next

< Back Civil Rights Act of 1964 ​ July 2, 1964 , President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today marks the 55th anniversary of the signing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Start date: July 2, 1964 Titles amended: Title 42—Public Health And Welfare Acts amended: Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960 Enacted by: the 88th United States Congress Statutes at Large: 78 Stat. 241 --- "The passage of this legislation championed the fight for equality in the United States. What started as a Black liberation movement, soon escalated into outlawing discrimination based on all races, religions, sexes, and national origins. ⁣However, the Black liberation movement was often seen as a "threat to internal security" in the United States, and activists were often harassed, intimidated, and divided from within by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the years leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the FBI targeted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with one goal; "to find avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader." They bugged his hotel rooms, followed him and his family, and even attempted to blackmail him into suicide. Simultaneously, FBI agents sent anonymous letters that incited violence between street gangs and Black Panthers which resulted in the killings of four Black Panther members, in addition to numerous beatings and shootings across various United States cities. As the FBI worked to dismantle the movement both internally and externally, divisions across groups arose based on methods and approaches to liberation. The Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Urban League were all working towards the liberation of Black people oppressed by systemic racism that plagued the entire Nation. However, personal rivalries and political disagreements led to disunity within the coalition. The Civil Rights coalition eventually broke down, with each organization going their separate ways. This was not before violence and death plagued the lives of leaders within these coalitions, and therefore their members. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was nothing less than a "second emancipation." Despite challenges from within and from outside forces, the legislation paved the way to end legal segregation in the United States with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. " Laurie A. Cumbo Majority Leader, New York City Council District 35 ---- Read More about The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Here:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 And Here: https://www.eeoc.gov/stat.../title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964 And Here: https://www.history.com/.../black-history/civil-rights-act Previous Next

< Back The Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone. This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning. Shared from fb page: Suppressed Histories Archives -posted · September 17 · This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0OirdYGdlY... In Harris Neck, in Georgia's coastal islands, in the 1930s, Lorenzo D. Turner recorded a 50-year-old woman singing. Her song preserved the longest known text in an African language in the North American diaspora. It was later recognized as Mende by a grad student from Sierra Leone, on the basis of a single word, kambei, which had funerary significance, and he published a translation of the song. The singer's grandmother had been born into slavery, a descendant of many West Africans trafficked to Georgia because of their expertise in rice cultivation. Slave traders paid a higher price for people with this skill, shipping captives from the rice-growing countries from Senegambia to Sierra Leone and Liberia. More than 45% of those trafficked to Savannah were taken from Sierra Leone, out of Bunce Island which was used as a holding area prior to the Middle Passage. The channels these Mende people dug for rice plantations still remain in Georgia. A group of Gullahs returned to Sierra Leone, and performed this melody for their African hosts. They discovered that one word, tombei, could be traced to a specific place. Anthropologists took recordings of the song around that region, and at first people recognized one or two words, but not the song. The researchers finally gave up, disappointed. Later, Cynthia Schmidt decided to try one more place, just outside the boundaries of the area they had searched in. To her amazement, people began to sing the song, which included the words “Everybody come together, the grave is restless, the grave is not yet at peace.” (starting around 15:25 in the video at link) This was a song that Mende women sang at burials, in a funerary rites called Tenjami, Cross the Water. Bendu Jabati describes how her grandmother taught her how to perform the mourning rites, kneeling and making gestures to the ground with outstretched hands. (And it seems that the grandmother foresaw that her descendant would be the one to preserve this knowledge, and the connection that it would make to distant kin.) The ceremony began with a call to the ancestors to accept the dead person. The women went in procession, their faces painted with white clay, dancing while bent over. They then cooked at the grave side (three days after a woman’s death, and four days after a man’s). They performed ritual crying and lamentation at the grave, and bid farewell with rice mixed with palm oil and meat. The ceremony ended when the pot was upturned over the grave, the final farewell. The ceremony lapsed after World War II, according to the narrator, when soldiers brought back Islam and Christianity; but this one woman Bendu Jabati had been charged to remember by her grandmother, and she kept the knowledge and the song alive. Back in the Georgia Sea Islands, Amelia Dawley taught this song to her daughter. Living in a remote area, without TV or radio, she was able to preserve it. (Hear her sing it around 26:00 in the video) The anthropologists visit and play the recording of her grandmother, telling her of the historical importance of her family legacy, in its connection to African roots. Previous Next

< Back Ella Baker "In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning- getting down and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system." - Ella Baker 1964 ------- Ella Baker, born Dec. 13, 1903 and died Dec. 13, 1986, was a civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s whose career spanned more than five decades. She was instrumental in the launch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker, and first raised there. She was the second of three surviving children, bracketed by her older brother Blake Curtis and younger sister Maggie. Her father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk, and so was often away. Her mother took in boarders to earn extra money. In 1910, Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard. Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina. She is the granddaughter of a slave who was beaten for refusing to marry a man her master chose for her, Ella Baker spent her life working behind the scenes to organize the Civil Rights Movement. If she could have changed anything about the movement, it might have been to persuade the men leading it that they, too, should do more work behind the scenes. Baker was a staunch believer in helping ordinary people to work together and lead themselves, and she objected to centralized authority. In her worldview, "strong people don't need strong leaders." In 1927, after graduating from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Baker moved to Harlem and began her long career of organizing, helping to establish consumer cooperatives during the Depression. She joined the NAACP's staff in 1938 and spent half of each year traveling in the South to build support for local branches, which would become the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1946, she reduced her NAACP responsibilities to work on integrating New York City public schools. Baker was one of the visionaries who created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and she recruited the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. into it. She served two terms as the SCLC's acting executive director but clashed with King, feeling that he controlled too much and empowered others too little. In 1960, when four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, were refused service in a university cafeteria, setting off sympathetic sit-ins across the country, Baker seized the day. Starting with student activists at her alma mater, she founded the nationwide Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which gave young blacks, including women and the poor, a major role in the Civil Rights Movement. Baker returned to New York City in 1964 and worked for human rights until her death. Her words live on in "Ella's Song," sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock: "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." Previous Next

< Back Jean Marie Bright Jean Marie Bright was born on 25 September 1915, the daughter of farmers John and Lollie Bright of Rutherford County, North Carolina. Image: Portrait of Jean Marie Bright against a backdrop of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., probably taken in Fall of 1944. Bright wears the American Red Cross Military Welfare winter uniform with the Military Welfare overseas cap. Jean Marie Bright was born on 25 September 1915, the daughter of farmers John and Lollie Bright of Rutherford County, North Carolina. She graduated from the Allen Home High School in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1933, and then attended North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, from which she graduated in 1939 . In the late 1930s and early 1940s Bright moved between various cities in North Carolina and New York for teaching various jobs. In summer 1942 she moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a clerk-typist in the adjutant general's office at the Pentagon. The following year she returned to Greensboro and served as director of recreation for the Windsor Community Center in Greensboro . Bright joined the American Red Cross in September 1944. After training in Washington, and at Camp Pickett, Virginia, she was sent to Camp Pendleton in California for embarkation to the Pacific in December 1944. Bright worked in recreational clubs in Finchaven, New Guinea, for almost a year, and then in Tokyo, Japan, until May 1946 . Following her discharge, Bright worked at several jobs, including as a clerical worker at Macy's in Washington, at the Harvard Coop in Massachusetts, and as a substitute teacher in Louisburg, North Carolina. She received a masters degree in English from Columbia University in 1953 and returned to Greensboro, where she taught at North Carolina A&T State University until 1978. In 1979, she set up a summer camp for low-income children in Rutherford County, North Carolina. Source: Gateway - Triad Digital History Collections. Source link: https://gateway.uncg.edu/.../%20Jean%20Marie%20Bright... Previous Next

< Back Bryan Dickson, Grandson of Isaac Dickson, 1917. Asheville, Buncombe County (N.C.) Bryan Dickson, Grandson of Isaac Dickson, 1917. Asheville, Buncombe County (N.C.) Bryan Dickson, Grandson of Isaac Dickson, 1917. Asheville, Buncombe County (N.C.) Heritage of Black Highlanders. Images in the Heritage of Black Highlanders Collection include photographs collected by Lucy Herring and other leaders of Asheville’s African American community in 1977. The collection is housed in Special Collections, Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina Asheville. Retrieved from: DigitalNC Previous Next

< Back Kellis Earl Parker Kellis Earl Parker 13 Jan 1942 - 10 Oct 2000 Kinston, Lenoir County, NC native Kellis Earl Parker, an accomplished lawyer, activist, scholar, and musician, was born January 13, 1942 in Kinston, North Carolina. In addition to his distinguished career, Parker was also well known for several firsts: he was one of the first black students to enroll at UNC-Chapel Hill, the first black student to run for a campus-wide office at Carolina, and the first black professor of law at Columbia University. Kellis Parker’s parents, Maceo Sr. and Novella, were business owners in Kinston and operated the only black dry cleaning facility in the city. Kinston had a thriving music scene and the entire Parker family played music: Kellis and his younger brothers Maceo Jr. and Melvin had a band together, having been taught the basics by their mother and father. Kellis’ chosen instrument was the trombone, which he would continue to play throughout his life and career, using jazz music as a tool to illuminate to his students the legal challenges facing black Americans. One of his classes at Columbia was called “Jazz Roots Revisited: The Law the Slaves Made.” Maceo, whose chosen instrument was the saxophone, and Melvin, drummer, would go on to be career musicians and collaborate with James Brown. From his own recollection, Parker’s work as a civil rights activist began as a teenager. As the head of the band at the segregated high school he attended, Parker successfully petitioned the Kinston Chamber of Commerce to change the rule requiring black schools to march at the back of a town parade. Parker matriculated at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1960, one of only four black students to enter as freshmen that year. He was deeply involved with the YMCA, working on numerous committees and holding multiple official positions, as well as with the student chapter of the NAACP. He was a leader in civil rights activism while at UNC with an eye on the community outside of campus; for example, coordinating the boycott of a Durham movie theater (the Rialto) that refused to integrate. In 1962, a fundraising campaign spearheaded by fellow Kinstonians raised money to help Parker travel to Greece as the first black undergraduate delegate to the United Nations International Students Conference. Parker became the first black student at UNC elected to a campus-wide position when he was chosen by the student body to attend the National Student Congress in 1963. He was also a member of the Order of the Grail, the highest undergraduate men’s honorary organization, and the Order of the Old Well. Parker’s accomplishments continued after leaving Carolina in 1964. He went on to attend Howard University Law School, where he graduated at the top of his class, and then taught at the University of California at Davis. In 1972, he became the first black law professor at Columbia University, receiving tenure in 1975. Parker’s civil rights work remained central: he was director of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund and produced numerous publications considering legal remedies for race issues in the United States. Kellis Earl Parker died of acute respiratory distress syndrome on October 10, 2000 in New York City. Previous Next

< Back Young Negro farm laborer. Stem, North Carolina. ​ May 1940. “Young Negro farm laborer. Stem, North Carolina.” 35mm nitrate negative by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration. Previous Next

< Back Durham, NC, Feb. 12, 1938: Ellen Harris Refuses to Move for White Passenger Durham, NC, Feb. 12, 1938: Ellen Harris Refuses to Move for White Passenger Time Periods: Prosperity, Depression, & World War II: 1920 - 1944 Themes: African American, Criminal Justice & Incarceration, Laws & Citizen Rights, Women's History In Durham, North Carolina on February 12, 1938, a bus driver asked Ellen Harris to move to the back of the bus when a white passenger got on board. She refused, but offered to get off the bus if her fare was refunded. Instead of refunding her fare, the bus driver had Ms. Harris arrested for violating segregation laws. Ms. Harris, represented by two Black attorneys, Caswell Jerry Gates and Edward Richard Avant, was tried and convicted in Recorder’s Court and fined $10.00. She appealed her case to the Superior Court, where she received a trial by jury and was again convicted for “unlawfully and willfully” occupying a seat. Gates and Avant immediately appealed her case to the North Carolina Supreme Court, where Judge J. Carson reversed her criminal conviction. He wrote “we do not think the defendant intended to willfully violate the provisions of this act.” Ellen Harris did not stop there. One month after being found innocent of the criminal charges, Ms. Harris and her attorneys filed a $15,000 civil lawsuit against Durham Public Services Company. The record shows that she settled her case with Durham Public Services for an undisclosed amount. Further reading here: State v. Harris, 213 N.C. 758 (1938) June 15, 1938 · Supreme Court of North Carolina 213 N.C. 758 STATE v. ELLEN HARRIS https://cite.case.law/nc/213/758/ Article source: https://www.zinnedproject.org/.../ellen-harris.../... Previous Next

< Back Elizabeth City State University- Principal Peter W. Moore and students ​ Photograph: ECSU Principal Peter W. Moore and students, 1899. Photo courtesy of North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. Previous Next

< Back Young Men’s Institute Jazz Band Young Men’s Institute jazz band, c. 1900 Ashville, NC Today, the Young Men’s Institute (YMI) is arguably one of the nation’s oldest African American institutions. Young Men’s Institute jazz band, c. 1900 Ashville, NC Today, the Young Men’s Institute (YMI) is arguably one of the nation’s oldest African American institutions. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area surrounding the Young Men's Institute (YMI) was the center of the business district for Asheville's African Americans. George Vanderbilt built the YMI in 1893 to serve as the equivalent of the YMCA for black men and boys who helped construct his palatial house during the 1890s. Many of these masons, carpenters, plasterers and laborers also built the YMI. It was Vanderbilt's vision that the building's users would buy the YMI building from profits earned by the stores and offices on the first floor. After much effort on the part of the African American community, the Vanderbilt estate was paid $10,000 for the building in 1906. The multi-use building was the center for social activity in the community where it supported professional offices, a public library and the YMI Orchestra. While the YMI flourished during segregation, integration signaled a new era in the country and the YMI ceased to be the focal point of social life for Asheville's African Americans. Following a period of decline in the 1960s and 1970s, a coalition of nine black churches, with the support of both the black and white communities, bought the YMI in 1980. The building was restored and reestablished as the YMI Cultural Center. Since 1981, the YMI Cultural Center has developed a variety of cultural programs and exhibitions of art and artifacts from Asheville to Africa preserving the heritage of African Americans in Buncombe County. The Young Men's Institute Building is located at the corner of South Market and Eagle sts., south of downtown Asheville's Pack Square. The exhibit rooms are open to the public Monday-Saturday, 10:00am to 5:00pm. Donations are accepted. For further information visit the YMI Cultural Center's website or call 828-257-4540. Here is the link to the YMI's web site: https://www.ymiculturalcenter.org/ Previous Next

< Back The 100th Anniversary of The Negro Leagues The Negro League documents the careers of more than four thousand black baseball players. To date there are less than 50 living players. Negro Baseball League’s 100th Anniversary 1920 – 2020 The Negro League documents the careers of more than four thousand black baseball players. To date there are less than 50 living players. The 100th Anniversary of The Negro Leagues The year 2020 marks the centennial celebration of the founding of the Negro National Leagues in 1920. During the 1920s, the combined forces of discrimination and segregation created a conducive environment for the development of separate enterprises such as professional baseball. The unparalleled Rube Foster started the first Negro League in 1920 with such dominant teams as the Chicago American Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs. Pittsburgh soon produced two of the greatest teams of all time, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, featuring such stars as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and many more. This superb brand of baseball rivaled the best of the major leagues until the historic signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues. During a time of segregation & discrimination, North Carolina would be a part of this important history. Photo collage description: Top photo-In this undated photo, the Asheville Royal Giants pose at the former Oates Park on Southside Avenue. Photo courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Library, Asheville. Bottom Left photo-Walter Fenner “Buck” Leonard was an American first baseman in Negro league baseball and in the Mexican League. After growing up in North Carolina, he played for the Homestead Grays between 1934 and 1950, batting fourth behind Josh Gibson for many years. The Grays teams of the 1930s and 1940s were considered some of the best teams in Negro league history. Bottom Right Photo-The book "THEY CALLED US CORNFIELD BOYS" Black Baseball, Hertford County, NC 1940-1955 Ahoskie War Hawks, Ahoskie, North Carolina- chowan Bees, Winton, North Carolina, Como Eagles, Como, North Carolina By Raymond Whitehead & E. Frank Stephenson, Jr.- Cover Photograph: David Collin "Ran" Jordan, of The Como Eagles This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues. During a time of segregation and discrimination, North Carolina would be part of this important history. The 100th anniversary of Negro League Baseball should have been marked with grand style, with pronouncements, with recognition of a profoundly significant time in American sports history. The names now should have been called, again and again, in Major League Baseball stadiums throughout America and Canada. Josh Gibson. Buck Leonard. Jackie Robinson. Satchel Paige. Cool Papa Bell. Etched in legend they are, some properly enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. A once-in-a-lifetime virus has changed that plan. The centennial of the Negro Leagues, as they were then called. could have raised — and still can raise — awareness in this age of tumult of not just the enduring racial tensions in the United States, but of some of the triumphs over it. For there are profound lessons in the legacy of the Negro Leagues, created from a thirst for competition from the finest African-American athletes of the day, a thirst that forced them to play in sandlots far beneath the worthiness of their talents, while white players — yes, a man named Ruth and another named Gehrig among them — played in grand stadiums and made huge salaries for the day. Those players, names now in bronze on that wall in Cooperstown, were lionized as the greats of their time. But meanwhile, Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard and Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell and a youngster named Willie Mays, were forced to stay in horrible hotels because the best places on the roads wouldn’t feed or house them. The era now is properly regarded with disgrace and still calls forth, in the few people left who remember it, tears of anger and yes, tears of regret in the white athletes who were aware of what was going on but were powerless to do anything about it beyond their individual protests. There are sandlots still left in North Carolina, in Rocky Mount and Reidsville and Greensboro and Winston-Salem, where old-timers will point out the places where the Negro League games were held, who recall the Asheville Royal Giants and the Raleigh Tigers and the teams from Greensboro and High Point. North Carolina was big in the Negro Leagues, because it has a baseball legacy built in the small towns, and though the African American kids and the white kids may not have played together officially, they always remained curious about one another’s skills. There were African American games all over North Carolina probably dating from the early 20th century and running through the 1950s, when African-American players were brought into the major leagues. In the 1930s, cities such as Greensboro (Red Wings), Asheville (Blues), Durham (Red Caps), and Winston-Salem (Mohawk Giants) had active black ball clubs, as did smaller towns including Erwin (Red Sox) and Louisburg (Independents). During World War II, the Raleigh Grays played against Negro units at Fort Bragg. The Raleigh Tigers came a little later and were among the last of the state’s prominent black teams. The Tigers played until the early 1960s, featuring several future minor and major leaguers. In 1951, four years after Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the major leagues, some white minor-league squads in North Carolina had begun signing black players. Granite Falls of the Western Carolina League, for example, hired Boney Fleming, a pitcher from Morganton; Christopher Rankin, a pitcher out of Hickory; Conover’s Bill Smith, a catcher; Hickory’s Russell Shuford, a catcher; and Eugene Abernathy, an outfielder from Hickory. But before Jackie Robinson, there were players in the Negro Leagues who were clearly “good enough” for the big leagues. And one of them, Walter Fenner Leonard of the Homestead Grays of Pennsylvania, was good enough and then some. His boyhood name of “Buck” was given to him by his family during his upbringing In Rocky Mount, a seemingly unlikely place to launch a remarkable career and life. But today, that name is in bronze in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and deservedly so. For in his day, in the 1920s through the 1940s, Buck Leonard was as good a baseball player, in any league, as any other. He was called the “black Lou Gehrig” after the New York Yankees first baseman (Leonard’s position), though some players of both races would later say that Gehrig probably should have been called the “white Buck Leonard.” Leonard played on famous Grays teams and batted behind Josh Gibson, perhaps the most famous of all the Negro Leagues players. Gibson also is in the Hall of Fame. Leonard was so good that at the age of 45, he was offered a professional contract in the major leagues, but typical for a man of his pride and grace, he decided against it for fear of embarrassing himself. And so he carved quite a life, working in professional baseball running farm teams but also being a strong citizen in his hometown as a truant officer among other occupations. It must also be said it was a good, long life too, with Leonard living to be 90 years old at his death. North Carolina would send other small town fellows to the major leagues, and yes, some of them like Gaylord Perry and Jim “Catfish” Hunter and others would gain fame. But it would hard to find anyone comparable to Buck Leonard, for whom the hill to greatness was steep but as he demonstrated, one that could be climbed. Today, his story serves as a grand one for all players who put on the glove and lace up the spikes to study. Alas, Leonard is not going to get the recognition he and other Negro Leagues players should be getting this year, in the 100th anniversary. The COVID-19 virus has seen to that, shuttering major league ballparks for the summer, a summer that was going to see celebrations around the country. Thankfully, there has already been recognition for Leonard in Chapel Hill, with some of his descendants participating in a special event in February. The Negro Leagues legacy in human terms is found in the stories of the greatest players of the era, who ranked by all accounts as the greatest players there were in that or any other time. In historic terms, the legacy is more complicated. For there is little glory in an era defined by racial separatism and injustice. Little glory, but perhaps lessons. Lessons that will teach generations now and forever. Lessons from here, from one small town in North Carolina and from others. Read More About The Book, "They Called Us The Cornfield Boys" Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.169158.../497358524322068/... View Video Interview of Clifford Layton, who was born in Dunn, North Carolina. Clifford Layton spent four years playing in the Negro Leagues and was inducted into the Negro Leagues Legend Hall of Fame in 2003. Video Link Here: https://youtu.be/CS5RCz1bmD0 Source: NC DNCR Source: https://negroleague.org/ Previous Next

< Back William Hooper Councill ​ William Hooper Councill was a teacher, social justice activist, college president, and editor. He was born in March.22.1849, Or in July 12, 1848. Council was formerly enslaved and the first president of Huntsville Normal School, which is today Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University in Normal, Alabama. He was born enslaved in Fayetteville, North Carolina to William and Mary Jane Councill. His father escaped to Canada in 1854 and made several unsuccessful attempts to free his family. The young William Hooper Councill was taken to Huntsville, Alabama, by slave traders in 1857. He and his mother and brothers were sold as slaves from the auction block, at Green Bottom Inn to Judge David Campbell Humphreys. At this auction he saw two of his brothers sold in 1857, and never heard from them again. He worked in the cotton fields near Huntsville until 1863, during the American Civil War, he and his remaining brothers were taken into rural areas to keep them from the Union Army, but before the end of the war they escaped to Union lines. They attended on a part-time basis the Freedmen's Bureau school opened by northerners in Stevenson, Alabama in 1865, where Councill remained until 1867, when he began teaching, the first person to teach a school for black students outside of a city in northern Alabama – a position which caused frequent trouble with the Ku Klux Klan. Councill helped start the Lincoln School, four miles west of Huntsville, in 1868, which had 36 students by 1870. During Reconstruction after the American Civil War, he held minor political positions in Alabama, serving as assistant enrollment clerk in the Alabama legislature in 1872 and 1874. He was a secretary of the Colored National Civil Rights Convention in Washington, DC in 1873. He taught for a time at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia and edited a newspaper, the Negro Watchman in 1874 in Huntsville. Councill used his connections in the Democratic party and state legislature to gain approval for his plan for the State Normal School for Negroes in 1875, becoming its principal and, later, president. He was appointed notary public by Governor Rufus W. Cobb in 1882. In 1883, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Alabama. In 1884 he married Maria H. Wheeden from Huntsville. As a contemporary of Booker T. Washington, he and Washington (who performed research at Tuskeegee Institute) often competed for favors and funds from the Alabama legislature and northern philanthropists. In 1887 Councill attracted wide attention when he complained to the Interstate Commerce Commission of harsh treatment on the Alabama railroad. That action later prompted his superiors to relieve him of his duties as president of AAMU for one year. That experience may have helped alter his position on the proper role for a Black man to play in the South during that era, because afterwards, he advocated accommodation and acceptance of his "unctuous sycophancy," which prompted Washington to characterize him as "simply toadying to White people." He served at AAMU until 1909, although Solomon T. Clanton served as acting president in 1903 when Council was ill. Under his leadership, AAMU was second only to Tuskegee Institute in size among Alabama Negro industrial schools. The first high school for blacks in Huntsville was named for him when it opened in 1867. William Hooper Councill High School closed after the schools were integrated in the 1960s. Source:The African American Desk Reference Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture Copyright 1999 The Stonesong Press Inc. and The New York Public Library, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Pub. ISBN 0-471-23924-0 Previous Next

< Back Thelonious Monk Thelonious Monk, was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70. Thelonious Monk photo by Lawrence Shustak, 1962 Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and was the son of Thelonious and Barbara Monk. He died of a stroke on February 17, 1982, and was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Nellie Monk, his wife died on in June 2002, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 80 years old He and his wife Nellie had two children, T. S. Monk, and Barbara Monk who died in 1984. Thelonious Monk, was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70. Monk's compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations. His style was not universally appreciated; the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed him as "the elephant on the keyboard". Monk was renowned for a distinct look which included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He was also noted for an idiosyncratic habit during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano. Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time magazine (the others being Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis). Read More Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk And Here: https://www.nytimes.com/.../nellie-monk-80-wife-muse-and... Previous Next

< Back Charlotte Hawkins Brown ​ Early Palmer Faculty. Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown is in center top. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Palmer Institute, Sedalia, NC. The Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, better known as Palmer Memorial Institute, was a boarding school for upper class African Americans. The school was founded in 1902 by Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown at Sedalia, North Carolina near Greensboro. Palmer Memorial Institute was named after Alice Freeman Palmer, former president of Wellesley College and benefactor of Dr. Brown. Source: N-83-12-10 - From the General Negatives, State Archives of NC Previous Next

< Back Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta is playing the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo. The Banjo's Roots, Reconsidered August 23, 201112:59 PM ET Heard on NPR All Things Considered Greg Allen Photo description: Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta sitting in a chair. He is facing the camera, wearing a V-neck white shirt with no sleeves. He is playing the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo. Courtesy of Chuck Levy "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. Click source link to listen to this article. Source Link: https://www.npr.org/.../the-banjos-roots-reconsidered... Previous Next

< Back The Birthplace of The Environmental Justice Movement 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. Previous Next

< Back The Badgett Sisters Connie B. Steadman of the Badgett Sisters, an a cappella gospel trio of tremendous depth, not too well known outside of North Carolina, where they sang in “folklife festivals, churches, schools, prisons and mental hospitals” according to the notes on their first LP. Singing in Harmony: The Badgett Sisters Noah Angell heads to North Carolina to track down a member of the gospel trio By Noah Angell on December 2, 2016 Red Bull Music Academy Daily December 30th, 2015. It was nearly noon and still no sign of the sun. We were on our way to Yanceyville from Durham, about an hour’s drive. The rain was dense beyond belief, pelting down on the windshield as I watched puddles and tributaries form in the fields we drove past. My mother was driving and was unusually calm given the tumultuous weather. I was on my way to meet Connie B. Steadman of the Badgett Sisters, an a cappella gospel trio of tremendous depth, not too well known outside of North Carolina, where they sang in “folklife festivals, churches, schools, prisons and mental hospitals” according to the notes on their first LP. I’ve been studying ethnographic records and incorporating them into lecture works for years now, immersing myself in ritual music from far-flung and little-known areas of this world, but something persistently calls me back to my childhood home of North Carolina. The Badgett Sisters’ recordings, in particular, have been a great source of strength, and of replenishment. I had heard that one of the Badgetts was still around and resolved that the next time I returned home I would seek her out, mostly just to say thank you. Riding through the rolling hills of Orange County, I studied old country shacks, stray architectural ciphers of rural life that punctuate the passing mounds of earth. Dilapidated scraps of wood and bowed sheet metal housing farming equipment, grain and wood – they always seem to be rotting from exposure to the elements, ready to fall apart and yet there they are, steadfast. “They say flooding is a big part of the cleansing process for North Carolina,” my mother said as she watched the road, the rain on the windshield now coming in waves, moving towards an undifferentiated downpour. I thought of the trail of tears, what it might take to wash something like that away. Yanceyville is a small town, population around 2,000. It’s a predominantly African American agricultural community located in Caswell County, bordering Virginia to its north. (I would later find out the Badgetts themselves farmed tobacco there for generations.) I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb in the local library, our designated meeting place. Any out-of-towner would, but I walked in with a bouquet of pink roses and started looking around corners. A man seated at a computer stared and made a curious upward nod in my direction, the woman at the front desk asked if she could help me. “I’m meeting someone here actually...” Just then she appeared, only a few feet from the librarian. “I believe you’re looking for me.” I handed her the flowers and we made our way to an adjacent conference room. (Their three voices so often blend so gracefully into one indistinguishable, powerful whole that it can be hard to separate one from another.) I began by expressing my gratitude and appreciation for the Badgett Sisters, how much their music affected me, how their voices reminded me so much of home, of women in my own family and those who taught me as I grew. As soon as I had her on the phone, I was trying to guess which voice she was. Her older sister Celeste has an unmistakably deep voice, but their three voices so often blend so gracefully into one indistinguishable, powerful whole that it can be hard to separate one from another. In the discourse of ethnomusicology, polyphony is often thought to map power relations within a given community. How voices relate to one another – who leads and who follows, who is allowed to sing at all and how we then sing together / to one another, these are all reflective of hierarchy or lack thereof within a given community, or – in this case – family. The Badgett Sisters are not only an excellent example of harmony in a technical sense, they provide a startlingly beautiful example of how people within a family might relate to one another – such intimacy, such sensitive understanding of one’s place in relation to others, even the silences are considered. I asked about the distinction between gospel and secular music in their household growing up. “Well, we weren’t allowed to do secular music. My daddy wouldn’t allow it. He may have known that we danced... and he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t approve.” Then she leaned in as if letting me in on a secret. “Daddy even played the guitar, but he wouldn’t play it outside the house.” During the struggle for civil rights, old church songs served to lift the spirits of those African Americans who wanted nothing more than to live in peace and in undisturbed dignity. So many of these songs – which told of being received in heaven and laying burdens down – were readily understood as urgent messages of the need for liberation. African American oral tradition has, out of necessity, grown to accommodate such camouflaged and codified speech, carefully weighed to reach certain ears and to evade others, as is most famously exemplified in the language of the underground railroad where Harriet Tubman was called “Moses” and the Ohio River was known as “the River Jordan.” I asked Steadman about the song, “Steal Away.” During the Jim Crow period, the phrase referred to sharecroppers who, unfairly burdened with debt by plantation owners, would disappear into the night seeking freedom and in doing so run off on their unjust debt. To what extent, when you were growing up, did you think of these songs as political? She didn’t seem quite comfortable with my characterization of the songs as political, but on “Steal Away” she offered: “Well, you know, when we sing ‘my Lord calls me by the thunder and the lightning,’ this comes from the time of slavery. That was a signal that at night there would be a storm and that would be the time to make our move. Wade in the water was (sung as) a way to signal that they were to escape by crossing the water that night.” Storytelling – and explaining the origins songs like these – has always been a part of the Badgetts’ repertoire, a means of ensuring not only that the old songs are kept alive, but also that the context in which they were sung is not lost. In trying to establish a timeline, I asked, “Were they always a trio?” “We were the Badgett Family – the original Badgett Family consisted of my dad, my oldest sister Ella, next oldest sister Cleo and oldest brother Cortelyou, Jr…. When my brother was 12 he was no longer with the group because of Baptist Church Traditions that didn't allow you to participate in church services if you had not become a member. Celester was placed in the group to fill his space. When Ella became 16 she no longer wanted to be a part of the group and so I replaced her.” Connie’s father, Cortelyou Odell Badgett was the architect and the visionary of their sound. In 1954 he recorded a number of four part a cappella gospel songs using his own voice multi-tracked and overdubbed to form all four parts of the harmony, calling himself a “one man quartet.” He was locally renowned as a master quartet arranger and choirmaster. He worked with two groups – The Badgett Family and the Silvertone Quartet – both comprised solely of family. Unfortunately their father passed away in 1978, just before the Badgetts recorded “Travelling Shoes,” their first official on-record appearance, for Eight-Hand Sets and Holy Steps under the name The Badgett Sisters. When it came time to record their first full-length record in 1986 it was dedicated to their father and titled in homage, The Voice that Refused to Die. It even begins with Mr. Badgett’s four-part overdubs singing “I don’t want nobody stumbling over my life...” before his daughters’ voices come in, echoing him in the present. Thus from the beginning of their recorded life there was always a voice which we the listeners could not detect but which shaped, guided and invisibly harmonized. Five years later, in 1991, Cleo, frequently the lead singer of the Badgett Sisters, passed. In 1995, Connie and Celester released Give Me Wings, which brings both of their voices powerfully to the fore but in doing so highlights the absence of their sister. The economy of harmonizing had to shift towards a dual axis, trading off on lead and support, whereas before they laid a shifting bed of hums and wordless vocals for their sister to sing atop, or all alternated parts, or sang in unison. Nowadays Celester no longer sings. When she does perform, Connie sings alone. It must be strange singing by yourself, as this always been a matter of singing harmonies right? “Yes, it is... But I can still hear them.” Which is to say that even when she sings alone this could never be a soloistic practice – it is inextricable from polyphony, and from harmony. Connie B. Steadman is currently back in the studio recording with Glenn Hinson, who has recorded and produced all of The Badgett Sisters’ studio output, and Noah Angell is presently working on a documentary film about The Badgett Sisters. This article first appeared in Arabic at ma3azef.com. NOTE: To hear The Badgettt Sisters singing, Click the Source Link* Source: https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/.../badgett-sisters... Previous Next

< Back Frederick Jones ​ On this day in 1949 Frederick Jones invented the air conditioner. Patent No. 2475841. Frederick McKinley Jones (May 17, 1893 – February 21, 1961), was an African-American inventor, entrepreneur, winner of the National Medal of Technology, and inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. His innovations in refrigeration brought great improvement to the long-haul transportation of perishable goods. He cofounded Thermo King. Over his lifetime, he patented more than sixty inventions in divergent fields with forty of those patents in refrigeration. He is best known for inventing the first automatic refrigeration system for trucks. Jones was born on May 17, 1893 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Source:http://www.blackpast.org/.../jones-frederick-mckinley... Previous Next

< Back Walter Long (r) with his baby brother Sylvester *Photo: Walter Long (r) with his baby brother Sylvester* ---- Black police officers…the forgotten story… February 25, 2010 A few days ago, in celebration of Black History Month, the Winston-Salem Police Department honored some of the first black police officers in the city. But there is a backstory that has been lost in the fog of time. On August 7, 1880, two black women, residents of the town of Winston, got into a fight. The police were summoned. The local weekly newspaper the Union Republican reported that the policemen arrested one woman: “It is reported that she was boisterous and would not go gently, and the police had to call for assistance. It is reported that she was somewhat roughly handled, and that the crowd of negroes looking on became enraged, and threatened a rescue.” Someone panicked and called out the local militia. Amidst great confusion, three black men were arrested and charged with inciting to riot. A week later, one policeman testified in court that one of the accused had actually assisted him in making the arrest. That charge was dropped. The other two accused had their charges reduced to disorderly conduct and were released under a peace bond. Shortly thereafter, the town commissioners received a petition from several leading white citizens, including Superior Court judge Darius H. Starbuck: “(We) do petition your Honorable Body to appoint Israel L. Clements (colored) as additional Policeman in and for the Town of Winston.” The commissioners’ response astonished almost everyone. Earlier that year, they had, on their own, asked Mr. Clements to join the local police force. And he had turned them down, because his job at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company paid considerably more than the salary of a policeman. No further action was taken to hire a black policeman. A year later, Clements ran for a seat on the town commission. In a non-districted election, he won, and became the first ever black town commissioner. Unfortunately, near the end of his term, he died. The commissioners passed a resolution that said, in part: “(he) was one who was recognized as a Standard for morals and probity…a most faithful and efficient upholder of law and good government in the town.” It would be almost ten years before another black man was elected to the town commission. Flash forward about thirty years, to around 1912. A local black man named Walter Long, who had been fascinated since childhood by police work, applied for a job as a Winston city policeman. He was told that that was impossible. So he went off to West Virginia to take a course in law enforcement. Around 1916 he returned to Winston-Salem and opened his own private detective agency. Over the next 25 years, his practice extended all along the Atlantic seaboard, from Atlanta to New York. Many of the cases that he worked were in conjunction with lily white local police agencies, including the North Carolina state police, the Forsyth County sheriff’s office and the Winston-Salem Police Department. But because he was a “hired gun,” he never received public credit for his work. When he died in 1941, most “black” obituaries appeared in agate type in the local papers in a special boxed section. Walter Long’s obituary ran as a regular story, including a picture of him, a bit of belated recognition. Source:https://northcarolinaroom.wordpress.com/.../black-police.../ Previous Next

< Back Ella Baker "In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning- getting down and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system." - Ella Baker 1964 Ella Baker born on December 13, 1903 was a Civil Rights and Human Rights Activist who began her long career in the 1930s. Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia and when she was seven, her family moved to her mother's hometown of Littleton in rural North Carolina. As a girl, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. Baker attended Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, graduating as class valedictorian in 1927 at the age of 24. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating, she moved to New York City. During 1929-1930 she was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News and at the Negro National News. She was a behind-the-scenes activist for over five decades working alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders of the 20th century. Including: W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis. She also had high positions in some of the greatest civil rights organizations in history including: NAACP (1938–1953), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957–1960), Southern Conference Education Fund (1962–1967), and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. It is widely written that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other SCLC members, differed in opinion and philosophy. She once claimed that the "movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement”. #EllaBaker was a very private person. People close to her did not know that she was married for twenty years to T. J. "Bob" Roberts. She left no diaries. The 1981 documentary Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, directed by Joanne Grant, revealed her important role in the Civil Rights Movement. She remained an activist until her death in 1986 on her 83rd birthday. In 2009 Ella Baker was honored on a U.S. postage stamp. Source: https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/ Source: https://ellabakercenter.org/who-was-ella-baker/ Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker Read More About Ella Baker Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.171506.../403415917049663/... Previous Next

< Back Navy B-1 Band Racial Barrier-Busting U.S. Navy B-1 Band The First African American Band Honored With Chapel Hill NC Historical Marker MAY 25, 2017 By Tammy Grubb The 44 members of the U.S. Navy B-1 Band cracked the color barrier, leaving an impression on the Chapel Hill community during their two-year service on UNC’s campus during World War II. Racial Barrier-Busting U.S. Navy B-1 Band The First African American Band Honored With Chapel Hill NC Historical Marker MAY 25, 2017 By Tammy Grubb The 44 members of the U.S. Navy B-1 Band cracked the color barrier, leaving an impression on the Chapel Hill community during their two-year service on UNC’s campus during World War II. The community will commemorate their contribution with a historical marker at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 27, 2017 at the intersection of West Franklin and South Roberson streets. Two of the band’s original members – Simeon Holloway of Las Vegas and Calvin Morrow of Greensboro – and many of the veterans’ family members are expected to attend. Only four of the original members are still living. The ceremony will be followed by a reception at the Hargraves Center, 216 N. Roberson St. The B-1 Band’s beginning is credited to four black university and business leaders who garnered support from UNC President Frank Porter Graham and North Carolina Gov. J. Melville Broughton in finding a role for black men in the war effort. The first B-1 Band members were highly skilled musicians enrolled at N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University and Dudley High School in Greensboro. Others hailed from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), South Carolina State University, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and N.C. Central University and Hillside High School in Durham. “They were the men who knew music. We read it. We could arrange it,” member Huey Lawrence says on the band’s website. “Most people back then thought black music was just jamming. But we played the classics, for the officers, the admirals, for dances for the movie stars. We played stocks, the classics, concert music, and marching songs.” They were formally inducted into the Navy on May 27, 1942, at a recruiting station in Raleigh – four years before the Navy adopted integration and equal rights policies for black service members. Before that, black Navy service members could serve only as cooks and porters. They trained in Norfolk, Virginia, before transferring to the Navy’s PreFlight School at UNC in July 1942. Although they served under the Navy’s general rating, segregationist laws prevented them from living and eating on campus. Four prominent black Chapel Hill residents – Harold M. Holmes, Albert Register, Kenneth Jones and O.D. Clark – offered the use of a new Negro Community Center – now Hargraves – in the Northside neighborhood near downtown. The band members lived there until being transferred in May 1944 to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. BUILDING COMMUNITY Those years in Chapel Hill were a big deal for the black community, the band’s history states. Children would gather each morning to watch the men march to campus in strict formation to play for assembled cadets six days a week at the raising of the colors. The late Rebecca Clark, a longtime Northside resident and civil rights activist, remembered the band in a 2007 town news release. “They’d come by before the kids went to school and before most of us had gone to work,” she said. “All the people, especially the kids, would come out to watch them parade by. Every morning. It was really something to see, all those boys in their white uniforms. It made us all proud.” Her son. John Clark, who would later perform with his brother in the band Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, recalled his fondness for the saxophone music, and how B-1 Band leader James B. Parsons inspired his brother. “Doug and I and all the kids in the neighborhood would run out to Roberson Street when we heard the band coming, and we followed them as far as we could,” John Clark said. The bandsmen also embraced the community, dedicating free time to outreach programs and music lessons for local children in their barracks. They provided equipment for football games and organized Christmas parties at which one member would dress as Santa Claus, the website noted. A few members formed a dance band, the Cloudbusters, and others went on to marry local girls. PUSHING BARRIERS History shows their influence beyond the black community, however, through patriotic gatherings, war bond rallies, concerts featuring stars such as Kay Kyser and Kate Smith, and special events, including ship launchings and visits by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President Henry A. Wallace. The road was not always smooth, as Parsons explained in recounting their arrival in Chapel Hill: “Just outside of town we got off our bus and were met by the officers and three companies of cadets in dress whites, like ours, and we assembled to parade into town. People started coming out on Franklin Street to see what was happening,” he said. “They started jeering at us, calling us all kinds of ugly names, most of them racial slurs. They were throwing mud and rocks at us. I got cut on my cheek. At least one instrument was dented. My men had mud all over them. But in the midst of all that, they held their heads high. I’d never heard them play better.” As Morrow explained in 2007: “It was straight segregation back then. There might have been a couple of places where you could eat. Certainly not on campus, not in downtown Chapel Hill. And you certainly wanted to be real careful if you ever left barracks.” UNC Chancellor Emeritus James Moeser apologized to band members that year for their treatment, and they became honorary members of the Marching Tar Heels during halftime of a Carolina-James Madison football game in Kenan Stadium. The marker will be Chapel Hill’s fourth. The others commemorate UNC’s founding, U.S. astronauts who trained at Morehead Planetarium and the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. A nearby Carrboro marker commemorates local blues and folk musician Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten. Source: http://b1band.org/ Learn More About The B-1 Band Members From Their Own Words =https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL33CAD62526A5AC3B Source: https://www.heraldsun.com/.../orang.../article152613599.html Previous Next

< Back Hughie Maynor Civil Rights: No Accommodations for Indians Life in the small town of Dunn, North Carolina in 1960 was like any other Southern, segregated town during the Jim Crow era. For decades, residents lived separate public lives based on whether they were Caucasian, African American, or Native American. Schools, restaurants, and theaters were divided based on their race. Growing up in a segregated society seems strange nowadays, but Hughie Maynor was impacted by racial discrimination at every turn. In some ways, being Native American was even more of a struggle than being African American. “They wouldn’t let us go to the theater, Hughie explains, For a while, the Dunn Stewart Theater had an upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs was for the blacks and the downstairs was for the white folks. We went to the movies and sat downstairs for a couple of years and then one day, we walked up there and there was a sign hanging up there at the ticket booth: No Accommodations for Indians. They wouldn’t let you go upstairs or downstairs. And that went on for a couple of years.“ “One night somebody threw a brick through the window of the movie theater. Uncle Junior went down to the Stewart Theater and he talked to a guy named Bill Yates who managed the theater. Me and Junior went up to Yates’s office to talk to him as to why it was we couldn’t go to the theater. I don’t remember what his excuse was, but they still would not let us go to the movies." Image description: Hughie Maynor, a Native American from North Carolina, standing in the backyard of a house. He is wearing a cap and a long sleeve shirt. His left arm is across his chest reaching for his shoulder. Previous Next

< Back African American Gold Star Mothers African American Gold Star mothers sail to France aboard the American Banker in 1933, on a mission to visit the graves of their sons killed in World War I. (Dick Lewis/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images) Photo: African American Gold Star mothers sail to France aboard the American Banker in 1933, on a mission to visit the graves of their sons killed in World War I. (Dick Lewis/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images) When the U.S. government organized segregated trips for Gold Star mothers, black women protested After World War I, the problematic program was implemented by Allen McDuffee Oct 31, 2017 In the summer of 1930, Bessie Strawther took a train from her home in Urbana, Ohio to New York City. It was the first leg of a long trip that would finally allow her to visit her son’s grave more than a decade after his death in World War I. Henry Strawther, a black American private in a segregated infantry unit, died fighting the German army in October 1918 — just weeks before the Armistice of November 1918. Strawther, like tens of thousands of other members of the military, remained buried in Europe either because of circumstances or by family choice. But after significant and sustained pressure on Congress from the American War Mothers and the newly formed American Gold Star Mothers, President Calvin Coolidge in March 1929 signed legislation authorizing Gold Star Mothers — or widows if mothers were deceased — to travel to Europe as guests of the U.S. government to see the final resting places. A fund of $5 million was allocated to cover two-week, all-expense-paid pilgrimages. Before the women left home, the Army’s Quartermaster Corps sent each traveler a list of what to pack and gave detailed travel arrangements. The War Department warned the women to wear “somewhat heavier clothing” to protect them against “the cold and dampness.” Because of the lack of laundry facilities, the quartermaster urged them to pack “sufficient underwear, nightgowns, stockings and handkerchiefs.” The travel arrangements included dates and times of travel as well as berth, seat, or room number for the ship, trains, and hotel rooms. Everything was taken care of. Strawther was to be among the first group of nearly 7,000 women making the Gold Star pilgrimages over the course of three years. But shortly after she arrived in New York, she declined to take the next step of the journey — the War Department required black mothers and widows to travel on freight ships instead of the luxury liners the white travelers were boarding, and their accommodations in Paris would also be segregated. In New York, white women were already staying in expensive hotels while black women slept in Harlem’s YWCA. “I am not going to France,” Strawther wrote to a prominent member of the NAACP, adding, “I do not want to be a disgrace to my son and the race.” In some ways, the segregation was not a surprise given the segregated army structure and the fact that the American Gold Star Mothers did not grant membership to black women, but it was no less insulting. By late May, 55 black women had signed a letter drafted by NAACP officials in which they pledged to refuse the trip rather than submit to segregation. “Twelve years after the Armistice, the high principles of 1918 seem to have been forgotten,” it read. “We who gave and who are colored are insulted by the implication that we are not fit persons to travel with other bereaved ones.” The Chicago Defender, the prominent black newspaper, responded by running a front-page article with a swelling headline: “Gold Star Black Mothers: STAY OUT OF FRANCE If Forced to Sail on Jim Crow Ships!” The director of the pilgrimage program, Gen. J. L. DeWitt, tried to soften the tension with the NAACP. “The composition of the groups,” he wrote, was “determined after the most careful consideration of the interests of the pilgrims themselves. No discrimination whatever will be made as between the various groups.” President Herbert Hoover, who was under increasing pressure to address the matter, referred all questions to the War Department, which, in its replies, both eschewed any suggestion of wrongdoing and illuminated how the military viewed the matter. Assistant Secretary of War F. H. Payne responded to one letter of complaint, “After thorough study, the conclusion was reached that the formation of white and colored groups of mothers and widows would best assure the contentment and comfort of the pilgrims themselves,” according to the National Archives. Payne continued, “No discrimination as between the various groups is contemplated. All groups will receive like accommodations at hotels and on steamships, and the representatives of the War Department will, at all times, be as solicitous of the welfare of the colored mothers and widows as they will be of the welfare of those of the white race.” He added: “It would seem natural to assume that these mothers and widows would prefer to seek solace in their grief from companions of their own race.” As such, the women were presented with a seemingly impossible choice: take a stand against segregation by joining the growing protest organized by the NAACP and black newspapers, or live with the government’s stipulations and make what would likely be a one-in-a-lifetime voyage to see the final resting place of their sons and husbands. Ultimately, most would choose the latter. “Ever since I lost my son in 1918 I have been wanting to come,” wrote one mother. “I would have come over on a cattle-boat. I would have swam if possible. I love my race as strongly as any other but when I heard that the United States was going to send us over I could not refuse.” Four years later, after struggling with her decision, Strawther finally sailed with the very last party of black women — by far the largest one, suggesting many also struggled with their decisions before yielding to the government’s terms. Approximately two dozen black women refused the trip and stuck with the decision. Mabel Johnson of Philadelphia wrote to the War Department that despite “an intense desire to visit the grave of my beloved husband” she would “not be a party to this conspiracy against the dead.” When Grace F. Taylor, a seamstress from Cambridge, Massachusetts, received a letter from another Gold Star widow who had made the pilgrimage and implored her to reconsider, Taylor replied that she considered the second-class treatment of black Gold Star mothers and widows a closed and private matter that could not be rectified. “I wish to say right here that I need no urging from anyone pertaining to making the pilgrimage to France, as my mind was completely settled when I cancelled my invitation last summer,” wrote Taylor. “I am a Massachusetts-born woman and my parents before me and I strongly resent any such stand as the United States government has taken. I feel they have grossly insulted our race and that they can never make amends.” Source: https://timeline.com/when-the-u-s-government-organized... Previous Next

< Back Manteo, NC Church Manteo, NC Church An African American congregation poses for a group photo outside of their church in Manteo, Dare County, NC. 1953 Photographer: Charles Brantley Aycock Brown, 1904-1984. Source: digital ncdcr gov Previous Next

< Back North Carolina A&T students working in the Biological laboratory ca 1800. ​ An early image of N.C. A&T students working in the Biological laboratory ca 1800. This was one of the photographs that W. B. DuBois used in his exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Source: African American photographs assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001705867/ On March 9, 1891, North Carolina A&T State University was founded as a land grant institution for African Americans. The school, originally named the Agricultural and Mechanical College, was established as a result of the Second Morrill Act, enacted by Congress in 1890, which mandated separate colleges for Black students. Initially, the college shared space with Shaw University but eventually moved to its permanent home in Greensboro with the assistance of Dewitt Clinton Benbow, a Guilford County businessman and philanthropist, and Charles H. Moore, an African American educator, and businessman. In 1915, the state legislature changed the name to Agricultural and Technical College. In 1967, the college became a university and took its current name, and in 1972, N.C. A&T became a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina system. Today, N.C. A&T has more than 12,000 students and awards degrees in bachelor’s, master's, and doctoral programs with a strong emphasis on engineering, science, and technology. It awards more degrees in engineering to African Americans than any other university in the country and is the second-largest producer of minority agricultural graduates nationwide. Image: Students inside the Biological laboratory; Circa 1899 Previous Next

< Back Howard P. Perry Howard P. Perry was the first Negro to enlist in the U.S.Marine Corps at Camp Lejune, on June 1, 1942 "Breaking a tradition of 167 years, the U.S. Marine Corps started enlisting Negroes on June 1, 1942. Howard P. Perry was the first Negro to enlist in the U.S.Marine Corps at Camp Lejune, on June 1, 1942 "Breaking a tradition of 167 years, the U.S. Marine Corps started enlisting Negroes on June 1, 1942. The first class of 1,200 Negro volunteers began their training 3 months later as members of the 51st Composite Defense Battalion at Montford Point, a section of the 200-square-mile Marine Base, Camp Lejeune, at New River, NC. The first Negro to enlist was Howard P. Perry shown here." Home Town: Born: 1924-Charlotte, NC Father: Jerry Perry, born 1882 Mother: Florida Perry, born 1882 Last Address: Montford Point, N.C. Last Rank: Private 1st Class Last Primary MOS:3371-Cook Last MOSGroup:Food Specialist Primary Unit:1943-1944, 3371, 51st Defense Bn Service Years:1942 - 1944 ----------- The Story of the First Black Marine Howard P. Perry was the face of a long overdue change in how our nation fought its wars. By Gil Troy-11.29.15-The Daily Beast The black-and-white photograph looks like one in sixteen million, yet another portrait of a bright-eyed, fresh-faced, all-American World War II recruit. The uniform is crisp; the tie only slightly askew. The cap is part postman, part policeman—back when both those jobs were all male. The recruit’s wide-eyed look telegraphs pride, eagerness, and fear, a logical response considering that more than 400,000 American soldiers would die. What makes the photo historic? The young Marine pictured, Howard P. Perry, is black. Private Perry was the first African-American Marine recruit in 167 years. The few historians who tell Perry’s story report the same facts. He came from Charlotte, North Carolina, remained a private from 1942 through 1944, and served as a cook in the 3371, 51st Defense Battalion. Then, they pull back the historical camera, telling the broader story of integrating America’s Armed Forces. And what a story it is. The Army’s desegregation in the 1940s anticipated the Civil Rights movement, with grassroots demands from blacks eventually producing statesmanlike changes among whites. The Double V campaign sought victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow segregation at home. Beyond democracy in Europe, African-Americans insisted: “We want democracy in Alabama, Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District of Columbia,in the Senate of the United States.” This strategy anticipated Martin Luther King’s Cold War linkage, holding America to the ideals it championed against Communism. The two individuals hailed – or blamed – for swaying President Franklin Roosevelt to start reforming the armed forces were his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the black labor activist A. Philip Randolph. Watching the president inch America into this global, ideological clash, Randolph threatened to embarrass FDR with a march on Washington against the military’s racial segregation. Knowing he could never convince the racist Southerners in his Democratic party to legislate desegregation, Roosevelt bypassed Congress. On June 25, 1941, Executive Order 8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Committee guaranteeing “full participation in the defense program by all persons regardless of color, race, creed, or national origin.” Especially after America entered what became World War II, the rigid, proud, traditional Marines were particularly resistant. Major General Commandant Thomas Holcomb anticipated “a definite loss of efficiency in the Marine Corps if we have to take Negroes.” Other officers objected, “Eleanor says we gotta take in Negroes, and we are just scared to death; we’ve never had any in; we don’t know how to handle them; we are afraid of them.” Nevertheless, the government appropriated $750,000 to build barracks at Montford Point, a satellite camp in North Carolina outside what in late 1942 became Camp Lejeune. Through 1949, nearly 20,000 African-American marines would train, suffering and toughening there. Howard Perry reported for duty on August 26, 1942 followed by 12 more black volunteers that day. These first 1200 recruits and their successors in this segregated unit could not enter the main camp, without a white Marine escort. Their service papers were stamped “colored.” These were among many insults America’s 1.2 million black soldiers endured. In Kentucky, policemen beat three black servicewomen for lingering in a railway’s Whites Only waiting room. In Texas, Richard Carter, an African-American soldier searching for a restaurant to serve him, saw “American MPs and some of Hitler’s bully boys, now prisoners of war” in a Whites Only establishment, “having a ball together, wining and dining. It was sickening.” In southern Indiana, the Tuskegee Airmen protested, demanding entry to the Freeman Field Officers Club that served German POWs but barred these American fighter bombers. Gradually, the Marines adjusted. By 1947 Marine training directives required “that all men be thoroughly indoctrinated on the principle of the equality of rights and privileges of all marines, and that they should be made to understand that it is their duty to set an example in conduct and deportment, and assist the incoming negro marines.” During the three-week Battle of Saipan in June-July, 1944, members of the all-black 3rd Marine Ammunition Company bravely unloaded ammunition during amphibious landings, distributed it onshore, then became “Black Angels,” often fighting with the guns of fallen white soldiers. Afterwards, General Alexander Vandergrift concluded: “The Negro Marines are no longer on trial. They are just Marines period.” Still, most of the 13,000 African American Marines saw minimal action. After the war, A. Philip Randolph spearheaded another campaign, informing the new president Harry Truman that “Segregation becomes all the more important at a time when the United States should be assuming moral leadership in the world.” Only on July 26, 1948 did Truman’s Executive Order 9981 integrate the armed forces, promising equal treatment and opportunity. It took another four years and the Korean War before blacks were integrated into combat units. By 1960, the Marines were integrated. In 2008, one Montford graduate, Melvin Shoats, bitterly remembering the early insults but amazed by the swift subsequent progress, proclaimed: “The transition was so easy, you really couldn’t see it.” History is not for wimps. The past is filled with violence, misery, bigotry. But it is also filled with redemptive ideals that created democracy’s marvelous self-correcting mechanisms: free speech, free thought, peaceful processes for change. Stalinists sanitized the past because dictators demanding total allegiance fear complicated narratives. Liberal democrats don’t. We cultivate deeper historical understandings, expanding our stories to learn about Howard Perry and the heroes of Montford Point, who finally received the recognition they deserved in 2012, when the 368 surviving members of that brutal but stretching training process received the Congressional Gold Medal. Aspiring censors at Princeton University and elsewhere should learn about this more expansive view of history and democracy. Don’t change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School because of his racist views. In fact, the more liberal students learn about Wilson the more likely they are to realize that conservatives might dislike honoring this progressive inventor of big government. Instead, weave a broader, dynamic narrative of a newly diverse, ever evolving Princeton – and America -- that cherishes the best of the past, understanding how, despite their faults, predecessors like President Wilson ultimately helped America empower trailblazers like Private Perry. We need to learn more about Perry and other African-American trailblazers as the best response to the fight at Princeton and elsewhere about renaming institutions after dead racists. Isn’t it better to fill in the historical blanks than to try wiping out historical contradictions? Source:https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-story-of-the-first... Source:https://www.archives.gov/histori.../todays-doc/index.html... Source:https://marines.togetherweserved.com/.../tws.webapp... Previous Next

< Back Montford Point at Camp Lejeune #OnThisDay April 26, 1942, the United States Marine Corps opened Montford Point at Camp Lejeune, specifically for the training of African American recruits. Photograph description: Top photo-Two Marine recruits at Montford Point standing up in a tank with a 90mm anti-aircraft gun, 1943. Library of Congress: Bottom photo- Three Marines with rifles, jumping over a barrier as they train at Montford Point. Image from National Archives. The Nation's First African American Marines #OnThisDay April 26, 1942, the United States Marine Corps opened Montford Point at Camp Lejeune, specifically for the training of African American recruits. Photograph description: Top photo-Two Marine recruits at Montford Point standing up in a tank with a 90mm anti-aircraft gun, 1943. Library of Congress: Bottom photo- Three Marines with rifles, jumping over a barrier as they train at Montford Point. Image from National Archives. Face to Face with Segregation: African American marines at Camp Lejune This text is from: From The Right to Fight: African-American Marines in World War II, by Bernard C. Nalty. Service in the Marine Corps brought men like Obie Hall, who enlisted from the cities of the North where race relations were somewhat relaxed, into contact with segregation at its harshest. Hall received a sleeping-car ticket for the rail journey from Boston to the training site in North Carolina, and all went well until he reached Washington, D.C., where he was ordered out of his assigned berth. A porter, also an African-American, explained that Hall had reached the "black line" south of which rail travel was segregated. The porter, in defiance of the law and social custom of that time, found an empty compartment that Hall occupied for the rest of the trip. Some 18 months later, John R. Griffin of Chicago did not find a sympathetic porter willing to break the rules; at Washington he had to transfer to a Jim Crow car, "hot, dirty, crowded (with babies crying and old men drinking and [black] Marines discussing the fun they had on leave)." Segregation prevailed at the Marine Barracks, New River, North Carolina — soon redesignated Camp Lejeune — where the African Americans would train, and in the nearby town of Jacksonville. For the black recruits, the Marine Corps established a separate cantonment, the Montford Point Camp, in westernmost Camp Lejeune. At least one Marine veteran, Lieutenant General James L. Underhill, suggested in retrospect that the Corps made a mistake in pushing them "off to one corner," for doing so reinforced the belief, accurate though it was, that blacks were not truly welcome. The Marine Corps, Underhill believed, "should have dressed them up in blue uniforms and put them behind a band and marched them down Fifth Avenue" to show their pride in being Marines and their acceptance by the Corps. At the time, as Underhill surely realized, neither the Marine Corps nor much of American society was ready for such a gesture of racial amity. The Montford Point Camp consisted at first of a headquarters building, a chapel, two warehouses, a mess hall, a dispensary, a steam generating plant, a motor pool, quarters and recreational facilities for the white enlisted men who initially staffed the operation, a barber shop, and 120 green-painted prefabricated huts, each capable of accommodating 16 recruits, though twice that number were sometimes jammed into them, pending the completion of new barracks. The original camp also boasted a snack bar that dispensed beer, a small club for the white officers, and a theater, one wing of which was converted into a library. As the black Marines cleared the land around the camp, they encountered clouds of mosquitoes, a variety of snakes, and the tracks of an occasional bear, if not the animal itself. To the north of the original site, across a creek, lay Camp Knox, occupied during the Great Depression of the 1930s by a contingent of the Civilian Conservation Corps, an agency that put jobless young men to work, under military supervision, on public improvements and reclamation projects. As the number of African-American Marines increased, they spilled over into the old CCC camp. Railroad tracks divided white residents from black in segregated Jacksonville. Suddenly, hundreds of African-American Marines on liberty appeared on the white side of the tracks, looking for entertainment. At first, white businessmen reacted to this sight by bolting their doors. Even the bus depot shutdown until some one realized that the liberty parties might well find other North Carolina towns like New Bern or Wilmington more attractive than Jacksonville, and the ticket agents went back to work. Getting out of Jacksonville became easier, but returning to camp from the town proved difficult on a Jim Crow bus line. Drivers gave priority to white passengers, as state law required, and restricted black passengers to the rear of the bus, unless whites needed the space. Since the two races formed separate lines at the bus stop, drivers tended to take only whites on board and leave the black Marines standing there as the deadline for returning to Montford Point drew nearer. When this happened, angry black Marines, at the risk of violence from the local police, might commandeer a bus, remove the driver, and take it to the gate nearest Jacksonville, where the transit company could retrieve it on the next morning. The white officer in command at Montford Point, Colonel Samuel A. Woods, Jr., took steps to ensure that the black Marines could return safely to Montford Point without risking arrest. He sent his battalion's trucks into town to pick up the men and assigned white non-commissioned officers from the staff at Montford Point to the military police patrols that kept order in the town. The NCOs detailed by Colonel Woods helped deter local authorities from making arbitrary arrests of black Marines. As black noncommissioned officers became available, one of them accompanied each patrol, though unarmed and without authority to arrest or detain white Marines. Although race also affected relationships among Marines, especially during the early months of the Montford Point Camp, instances of the racial harassment of black Marines became increasingly less frequent. The improved conditions resulted in part from Montford Point's isolation, but it also reflected the efforts of the African-Americans to impress their white fellow Marines. Obie Hall recalled that the men of Montford Point tried to look their sharpest, especially when in the presence of white Marines. "They really put that chest out," he said. Pride in appearance had beneficial effects, for one white Marine remarked that, although he only saw blacks when they were on liberty because of the segregation on Camp Lejeune, "they always looked sharp." The white military police remained unimpressed, however. They tended to share the racial attitudes of their civilian counterparts, and the persistent hostility generated intense resentment among the African-American Marines. Knowledge that they would have to overcome racism to gain the right to serve created a feeling of solidarity among black Marines. At times, they could invoke this unity to right a wrong, as happened after the officer of the day at Montford Point, angered by what he considered raucous behavior during a comedy being shown at the camp movie theater, had the black audience take their buckets — these utilitarian possessions at the time were serving as seats — and put them over their heads. The recently appointed black drill instructors reacted by ordering their Marines to clean the barracks instead of attending a show being staged especially for them by black performers. When Colonel Woods heard of the impromptu field day, he investigated, learned of the ill considered action by the officer of the day, and made sure the African-Americans attended the performance. One incident painfully reminded the African-Americans of their second-class status in the Marine Corps, indeed throughout a Jim Crow society. A boxing show staged at the Montford Point Camp attracted a distinguished guest, Major General Henry L. Larsen, who had taken command of Camp Lejeune after returning from the South Pacific. During an informal talk, he made what he considered a humorous remark, but his audience interpreted it as an insult. According to one of the black Marines who was there, the general said something to the effect that when he returned from overseas he had seen women Marines and dog Marines, but when he saw "you people wearing our uniform," he knew there was a war on. The off-hand comment may have served, however, to bring the men of Montford Point even closer together. Oddly enough, a white officer came the closest to capturing the isolation felt by blacks in segregated North Carolina. Robert W. Troup, in peacetime a musician and composer who had played alongside black performers, accepted a wartime commission and reported to Montford Point, where he made a lasting impression. One of the African-American Marines, Gilbert H. Johnson, considered him a "topnotch musician, a very decent sort of officer," and another, Obie Hall, described him as "the sharpest cat I've ever seen in my life." Bobby Troup's song "Jacksonville," the unofficial anthem of men of Montford Point, included the heartfelt plea: Take me away from Jacksonville, 'cause I've had my fill and that's no lie. Take me away from Jacksonville, keep me away from Jacksonville until I die. Jacksonville stood still, while the rest of the world passed by. While assigned to the 51st Defense Battalion (Composite), the African-American defense battalion authorized in 1942, Troup doubled as recreation officer, organizing baseball and basketball teams, arranging the construction of sports facilities, and staging shows using talent available at Montford Point. Perhaps the most popular performer was Finis Henderson, a private who had sung and tap-danced in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films. As the star of one of Troup's shows, Henderson sang "Jacksonville" while stage hands threw bits of brown paper into the airflow from a pair of electric fans to simulate the dust blowing down the street of that much-despised town. In December 1944, Troup took command of the black 6th Depot Company — the second unit with that designation — which deployed to Saipan and handled supplies at the base there. Previous Next

< Back NEGRO SOLDIERS LIBERATING SLAVES Item description: Illustration, published in Harper’s Weekly on 23 January 1864, entitled “Colored troops, under General Wild, liberating slaves in North Carolina.” The illustration depicts the liberation of slaves in Camden County, North Carolina. 23 January 1864: “Colored troops, under General Wild, liberating slaves in North Carolina.” Posted on 23 Jan ’14 by fletches Item description: Illustration, published in Harper’s Weekly on 23 January 1864, entitled “Colored troops, under General Wild, liberating slaves in North Carolina.” The illustration depicts the liberation of slaves in Camden County, North Carolina. Text accompanying illustration: NEGRO SOLDIERS LIBERATING SLAVES. General Wild’s late raid into the interior of North Carolina abounded in incidents of peculiar interest, from which we have selected a single one as the subject of the illustration on page 52, representing the liberation by the negro battalion of the slaves on Mr. Terrebee’s plantation. As the reader may imagine, the scene was both novel and original in all its features. General Wild having scoured the peninsula between Pasquotank and Little Rivers to Elizabeth City, proceeded from the latter place toward Indiantown in Camden County. Having encamped overnight, the column moved on into a rich country which was covered with wealthy plantations. The scene in our sketch represents the colored troops on one of these plantations freeing the slaves. The morning light is shining upon their bristling bayonets in the back-ground, and upon a scene in front as ludicrous as it is interesting. The personal effects of the slaves are being gathered together from the outhouses on the plantation and piled, regardless of order, in an old cart, the party meanwhile availing themselves in a promiscuous manner of the Confiscation Act by plundering hens and chickens and larger fowl; and after all of these preliminary arrangements the women and children are (in a double sense) placed on an eminence above their chattels and carted off in triumph, leaving “Ole Massa” to glory in solitude and secession." Item citation: From the North Carolina Civil War Image Portfolio, North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previous Next

< Back Veterans Day Although Veterans Day, as a nationally recognized holiday, did not come about until after the end of the Reconstruction Era, Americans have been commemorating our country’s veterans for generations. Shared from: Reconstruction Era National Historical Park November 11, 2021 9:33am Although Veterans Day, as a nationally recognized holiday, did not come about until after the end of the Reconstruction Era, Americans have been commemorating our country’s veterans for generations. Susie King Taylor, a nurse, educator, and wife of a veteran of the 1st South Carolina Infantry, founded a chapter of the Women’s Relief Corps where she personally rendered aid to Civil War veterans during the Reconstruction Era. In her memoirs, published nearly 40 years after the war’s end, Taylor reflected on the importance of honoring American veterans and perpetuating their memory: “...I look around now and see the comforts that our younger generation enjoy, and think of the blood that was shed to make these comforts possible for them, and see how little some of them appreciate the old soldiers... There are only a few of them left now, so let us all, as the ranks close, take a deeper interest in them. Let the younger generation take an interest also, and remember that it was through the efforts of these veterans that they and we older ones enjoy our liberty to-day.” Image: Veterans of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer/33rd United States Colored Troops Infantry gather on St. Helena Island - April 14, 1912 (Penn Center Collection) Previous Next

< Back Garland E. Cooper Garland E. Cooper, Pvt. Medical Det. Recruit, WWI. Enlisted June 9th, 1918, Nash County, NC. Garland E. Cooper, Pvt. Medical Det. Recruit, WWI. Enlisted June 9th, 1918, Nash County, NC. Heritage of Black Highlanders Images in the Heritage of Black Highlanders Collection include photographs collected by Lucy Herring and other leaders of Asheville’s African American community in 1977. The collection is housed in Special Collections, Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina Asheville, Retrieved from: DigitalNC Previous Next

< Back Garland E. Cooper, Pvt. Medical Det. Recruit, WWI. Enlisted June 9th, 1918, Nash County, NC. Garland E. Cooper, Pvt. Medical Det. Recruit, WWI. Enlisted June 9th, 1918, Nash County, NC. Garland E. Cooper, Pvt. Medical Det. Recruit, WWI. Enlisted June 9th, 1918, Nash County, NC. Heritage of Black Highlanders Images in the Heritage of Black Highlanders Collection include photographs collected by Lucy Herring and other leaders of Asheville’s African American community in 1977. The collection is housed in Special Collections, Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina Asheville, Retrieved from: DigitalNC Previous Next

< Back Inez Stroud Inez Stroud, a member of the WAC ASF Band, poses with her saxophone at Ft. Des Moines, Iowa in 1943. She is wearing the enlistees' summer khaki uniform. Photograph: Inez Stroud, a member of the WAC ASF Band, poses with her saxophone at Ft. Des Moines, Iowa in 1943. She is wearing the enlistees' summer khaki uniform. Inez Naomi Stroud (1909-1994) of Wilmington, North Carolina, served in the Women's Army Corps and then the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1969 . Inez Namoi Stroud was born on 9 July 1909 in Wilmington, North Carolina. She was the third of nine children of the Rev. C.A. Stroud and Mrs. Beatrice Ford Stroud. Her father was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the family moved frequently. Stroud was a graduate of the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina. She also studied music and cosmetology." Stroud joined the Women's Army Corps (WAC) in 1943. She served at various installations in the United States and Europe over the course of her career in the army, including three tours in Germany. She frequently served as the organist for post chapels and was a saxophonist in the WAC band. Stroud was discharged in 1969 . Stroud lived in Washington, D.C., and Greensboro, North Carolina, after her military service. She continued her education at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro and continued to play music at the Bethel AME Church. Stroud died on 21 November 1994. Image and narrative source: Gateway - Triad Digital History Collections Previous Next

< Back Florida agricultural migrant ​ July 1940. “Florida agricultural migrant with a group who had their own tent which they pitched outside the grading station at Belcross, North Carolina.” Photo by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration. Previous Next

< Back Elizabeth Barker Johnson For her 99th birthday, Elizabeth Barker Johnson was surprised with a party and an opportunity she has longed for since 1949. The World War II veteran found out she would finally be able to put on her cap and gown and walk across the stage at Winston-Salem State University’s graduation. WWII VETERAN MISSED HER COLLEGE GRADUATION, NOW FOR HER 99TH BIRTHDAY SHE’LL FINALLY GET TO WALK ACROSS THE STAGE--3rd May 2019 by BOTWC Staff For her 99th birthday, Elizabeth Barker Johnson was surprised with a party and an opportunity she has longed for since 1949. The World War II veteran found out she would finally be able to put on her cap and gown and walk across the stage at Winston-Salem State University’s graduation. Johnson successfully completed her teaching at what was back then, Winston-Salem Teachers College, however she couldn’t find anyone to substitute for her at work and missed the graduation as a result. She told the Winston-Salem Journal that she couldn’t believe the day had finally come to redeem a moment most grads look forward as they close the book on their college years. I just can’t believe this is happening. I really think I’m dreaming,” she said. Johnson was able to attend WSSU thanks to the GI Bill. She made history as the first woman to attend Winston-Salem on the bill when she returned home from WWII. There she was a part of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of the Women’s Army Corps. The battalion was the only all-Black female battalion stationed overseas during the war. Her son, David Johnson, 60, was there to echo how amazing his mother is. “She’s faced war, she’s faced racism along the way as the only Black school teacher in her area for a long time,” he told the journal. He continued, “She’s such a remarkable woman.” Mrs. Johnson summed up the experience with two words that resonate with the class of 1949 and the class of 2019 — Go Rams! Source:https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com/.../wwii-veteran... Previous Next

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" L.D. Edwards Black Farmers, Gardeners & Sharecroppers Farmers & Farming 1/5 In this Gallery, we celebrate North Carolina black farmers who have contributed greatly to the state's agricultural industry. From the early days of slavery to the present, black farmers have persevered through adversity and continue to make significant contributions to the state's economy. Sharecroppers This is EBONY Magazine's first edition, which came out November 1, 1945. 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 Add a Title Describe your image Add a Title Describe your image This is EBONY Magazine's first edition, which came out November 1, 1945. 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 1/4 After the abolition of slavery, many African Americans in North Carolina turned to sharecropping as a means of survival. Despite the promise of independence, sharecropping often led to debt and poverty for these farmers. Unfortunately the legacy of this system can still be seen in the economic disparities faced by Black communities today. Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon! Gardeners 1/5 North Carolina has a rich history of African American farmers who have contributed greatly to the state's agricultural industry. Despite facing numerous challenges and obstacles, these farmers have persevered and continue to make significant contributions to the state's economy. From tobacco to sweet potatoes, their hard work and dedication have helped shape North Carolina's agricultural landscape. 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

"We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers. Our abundance has brought us neither peace of mind nor serenity of spirit." —Martin Luther King, Jr. Places & Spaces Graveyards & Cemeteries 1/5 North Carolina is home to many places and spaces that celebrate the contributions and achievements of African Americans. From museums to cultural centers, visitors can learn about the important strides made by this community throughout history. These sites offer a unique opportunity to explore the rich cultural heritage of African Americans in North Carolina. Plantations 1/6 North Carolina is home to many places and spaces that celebrate the contributions and achievements of African Americans. From museums to cultural centers, visitors can learn about the important strides made by this community throughout history. These sites offer a unique opportunity to explore the rich cultural heritage of African Americans in North Carolina. Monuments & Markers 1/1 North Carolina has a significant number of monuments and markers that commemorate the contributions of African Americans throughout history. From the Civil to the Civil Rights Movement, these monuments and markers are a testament to the resilience and perseverance of African Americans in North Carolina. 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 Henry Johnson Henry Johnson was born July 15 1892. He was a decorated African American soldier in WW1. He was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina William Henry Lincoln Johnson moved to Albany, New York when he was in his early teens. He worked as a redcap porter at the Albany Union Station on Broadway. *Henry Johnson was born July 15 1892. He was a decorated African American soldier in WW1. He was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina William Henry Lincoln Johnson moved to Albany, New York when he was in his early teens. He worked as a redcap porter at the Albany Union Station on Broadway. Johnson enlisted in the United States Army on June 5, 1917, joining the all-black New York National Guard 15th Infantry Regiment, which, when mustered into Federal service was re-designated as the 369th Infantry Regiment, based in Harlem. The 369th Infantry joined the 185th Infantry Brigade upon arrival in France, but the unit was relegated to labor service duties instead of combat training. The 185th Infantry Brigade was in turn assigned on January 5, 1918 to the 93rd Infantry Division. Although General John J. Pershing wished to keep the U.S. Army autonomous, he "loaned" the 369th to the 161st Division of the French Army. Supposedly, the unreported and unofficial reason he was willing to detach the Negro regiments from American command was that White American soldiers refused to fight alongside Black troops, although they were all American citizens. These regiments suffered considerable harassment by American White soldiers with many dying on American soil at their hands and even denigration by the American Expeditionary Force headquarters which went so far as to release the notorious pamphlet Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, which "warned" French civilian authorities of the alleged inferior nature and supposed tendencies of African American troops to commit sexual assaults. Johnson and his fellow Black soldiers arrived in France on New Year’s Day, 1918. The French Army and people were happy and welcoming to accept the reinforcements. Among the first regiments to arrive in France, and among the most highly decorated when it returned, was the 369th Infantry (formerly the 15th Regiment New York Guard), which later became famous as the "Harlem Hellfighters." The 369th was an all-Black regiment under the command of mostly White officers including their commander, Colonel William Hayward. Charles W. Fillmore, a Black New Yorker, first put the idea of a Black New York National Guard regiment forward. Governor Charles S. Whitmore, inspired by the brave showing of the Black 10th Cavalry in Mexico, eventually authorized the project. He appointed Col. William Hayward to carry out the task of organizing the unit, and Hayward gave Fillmore a commission as a captain in the 15th Infantry Regiment, New York National Guard. The 15th New York Infantry Regiment became the 369th United States Infantry Regiment prior to engaging in combat in France. The 369th got off to a rocky departure from the United States, making three attempts over a period of months to sail for France before finally getting out of sight of land. Even then, their transport, which had stopped and anchored because of a sudden snowstorm, which arose before they could get out of the harbor, was struck by another ship due to the poor visibility. The captain of the transport, the Pocahontas, wanted to turn back, much to the dismay of his passengers. Col Hayward's men repaired the damage themselves and the ship sailed on, battered but undaunted. According to Col. Hayward’s notes, they “landed at Brest. Right side up” on December 27, 1917. They acquitted themselves well once they finally got to France. However, it was a while before they saw combat. The French Army assigned Johnson's regiment to Outpost 20 on the edge of the Argonne Forest in the Champagne region of France and equipped them with French rifles and helmets. While on guard duty on May 14, 1918, Private Johnson came under attack by a large German raider party, which may have numbered as many as 24 German soldiers. Johnson displayed uncommon heroism when, using grenades, the butt of his rifle, a bolo knife, and his bare fists, he repelled the Germans rescuing Needham Roberts from capture and saving the lives of his other fellow American and French soldiers. Johnson suffered 21 wounds during this ordeal. This act of valor earned him the nickname of "Black Death", as a sign of respect for his prowess in combat. The story of Johnson's exploits first came to national attention in an article by Irvin S. Cobb entitled "Young Black Joe" published in the August 24, 1918 Saturday Evening Post. Returning home, now Sergeant Johnson participated (with his regiment) in a victory parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City in February 1919. Johnson was then paid to take part in a series of lecture tours. He appeared one evening in St. Louis and instead of delivering the expected tale of racial harmony in the trenches; he instead revealed the abuse Black soldiers had suffered, such as White soldiers refusing to share trenches with Blacks. Soon after this a warrant was issued for Johnson's arrest for wearing his uniform beyond the prescribed date of his commission and paid lecturing engagements dried up too. Veterans Bureau records show that a "permanent and total disability" rating was granted to Johnson on September 16, 1927 as a result of his tuberculosis. Additional Veterans Bureau records refer to Johnson receiving monthly compensation and regular visits by Veterans Bureau medical personnel until his death. William Henry Johnson died on July 1, 1929 in Washington, DC. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on July 6, 1929. On June 2, 2015, President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Honor to Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson of the New York National Guard on behalf of Private William H. Johnson due to Private Johnson having no living relatives. Reference: Arlington National Cemetery Previous Next

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" Unknown Spirituality The Black Church 1/5 Throughout North Carolina's history, the Black Church has been a vital institution for the African American community. From its origins during the slavery era to its present-day influence, the Black Church has provided a source of strength and resilience. Its teachings, music, and community outreach have all contributed to shaping the cultural and social landscape of the state. African centered Practices 1/1 More great content coming soon! Clergy 1/2 North Carolina has been home to many influential African American clergy members throughout its history. From the earliest days of the state's settlement, these leaders have played a vital role in shaping the spiritual and moral landscape of the region. Today, North Carolina continues to be home to a diverse and vibrant religious community, with African American clergy members from a wide range of faiths and traditions serving the needs of their congregations with distinction. 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

"People are underrepresented because that's a consequence of being 'historically excluded' which is the cause" L.D. Edwards Education & Educators Edu cation 1/4 In this gallery learn about early education institutions, specifically set up to serve the North Carolina African-American community. North Carolina HBCUs 1/11 Explore North Carolina's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), their founders, history, and student life. Educators 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 1/7 In this gallery we highlight the brilliant and dedicated educators who created and shaped the educational framework for African-Americans in North Carolina. U.S. HBCUs 1/7 Historically Black Colleges and Universities were founded throughout the United States. This gallery highlights their founders, history and student life. 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 Coming Soon 1/1 More great content coming soon. ​