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< Back Mamie Lee Parks Bryan was born in 1900 in Alleghany County, North Carolina. She married Leonard Bryan in 1914, and they lived in the vicinity of Sparta, North Carolina. Images left to right: Quilt back, feed sack logo; Portrait of Mamie and Leonard Bryan on porch in front of bedspread; Bottom images: Log Cabin quilt; Sixteen Patch quilt. Images source: LOC COLLECTION Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978 to 1996. . LOC Article by Laurel Horton, July 1999 - Blue Ridge Quilters - Mamie Bryan Mamie Lee Parks Bryan was born in 1900 in Alleghany County, North Carolina. She married Leonard Bryan in 1914, and they lived in the vicinity of Sparta, North Carolina. Leonard Bryan worked as a coal miner in West Virginia for thirty-two years in a company house and returning home, along with other North Carolina men, every two weeks. Mamie and Leonard Bryan had six children: two sons and a daughter who died in childhood, and three daughters who survived. Mamie Bryan assumed responsibility for the home, family, and farm while her husband worked away from home. Mamie Bryan learned to make quilts from her husband's mother, Alice Goans Bryan. Mamie Bryan made quilts to keep her family warm and because quilting provided a pleasant way to keep busy and productive while her husband was working in West Virginia or out foxhunting at night. At the time of the interview in 1978, Mrs. Bryan had not made quilts for several years because of failing eyesight. Mrs. Bryan pieced her quilts by hand, using remnants from the clothing she sewed for her family. At times she also recycled the good parts of worn-out family clothing into quilts. She recalled purchasing the fabrics to make a special "silk" quilt. (Satin-woven rayon or acetate fabrics are often referred to as "artificial silk" because they were designed to imitate the luster, fine texture, and light weight of natural silk.) For quilt linings, she purchased "factory cloth," a plain woven product manufactured in cotton mills in the nearby Piedmont region of North Carolina and sold in local stores. She also reused the cotton sacks from animal feed, a popular free source of fabric for thrifty families during the 1930s and 1940s. Typically she purchased Diamond brand dyes to color the plain white fabrics for her quilt linings. For one particular quilt, Mrs. Bryan used two purchased "countypins" (counterpanes) for the top and bottom. (The term "counterpane" can designate many different types of bedcover; here it refers to one designed to serve as a decorative bedspread rather than as a blanket to be covered up.) Mrs. Bryan's method of making quilts reflected a number of factors. First, she was a busy person with many responsibilities, and she adopted methods that allowed her to complete her work quickly and efficiently. Second, she had limited access to materials, so she sought to make the best use of what she had. Large remnants were left large and were squared off to make them easy to join with others. Smaller scraps were saved up and combined to make tops. Third, Mrs. Bryan had limited exposure to commercial quilt patterns. Her quilts generally followed examples set by earlier, locally made, utilitarian quilts. Fourth, her quilts reflect an African-American design aesthetic, and some of Mrs. Bryan's quilts resemble those made by other African-American quiltmakers, particularly in the southeastern United States. The quilts that Mrs. Bryan made for everyday use were typically pieced from large squares, rectangles, or strips. Her mother-in-law had made a counterpane (an unquilted appliqued bedspread) using the "Dutch Girl" pattern. (The particular version made by Alice Bryan closely resembles the "Colonial Lady" pattern published in the 1930s by the Grandma Dexter, part of the Dexter Yarn and Thread Company of Elgin, Illinois.) Mamie Bryan converted the counterpane into a quilt by tufting it with knots similar to embroidered French knots. (There is evidence of a larger tradition of tufted bedspreads in northwestern North Carolina during the first half of the twentieth century. However, those bedspreads were typically made using white yarn on plain white fabric.) Mamie Bryan's mother-in-law was also her source for the "Log Cabin" pattern. After making four blocks with this pattern, however, Mrs. Bryan decided that the process was too slow, and she completed the quilt by making blocks in a more familiar free-form manner. Mamie Bryan quilted some of her tops and tacked others, especially the heavier ones. She quilted during the winter months, setting up her frame in the living room near the fire. Mamie Bryan made quilts to meet the physical needs of her family. She also used quiltmaking as a form of creative expression, choosing and rearranging colors "to make them look pretty." She gave quilts to her children, but reported that her children preferred to use blankets, as quilts were considered to be old-fashioned. At the time of the interview, Mrs. Bryan was focusing her creative energy on growing flowers around her house. -end- . Images and narrative source: LOC COLLECTION - Blue Ridge Quilters - Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978 to 1996. Previous Next

< Back Fisk University-Fisk Jubilee Singers ​ Shared post. As Fisk University mourns the passing of Dr. Paul T. Kwami, the longtime Musical Director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, we take a moment to reflect on the founding of a cornerstone of this institution. Founded in 1865, Fisk University faced the threat of closure only a few years after opening its doors. Professor George White had appreciation for students’ acapella singing and organized small choral groups on campus. He proposed a touring singing student troupe. Seeing the benefit of such an endeavor, by 1871 #FiskUniversity trustees allowed its students to undertake a musical tour. The Jubilee Singers experienced a successful southern concert tour in the fall of 1871 before departing on a northern concert tour in 1872. Following their successful tours, the singers and Professor White traveled throughout England in 1873, and their tour culminated in a performance for Queen Victoria. The money generated by the singers helped pay many of the school’s debts and provided funding to allow Fisk University to construct the school’s first permanent building, Jubilee Hall. The TN Library Archives joins the community in honoring Dr. Kwami for his leadership and continuing the legacy of the #FiskJubileeSingers during his nearly three decades as Musical Director. Pictured: Photograph showing original members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers surrounding a piano. The title reads “The Jubilee Singers, Original Company from Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., 1871-1882, Eleventh Season.” Source: Tennessee Virtual Archive (TeVA): https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/.../reconaa/id/203/rec/1 Previous Next

< Back Wallace Evans' "SCRAPPY SQUARES" "SCRAPPY SQUARES" by Wallace Evans 100% cotton Machine pieces and quilted — in Warrenton, NC. Previous Next

< Back Mother of sharecropper family and friend coming up the road in the rain, bringing home sacks of vegetables from the neighbor place. Mother of sharecropper family and friend coming up the road in the rain, bringing home sacks of vegetables from the neighbor place. Top photo: Mother of sharecropper family and friend coming up the road in the rain, bringing home sacks of vegetables from the neighbor place. Person County, North Carolina. Off Highway 144. Bottom photo: [Untitled photo, possibly related to: Mother of sharecropper family and friend coming up the road in the rain, bringing home sacks of vegetables from the neighbor place. Person County, North Carolina. Off Highway 144. Both photographs date: July 1939. Photographer: Dorothea Lange Source: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) Previous Next

< Back JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell Assistant Director for PlayMakers Repertory Company's upcoming world premiere of Leaving Eden. Photo: JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell "In the Inaugural Bull City Black Theatre Festival, Underserved African-American Theater Artists Go Straight to the Audience They Richly Deserve" By Byron Woods JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell has to stop and catch her breath for a moment. I've caught her between appointments on a busy day, moments before she rushes into a rehearsal for PlayMakers Repertory Company's upcoming world premiere of Leaving Eden. Over the last month, Holloway-Burrell has been assistant director for that production while also producing what promises to be a groundbreaking two-week festival devoted to developing black theater artists and audiences in our region. You'd be out of breath, too. This weekend and next, the Bull City Black Theatre Festival will fill Manbites Dog Theater with shows, workshops, master classes, seminars, and conversations on stage movement, playwriting, acting, and the past and present of black theater, locally and nationally. Holloway-Burrell is still adding events as we speak, juggling rehearsal schedules and performance slots for almost thirty stage artists in a dozen presentations—all while managing the responsibilities of that gig at PlayMakers Rep. There will be performances, of course: staged readings by the region's three main black theater troupes (MOJOAA Performing Arts, Black Poetry Theatre, and Holloway-Burrell's own Black Ops) of work by three local black playwrights. But the other offerings are notably different from traditional theater-festival fare. Lakeisha Coffey's workshop on acting, entitled The Playground, is open to people who've never studied acting, and even those who've never stepped on stage. Coffey, a veteran actor who's performed with companies including Little Green Pig and Bartlett Theater, says many people who have the talent to be on stage don't know it because they don't have formal training or they're afraid of auditioning. Rhetta Greene and Robin Carmon Marshall's session, Next Act, focuses on raising up the voices and stories of women fifty and older—a demographic for which American theater has had shamefully little use. "We have so much to say and we've just not been heard," says Greene, an Obie-winning stage and film actor who recently appeared in Manbites Dog's Life Sucks. These events are meant to provide access to tools, techniques, information, and support, not only for those already in the field, "but for those just beyond the doorway, looking through," as Holloway-Burrell says. She and her co-organizers want the festival to gather, nurture, train, and provide more exposure for black theater artists while building an audience "who will act as our collaborators." Director and local black theater historian John Harris calls it "watering the grassroots." The stakes are high, as the festival could be a prototype for a more permanent regional entity. A group of artists is considering starting an African-American theater collective with its own black box theater, making the festival "a little laboratory for us to see what something more fully fleshed out would look like," says Holloway-Burrell. It's painfully obvious that the community of black theater artists needs such an organization. Over the years, the region's academic, independent, and community-based theaters have provided inconsistent support at best, through isolated productions and initiatives. During them, the riches of this community have shone, only to fade upon their conclusion. The existing theater infrastructure "hasn't developed a sustained relationship with black artists and audiences," Harris says. "Frances McDormand put it best during the Oscars: we need an inclusion rider as well. There's a critical mass of black performers in our area. But looking at the upcoming season, what is there for them to do?" Greene came of age as an artist through the Black Arts Movement in New York during the seventies, performing on and off Broadway and working as a film and television actor in Los Angeles before moving to this area in the last decade. "I'm astounded at the talent here," she says. Greene likens the experience to "being back at Howard [University]. People live, eat, and drink theater here. I haven't experienced that love and dedication for so long." As Marvel's Black Panther leaps over the $1 billion mark in ticket sales, the hunger for black stories told by black people—"for us, by us, about us, and near us," in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois—is undeniable. "The audience is out there and the money is out there," Harris says. "The community is ripe to receive it," Green adds. The lingering question, according to Holloway-Burrell, is how a community of artists historically limited by oppressive or disinterested structures can share resources, find their own direct access to audiences, and function as a holistic community. "We'll get to the crux of these inside the festival," she says. "I can't wait to have those conversations." BULL CITY BLACK THEATRE FESTIVAL Thursday, March 15–Saturday, March 24 Manbites Dog Theater, Durham www.bullcityblacktheatrefest.wordpress.com Source: https://www.indyweek.com/.../in-the-inaugural.../Content... Previous Next

< Back Julius Rosenwald School Long-Lost Piece of Black History: Early 19th Century Schoolhouse Found By Monica Manney / Concord Published 4:15 PM ET Jun. 07, 2021 CONCORD, N.C. — Following the abolition of slavery, a Jewish philanthropist learned African Americans had little access to education. So, he built more than 5,000 schools across the South. Long-Lost Piece of Black History: Early 19th Century Schoolhouse Found By Monica Manney / Concord Published 4:15 PM ET Jun. 07, 2021 CONCORD, N.C. — Following the abolition of slavery, a Jewish philanthropist learned African Americans had little access to education. So, he built more than 5,000 schools across the South. Now, historians in Concord believe they've found the last-standing school in the county, and they're working to preserve it. Ashley Sedlak-Propst said she remembers when she fell in love with history as a little girl. It all started on a family trip to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. "I ducked beneath the red velvet rope in the library and took a running jump for the books," Sedlak-Propst said. "I didn't want to be on the wrong side of the velvet rope." Now, she serves as the executive director of the Historic Cabarrus Association, focusing on history and race relations in America. In 2016, Sedlak-Propst created an exhibition on the historic Rosenwald Schools. The schools were created in the early 1900s by the president of retailer Sears and Roebuck, Julius Rosenwald. "He was distraught by the fact that a lot of African American students did not have proper means of education," Sedlak-Propst said. Along with activist and educator Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald funded over 5,000 schools across the South for desdendants of slaves. According to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the duo built the most number of schools in North Carolina. "I knew from my research that I had done there were 10 Rosenwald schools in Cabarrus County," Sedlak-Propst said. So she traveled around the county searching for one of the schools in particular, the Meadow View School, but with no luck. "There was nothing there, so I just kind of gave up hope of ever finding one still standing," she said. Sedlak-Propst said when schools were integrated, Meadow View School was abandoned, meaning it was possible that the school could have been demolished. She says she gave up hope until she met the Motley family. "We came out on her request ... to see ways the Historic Cabarrus Association could save [a] structure," Sedlak-Propst said. And while they were there, they noticed a small shed in the yard. "I said, 'what's that building over there?' And that's the moment when Ms. Motley told us, 'Oh that is one of the old Black school houses,'" Sedlak-Propst remembered. The Motley family bought the school from the Board of Education in the 1950s and moved it from its original location. "It had been in that spot all those years ago when I was looking for the Rosenwald Schools of Cabarrus County," she said. Sedlak-Propst said the building is archetectuallly similiar to the Rosenwald designs, with ceiling to floor windows, allowing light to flow in and facing a certain direction. She says they'll need proper documentation to determine if it is a Rosenwald School. Regardless of whether it's a Rosenwald school, it's a piece of history worth preserving. "This is a way to help tell their story and save their story so they can show it to their kids and their grandkids and their story can be told perpetually," she said. For the next three weeks, Foxx Contracting will take apart and catalog the school. According to the Mayor of Concord, the school will be held in storage for the time being. Source: Spectrum News Previous Next

< Back Jereann King Johnson is congratulated by Gov. Roy Cooper after he awarded her the Old North State Award. Gov. Roy Cooper congratulates Warren County resident Jereann King, who received the Old North State Award from Cooper on Feb. 15, 2018 Warren County textile and cultural heritage specialist Jereann King Johnson was among 15 North Carolinians honored on Feb. 15 by Gov. Roy Cooper with the Old North State Award for their efforts to preserve African-American heritage and culture. “Our celebration of African-American culture and heritage would not be possible without the work … See more — with Heritage Quilters Giving Circle, Inc. Previous Next

< Back The FREEDOM RIDERS On March 21, 1949, the Freedom Riders surrendered at the Orange County Courthouse in Hillsborough and were sent to segregated chain gangs. In 1946 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregation on interstate buses and trains was unconstitutional, though segregation was still widely practiced across the south. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to test compliance with the court’s ruling across the South by having interracial groups of protesters travel on Greyhound and Trailways buses. This “Journey of Reconciliation,” as it was dubbed, began in April 1947, and the protesters who participated became known as the “Freedom Riders. In Chapel Hill in April 1947, four riders, including one of the organizers, Bayard Rustin, were arrested and later went to trial. In 1949, Rustin and two white protesters surrendered and were sent to segregated chain gangs. Rustin published journal entries about the experience. His writings, as well as the actions of the “Journey” riders in April 1947, in time inspired Rosa Parks’ nonviolent protest in 1955 and the Freedom Rides of 1960-1961. Previous Next

< Back Migrant Workers, Camden County, North Carolina. June 1972 Migrant Workers, Camden County, North Carolina. June 1972 Migrant Workers, Camden County, North Carolina. June 1972 Photograph credit: Alex Harris @ourstrangenewland Previous Next

< Back Wallace Evans' 'GONE TOO SOON" "GONE TOO SOON" by Wallace Evans Young african american men killed because of gun violence in Vance County, NC. Machine pieced and quilted. — in Warrenton, NC. Previous Next

< Back Elreta Melton Alexander-Ralston Elreta Melton Alexander-Ralston was born on March 19, 1919 - and died on March 14,1998. In 1947, after passing the North Carolina bar exam, Alexander became the first Black woman to practice law in North Carolina. However, it is important to note that Ruth Whitehead Whaley was the first Black woman admitted to the North Carolina bar, but she never practiced in the state. On December 2, 1968, Alexander became the first Black judge elected in North Carolina and the first Black woman to be elected an elected district court judge in the United States. Alexander was a mid-twentieth-century Black woman American lawyer and judge in North Carolina at a time when there were only a handful of practicing women or Black lawyers in that state. With an unusual career as a trial attorney and District Court Judge, she has been noted for her “refusal to allow the circumstances of her birth, the realities of her time, and the limitations imposed by others to define her destiny.” However, notwithstanding her accomplishments, Judge Alexander's legacy has remained largely unrecognized and her story untold. This confirms the notion that Black women lawyers have received minimal universal recognition for their accomplishments and contributions to the legal profession. Elreta Narcissus Melton was born on March 21, 1919, in the small eastern North Carolina town of Smithfield. Her father, Joseph C. Melton, was a Baptist minister and teacher, and her mother, Alian A. Reynolds Melton, was a schoolteacher. Alexander's father strongly insisted that each of his children receive a college education, as he believed “education was essential to equip his family for life” and entrenched this belief in each of his family members. Along with her parents’ strong beliefs about the importance of education, Alexander's parents also refused to perpetuate racial injustice by prohibiting their children from riding segregated buses or otherwise partaking in segregation. After spending about twelve years in Danville, Virginia, where Alexander spent much of her young life, the family returned to North Carolina, this time to the bustling metropolis of Greensboro. In 1937, and at the age of eighteen, Alexander graduated from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College (now North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University) in Greensboro with a Bachelor of Science degree in music. Upon graduation, she became a high-school teacher in South Carolina, where she met Girardeau “Tony” Alexander II, a physician who soon became her husband. They married in Asheboro, North Carolina on June 7, 1938. The couple had one son, Girardeau Alexander III (born Oct. 4, 1950). Elreta and Dr. Girardeau Alexander were divorced March 12, 1968. Elreta married retired IRS official John D. Ralston on August 23, 1979. Judge Elreta Alexander-Ralston died on March 14, 1998, at the age of seventy-eight, one week shy of her seventy-ninth birthday. She requested there be no funeral, and her ashes were buried in a small grove behind a nursing home in Greensboro Law school Due to the limited access to law schools in North Carolina for Black women and to her husband's instance, Alexander applied and was the first Black woman admitted to Columbia Law School in 1943 at the age of twenty-four. The significance of this achievement is highlighted by the fact that only three Black students, all men, had been admitted before her. While initially viewing her legal education as something to “pass the time,” she eventually warmed up to the idea of seriously pursuing a legal career, grew increasingly popular among the student body, and became the first Black woman to graduate from Columbia Law School in 1945. Trial attorney In 1947, after passing the North Carolina bar exam, Alexander became the first Black woman to practice law in North Carolina. However, it is important to note that Ruth Whitehead Whaley was the first Black woman admitted to the North Carolina bar, but she never practiced in the state. After establishing a large solo criminal practice in Greensboro in which she frequently challenged the status quo (for instance, by representing a white client), Alexander formed one of the first integrated law firms in the South, Alston, Alexander, Pell & Pell. During her career as a trial attorney, she added to her list of “firsts” when she became the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court of North Carolina. District court judge On December 2, 1968, Alexander became the first Black judge elected in North Carolina and the first Black woman to be elected an elected district court judge in the United States. She ran for election to the District Court as a Republican in order to increase her chances of surviving the primary and because she “felt that the Democratic Party was unresponsive to the needs of African Americans.” Alexander, running unopposed, was subsequently re-elected in 1972, 1976 and 1980. One of her most notable accomplishments as a District Court Judge was “Judgment Day,” her innovative juvenile sentencing approach, which focused on rehabilitating young offenders and misdemeanants. Judge Alexander ran for the Republican nomination for the Chief Justice position on the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1974. She lost to James Newcomb, a fire extinguisher salesman with no college degree or legal background; however, her loss prompted a later-adopted constitutional amendment requiring judges be attorneys licensed in North Carolina. Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Elreta_Melton_Alexander-Ralston Previous Next

< Back Harvey Beech (left) and J. Kenneth Lee (right) on the first day of classes at UNC Law School in 1951. (Photo courtesy: UNC Library) 1960s - Represents over 1,700 civil rights cases in North Carolina, including sit-in case in Greensboro 1973 - Becomes first black member of North Carolina’s banking commission Harvey Beech (left) and J. Kenneth Lee (right) on the first day of classes at UNC Law School in 1951. (Photo courtesy: UNC Library)* 1923 Born in Charlotte, North Carolina on November 1 1931 Moves to Hamlet, North Carolina 1944 Joins the U. S. Navy 1946 Receives B.S. from North Carolina A&T College 1949 Enrolls in law school at North Carolina College; joins in suit to desegregate law school at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill 1950 Enrolls in UNC’s law school 1957 Files successful suit to integrate Gillespie Park elementary school 1959 Opens American Federal Savings and Loan Association 1960s Represents over 1,700 civil rights cases in North Carolina, including sit-in case in Greensboro 1973 Becomes first black member of North Carolina’s banking commission 1985 Becomes first black inducted into Greensboro Business Leaders Hall of Fame -- Integrates Law School In June 1950, Lee and Harvey E. Beech of Kinston, North Carolina, entered UNC and as a contingent of law enforcement officers escorted them into the dining hall, “everybody stopped, forks in mid-air,” Lee said in his interview with Eugene E. Pfaff Jr. Their escorts continued for several months. Soon they moved about with little attention, but continued to face racism. At the football games, they were given tickets for the “colored” section behind the goal posts but went back to court and won the right to sit in the general student section. Chancellor Carmichael sent the tickets to them but cautioned, “I hope that you have sense enough not to use them.” He said that the university would not be responsible if they were hit with a rock or if a riot occurred. Racism also worked itself into the law school courses at UNC. In one of Lee’s classes, students sat in alphabetical order and were addressed by the professor as “mister,” but the professor never addressed Lee, simply pointing to recognize him. “It hurt every time,” said Lee. Lee passed the bar examination before his graduation in summer 1952 and was licensed in September; he deliberately missed the ceremony to work in Greensboro. In 1953, Lee saw the peculiar way the state’s legal system worked for blacks. He served as attorney for a black man in Alamance County who was accused of “reckless eyeballing” a white woman who walked by a field where the man was working. The woman and the worker did not speak to each other. When the case was heard, the judge, dressed in bibbed overalls and working without legal training, disregarded Lee’s contention that there was “no such thing as reckless eyeballing” and sentenced him to two years. The case was reversed on appeal. As Lee handled many other civil rights cases, the road was always rough. The court room was often a hostile environment for Lee, one filled with total lack of respect for him as a black lawyer. He recalled in the News & Record that on many occasions when he argued a case, jurors would look out the window. During his first jury case, involving five black men charged with killing a white sheriff’s deputy in Moore County, the judge and other attorneys ignored a white spectator who had a double-barreled shotgun in easy view. Although the men had committed the crime and Lee wanted to spare them the death penalty, Lee argued that their arraignment was improper. In the end, the man who actually pulled the trigger was sentenced to life in prison, and Lee was on his way to becoming a successful lawyer. The late 1950s and early 1960s was a time of numerous civil rights cases in North Carolina and elsewhere. Whether a lawyer was white or black, anyone who advocated the rights of minorities was in danger. Lee became assistant legal counsel for the state NAACP; the other thirty to forty black lawyers in the state would not accept such a post. Lee became local counsel for the first suits to dismantle racial segregation in the state’s public elementary and secondary schools. With his steady and compelling voice, he successfully represented five black children who, in 1957, sued to enter all-white Gillespie Park elementary school in Greensboro. As result, Josephine Boyd won admission to Greensboro Senior High School and the five black children were the state’s first black students to attend previously all-white schools. Source:http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/.../Lee-J-Kenneth-1923.html Previous Next

< Back Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. Shared post from: The HistoryMakers Activist and former head of the NAACP, Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., (Born in Oxford, NC), told in his HistoryMakers interview of his great-great-great grandfather, John Chavis, who was one of the earliest black educators in the United States. Born in 1763 in North Carolina, John Chavis enlisted in the Revolutionary War in 1778 and served for three years in the 5th Virginia Regiment. In 1792, he began studying for the ministry at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) before moving to Virginia in 1795 to complete his studies at Washington Academy (now Washington and Lee University). In his HistoryMakers oral history interview, Chavis said: “My great-great-great-grandfather… was a land owner… John Chavis is his name … and [he] had a school for blacks and whites. But after the Nat Turner insurrection and after the state passed these laws [prohibiting black Americans from preaching], he was barred from teaching blacks... So, of course, in the tradition of the Chavis family, my great-great-great-grandfather set up an underground school in northern North Carolina, in Granville County, in a little part called Satterwhite Shop... In 1838, my great-great-grandfather had a buggy, a horse and buggy, and he was coming from the school one day. And a group of white men stopped him, pulled him out of the buggy, and beat him to death. And not only did they beat him to death, but after killing, they hid his body from the family. And so my father told me that it was passed down through the generations where his body was buried… He was actually buried on a white man's farm called the Mangum Farm--[Willie Person] Mangum--who later became a United States senator.” Several prominent North Carolinians were among Chavis’s white pupils, including Senator Willie P. Mangum, a founder of the Whig Party and 1836 presidential candidate, with whom Chavis developed a close and lasting friendship. Images, L-R: John Chavis bust outside of Chavis Hall, Washington & Lee University; Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. Read More About Ben Chavis At The History Makers Here: https://www.thehistorymakers.org/bio.../benjamin-f-chavis-jr Read More About John Chavis Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.169158510.../924086978315885/ READ more about John Chavis Here: https://www.facebook.com/.../a.1700871337.../411524756238779 Previous Next

< Back Birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) On April 15, 1960, black college students guided by civil rights activist Ella Baker formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in North Carolina. Inspired by the sit-ins that college students waged throughout the South in February 1960, Ella Baker organized a conference at Shaw University to bring these young activists together. Members of the new student organization, known as SNCC (pronounced “snick”), dedicated themselves to challenging segregation by following the nonviolent, direct action practices of Reverend James Lawson and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Some of SNCC’s most well-known members include Diane Nash, John Lewis, Julian Bond, Marion Barry, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), Bernard Lafayette, and James Bevel. Through nonviolent demonstrations and grassroots organizing, SNCC furthered the goals of the civil rights movement by empowering and organizing young people to challenge injustice on their own terms. Instead of acting as a youth division of other civil rights organizations, SNCC maintained independence as a group and created their own strategies to further the struggle for freedom. SNCC became a powerful organizing force by coordinating continuing sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters throughout the South and organizing voter registration efforts in their local communities. In 1961, SNCC joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to launch Freedom Rides: interracial bus riding campaigns designed to test compliance with a 1960 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation in interstate travel facilities. Many Southern states had nonetheless retained their segregated bus terminals and restaurants, and the Freedom Riders challenged them at each stop along their journey, facing violence, threats, and arrest. The activists continued the rides anyway, gaining national attention for their perseverance in spite of danger and brutality. In the latter half of the 1960s, increasingly divided ideologies emerged within the SNCC organization as members debated the efficacy of nonviolent tactics, among other issues. By the early 1970s, the group had lost most of its members and influence as new splinter organizations emerged. SNCC’s impact on the civil rights movement rippled out across the United States, inspired other movements for decades afterward, and demonstrated that young people have the power to further the fight for justice." #NeverForget #EllaBaker #SNCC #ShawUniv #CivilRights #SocialJustice #IrememberourHistory #AfricanAmerican #activisim #afrocarolinahistory #ShawU #SNCC60 Source:https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/15... Previous Next

< Back North Carolina College’s high-stepping majorettes ​ 19 October, 1965 - Three of North Carolina College’s high-stepping majorettes photographed during a practice session on the college’s campus in Durham, North Carolina. From left are Beverly Johnson, freshman, Durham; Vera Shaw, sophomore, Burlington, head majorette; and Loretta Jones, senior, Columbia, S. C. They are part of a crew which will lead the NCC marching band at football games and other events this year. Source: North Carolina Central University via Getty Images. Previous Next

< Back Educator and activist Elizabeth Brooks posing with singer and activist Emma Hackley Educator and activist Elizabeth Brooks posing with singer and activist Emma Hackley (in spectacles) in five different portraits (1885) (courtesy William Henry Richards Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division) Previous Next

< Back Shaw University-Louise Cecelia Fleming was a graduate of Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, and she was the first Black woman to graduate from the Women’s Medical College at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ​ Louise Celia "Lulu" Fleming MD Public Domain Image Louise Cecelia Fleming was a graduate of Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, and she was the first Black woman to graduate from the Women’s Medical College at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was born enslaved on January 28, 1862 to enslaved parents on Col. Lewis Michael Fleming's Hibernia Plantation in Hibernia, Clay County, Florida. Her father is unknown; she was raised by her mother who served as a maid in the plantation house. As a child she travelled along with her owners and her mother to Jacksonville, Florida to attend Bethel Baptist Church, which in 1859 had a membership of 40 Whites, and 250 Black enslaved people. In 1865, immediately after the Civil War, the White and Black members of the church separated and formed their own congregations. Lulu Fleming completed her basic education and trained to become a teacher. She first taught in public schools near St. Augustine, Florida. In 1880 a visiting Brooklyn, New York minister, impressed by her knowledge of scriptures and her teaching, encouraged her to attend Shaw University in North Carolina. Fleming graduated from Shaw as class valedictorian on May 27, 1885. "In her final six (6) months of schooling at Shaw University, she became interested in the work of the American Baptist Convention through its foreign mission society. She began seeking an appointment through the Women’s American Baptist Foreign Missionaries Society to serve as a missionary to Africa. This was highly unusual, in that there had never been an African-American woman appointed by the society. She wrote a number of letters to the leaders of the board of the society, pleading with her cause and desire to serve the Lord on the African continent. Despite return letters, which were less than encouraging, she continued until she finally received an interview. She so impressed members of the board at that interview, that they immediately began looking for a place for her service. In May, 1886, she was appointed by the Women’s American Baptist Foreign Missionaries Society to serve as a first missionary to the Congo. She also was the first African-American women appointed by the society. After an arduous journey, she ended up at Palabala Station, Congo Free State (now Zaire), Southwest Africa. A photograph of this young lady shows a face which reflects strength, beauty, intelligence and foresight. She wrote numerous letters home to the people who sent her there to make them aware of what it was like in service in this new area for Baptists. In an article which appears in The Baptist Missionary Magazine of The American Baptists Missionary Union in 1888, she described a day at Palabala, Congo: “This is a second station from the coast, in the stations above get supplies from here. We are on a plateau 1700 feet above sea level, and are in the clouds up until a late hour some mornings. The mornings have been very cold here now as this is the cold season. The community has made it seem like home and this has been a pleasant surprise to me. I have never felt better than since I’ve come here. Our “family of children” consists of nine girls and 18 boys. I have full charge of the girls and enjoy them very much. We are having a new house go up, one end of which is to be used as a school and chapel, and the other to be the girls’ and my rooms.” She goes on to suggest that they imagine what it is like to spend the typical days on the mission field and describes it with great clarity and understanding for the people who had sent her there. She also concludes, “the Lord give us patience to train them.” In her numerous letters back home, she continues to inform Dr. Murdock of the American Baptist Historical Society, and the others she writes to about her progress, and the efforts in the area. She notes it is much easier to have the young boys and men come to know the Lord and be willing to learn, then it is the young girls. She recognizes this as the culture of the area and that it will take more effort to reach the girls. She also begins sending students back to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The first of whom go back in 1888. In an article in The American Baptist Missionary Union, it has the pictures of two of the young men sent back along with a young lady. She describes them as Estey Carolina, an orphan of about 14, but uncertain as to her age. She lived with her half-sister, who was cruel to her after the death of her father. She was also sent back with her brother, who is in the picture, for education, along with another friend of her brother’s. The assistance was arranged by King Noso of the Congo, but the King attempted to change his mind and marry Estey. She ran away, and so Ms. Fleming decided to send her to Shaw with her brother and other friends as soon as possible. She planned to have them study for six (6) years and then return as missionaries to help their people in that part of the world. Henry Stevens is the brother who went with Estey Carolina. He was a little bit older, about 18. He was a gifted speaker and churches in North Carolina were greatly interested in having them come visit and give information about the people of the Congo. He also spoke in a number of churches in the Washington, D. C., Philadelphia and other parts of the eastern part of the United States. The young friend was Robert Walker. Robert had been a slave to King Noso. The King had treated him cruelly and thanks to the work of Louise Fleming, she convinced the King to free him from the bondage he kept him in. During the night after being united, Robert Walker ran away. Again, Louise Fleming took a chance and later travelled to England and met with Dr. Guiness, and helped him arrange a grammar for the Congo language so they could come back home and teach. Which they did. This was the typical approach to her mission effort. She was training and teaching in the field, but also finding some young people who she thought should be further educated and then come back to their homeland. Dr. Thomas E. Skinner sent reports back to Ms. Fleming to inform her of the student’s progress and that they told him they expected to go back to Africa as missionaries. At her work was progressing, Lulu Fleming suddenly had a debilitating illness and had to return home for treatment. She returned to Raleigh, North Carolina and began recuperating. In the meantime, Dr. Tupper had started Leonard College of Medicine at Shaw University. While Lulu Fleming was recuperating, she realized that the people in the mission field in the Congo where she was working needed medical attention desperately. So, she began to study medicine at Shaw. Shaw was relatively new and ill-equipped to truly train her at this stage so with the assistance of the American Baptist Missionary Society; she was permitted to study medicine with the Society paying her tuition at the Women’s Medical College at Philadelphia. That is now the well-known Medical College of Pennsylvania located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Again, she broke new ground when she attended Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia as the first African-American female to attend that school. She completed her education and training in1895 and was prepared to go back to the field for service now as a medical missionary. During the time of preparation for her return, Dr. Fleming was not only petitioning, the board for her own return to the field as a medical missionary, she also recommended for appointment by the board, the American Missionary Society board, one of her young men from the Congo, a “Crowned Prince” of Palabala, with training in carpentry and farming, with a desire to do mission work among his own people. She attached a copy of his letter, requesting appointment, which is written in a beautiful calligraphy and in perfect English. She succeeded in getting him an appointment and at the same time the board appointed her to return. On October 2, 1895, the Women’s Missionary Foreign Mission Society assigned her to be stationed at Irebu in the Upper Congo. There, she undertook to provide medical care as a medical missionary for a large geographic area. The work was undaunting and at times, overwhelming, but the people of this area had never had a medical doctor with he kind of training she had, let alone an AfricanAmerican woman. In 1898, approximately three (3) years later, the Irebu Station was closed and she was reassigned to the Bolengi Station. She again undertook long hours of arduous work to provide the necessary medical skills to treat people and to train young men and young women to assist in treating people so that they would learn as best they could what needs to be done for their people who become ill or injured. It was during this period of time that she became ill with what is known as African Sleeping Sickness. It was shortly before the end of her second term and therefore was reluctantly returned to the United States early. While she was attempting to recuperate in and near the hospital and medical school in Philadelphia, her illness turned for the worse. She died on June 20, 1899. she was 37 years old. " *NOTE: Estey Carolina, arrived at Shaw in 1888 she was thought to be about 14 years old. In a 1893-1894 Shaw University catalog, on page 11, Esty Carolina Fleming of Palabala, West Africa, is listed as a First year student in the Missionary Training School. Source: Shaw University Catalog 1893-1894 :https://www.shawu.edu/.../Di%20Copy.../1893-94%20Catalog.pdf Source: The Missionary Journey Of Louise Celia "Lulu" Fleming MD by Joseph R Moss - https://floridabaptisthistory.org/.../08/lulu_fleming.pdf Sources: Wikipedia - Black women in America. Hine, Darlene Clark. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Previous Next

< Back Deborah Neff Collection ​ An exhibition view of “Black Dolls: The Deborah Neff Collection” at La Maison Rouge. Photo: Marc Domage / Courtesy of La Maison Rouge The Black Dolls on Showcase at a Parisian Gallery Have a Poignant Story to Tell MARCH 16, 2018 by LYNN YAEGER Two weeks ago, just after Paris Fashion Week, on an afternoon that hung between rain and sunshine, I took the Métro to Bastille, walked a few blocks to the gallery La Maison Rouge, entered the “Black Dolls: The Deborah Neff Collection” exhibition, and burst into tears. This extraordinary assemblage, the collection of an American woman, Deborah Neff, runs the gamut from the most modest, touching efforts—a mere sock and rag with eyes—to figures that demonstrate dazzling needlework skills. The 200 or so dolls on display, proud survivors of an unspeakable time in American history, are far from the demeaning representation of African Americans that dominated the larger culture. Dating from 1840 to 1940, they are assumed to be made largely by African-American women. In the years before the Civil War, when enslaved individuals were forbidden to paint or sculpt, to learn how to read or write, the artists who created these works managed a stunning rebuke to these strictures. Neff says she didn’t consciously set out to build a collection. “I found my first doll in Atlanta on a business trip. I went by chance to an antique fair, and there was this decrepit but proud-looking doll fashioned out of leather scraps, nails, and wood, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it.” So many others followed—orphans stranded at antique shows, auctions, dusty shops—who eventually found their way into Neff’s home. Mystery shrouds these silent babies. The dolls may exude a quiet dignity, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fun—they are toys, meant to be loved, meant to be played with. Here are nursemaids and newsboys; elegant sisters in their Sunday best; gentlemen out for a stroll in striped vests. Others, just as worthy of affection, feature humble outfits made from flour sacks. Their faces and bodies are given life with cloth, of course, but also leather, wood, and found materials. One area of the exhibition holds shadow boxes in which small dolls are sequestered, looking out of the suggestion of a window, as if they wished they could know how it feels to be free. Another section offers variations of topsy-turvy dolls, those two-headed girls that flip over—a black head on one end, a white one on the other. You can enjoy their company only separately; they are joined at the waist, sharing a single skirt. They can never look each other in the eye. We will never know who made these wonderful dolls; we can only imagine under what circumstances their creators sewed. But we know that they were treasured, passed down from hand to hand, and that over the course of a century, no one could bear to throw them away. Mute witnesses to our American story, in all its glory and its wretchedness, they are small but mighty testaments to our shared history, our survival, and our triumphs. Previous Next

< Back Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. December 4,1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, a movement to broadly address economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action. “It must not be just Black people,” argued King, “it must be all poor people. We must include American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and even poor whites.” The idea for the push came from Marian Wright Edelman, who had recently taken U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy to witness poverty firsthand in the Mississippi Delta. When she shared the idea that Washington officials should meet the nation’s poorest citizens, King embraced the vision, telling reporters, #IrememberOurHistory® “We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until America responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. ...In short, we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant, nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.” #IrememberOurHistory® King talked of a debt that the nation owed African Americans, who were set free in 1863, “yet they were not given any land to make that freedom meaningful.” He compared it to an imprisoned man whom authorities learn is innocent, “then going up to the man saying, now you are free. And you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any clothes to put on his back. You don’t give him any money to get on his feet in life again. The whole code of jurisprudence would rise up against this and yet, this is what America did to the Black man.” King didn’t live to see this dream through, assassinated five months later. -- #IrememberOurHistory® The Poor People's Campaign, or Poor People's March on Washington, was a 1968 effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States. It was organized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination in April 1968. The campaign demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968. The Poor People's Campaign was motivated by a desire for economic justice: the idea that all people should have what they need to live. King and the SCLC shifted their focus to these issues after observing that gains in civil rights had not improved the material conditions of life for many African Americans. The Poor People's Campaign was a multiracial effort—including African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans—aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race. According to political historians such as Barbara Cruikshank, "the poor" did not particularly conceive of themselves as a unified group until President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty (declared in 1964) identified them as such. Figures from the 1960 census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Commerce Department, and the Federal Reserve estimated anywhere from 40 to 60 million Americans—or 22 to 33 percent—lived below the poverty line. At the same time, the nature of poverty itself was changing as America's population increasingly lived in cities, not farms (and could not grow its own food). Poor African Americans, particularly women, suffered from racism and sexism that amplified the impact of poverty, especially after "welfare mothers" became a nationally recognized concept. By 1968, the War on Poverty seemed like a failure, neglected by a Johnson administration (and Congress) that wanted to focus on the Vietnam War and increasingly saw anti-poverty programs as primarily helping African Americans. The Poor People's Campaign sought to address poverty through income and housing. The campaign would help the poor by dramatizing their needs, uniting all races under the commonality of hardship and presenting a plan to start to a solution. Under the "economic bill of rights," the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with a $30 billion anti-poverty package that included, among other demands, a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure and more low-income housing. The Poor People's Campaign was part of the second phase of the civil rights movement. King said, "We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty". #IrememberOurHistory® King wanted to bring poor people to Washington, D.C., forcing politicians to see them and think about their needs: "We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, 'We are here; we are poor; we don't have any money; you have made us this way ... and we've come to stay until you do something about it.'" The Poor People's Campaign had complex origins. King considered bringing poor people to the nation's capital since at least October 1966, when welfare rights activists held a one-day march on the Mall. In May 1967 during a SCLC retreat in Frogmore, South Carolina, King told his aides that the SCLC would have to raise nonviolence to a new level to pressure Congress into passing an Economic Bill of Rights for the nation's poor. The SCLC resolved to expand its civil rights struggle to include demands for economic justice and to challenge the Vietnam War. In his concluding address to the conference, King announced a shift from "reform" to "revolution" and stated: "We have moved from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights." In response to the anger that led to riots in 1967 in Newark (July 12–17) and Detroit (July 23–28), King and his close confidante, Stanley Levison, wrote a report in August (titled "The Crisis in America's Cities") which called for disciplined urban disruption, particularly in Washington: "To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to society but not wantonly destructive. Moreover, it is more difficult for government to quell it by superior force. Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force. It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militancy wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many did not even want. Civil disobedience has never been used on a mass scale in the North. It has rarely been seriously organized and resolutely pursued. Too often in the past was it employed incorrectly. It was resorted to only when there was an absence of mass support and its purpose was headline-hunting. The exceptions were the massive school boycotts by Northern Negroes. They shook educational systems to their roots but they lasted only single days and were never repeated. #IrememberOurHistory® If they are developed as weekly events at the same time that mass sit-ins are developed inside and at the gates of factories for jobs, and if simultaneously thousands of unemployed youth camp in Washington, as the Bonus Marchers did in the thirties, with these and other practices, without burning a match or firing a gun, the impact of the movement will have earthquake proportions. (In the Bonus Marches, it was the government that burned down the marchers' shelters when it became confounded by peaceful civil disobedience). This is not an easy program to implement. Riots are easier just because they need no organization. To have effect we will have to develop mass disciplined forces that can remain excited and determined without dramatic conflagrations. Also in August, Senator Robert F. Kennedy asked Marian Wright Edelman "to tell Dr. King to bring the poor people to Washington to make hunger and poverty visible since the country's attention had turned to the Vietnam War and put poverty and hunger on the back burner." At another SCLC retreat in September, Edelman transmitted Kennedy's message to King and suggested that King and a handful of poor people hold a sit-in at the Department of Agriculture. Stanley Levison proposed an even more ambitious crusade that modeled itself on the Bonus Army of 1932. PLANNING The SCLC's major planning before announcing the campaign took place during a five-day meeting (November 27 – December 1, 1967) in Frogmore, SC. With King's leadership, the group agreed to organize a civil disobedience campaign in Washington, D.C., focused on jobs and income. King wanted the demonstration to be "nonviolent, but militant, and as dramatic, as dislocative, as disruptive, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying property". Not all members of the SCLC agreed with the idea of occupying Washington. Bayard Rustin opposed civil disobedience. Other members of the group (like Jesse Jackson) wanted to pursue other priorities. Dissent continued throughout the planning of the campaign. King traveled to Washington in February 1968 in order to meet with local activists and prepare the resources necessary to support the campaign. Marchers were scheduled to arrive in Washington on May 2. Some planners wanted to target specific politicians; others wanted to avoid "begging" and focus on movement-building and mutual education. #IrememberOurHistory® PUBLICITY The SCLC announced the campaign on December 4, 1967. King delivered a speech which identified "a kind of social insanity which could lead to national ruin." In January 1968, the SCLC created and distributed an "Economic Fact Sheet" with statistics explaining why the campaign was necessary. King avoided providing specific details about the campaign and attempted to redirect media attention to the values at stake. The Poor People's Campaign held firm to the movement's commitment to non-violence. "We are custodians of the philosophy of non-violence," said King at a press conference. "And it has worked." In February 1968, King announced specific demands: $30 billion for antipoverty, full employment, guaranteed income, and the annual construction of 500,000 affordable residences. The media often discouraged those within the movement who were committed to non-violence. Instead of focusing on issues of urban inequality and the interracial efforts concerted to address them, the media concentrated on specific incidents of violence, leadership conflicts and protest tactics. King toured a number of cities to raise support for the campaign. King's visits were carefully orchestrated and the media tightly controlled; meetings with militant Black leaders were held behind closed doors. #IrememberOurHistory® On March 18, 1968, he visited the town of Marks, Mississippi. He watched a teacher feeding schoolchildren their lunch, consisting only of a slice of apple and some crackers, and was moved to tears. A few days after the visit, he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.: "We're coming to Washington in a poor people's campaign. I was in Marks, Miss., the other day, which is in Quitman County, the poorest county in the United States. And I tell you I saw hundreds of black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear." He decided he wanted the Poor People's Campaign to start in Marks because of the intense and visible economic disparity he'd seen there. Recruitment The SCLC recruited marshals, who came to a training workshop in Atlanta in March then returned home to recruit participants, raise funds, and solicit organizational support. Participants were required to sign an agreement to use non-violence and to obey the marshals. Reactions to the campaign were mixed, and some were outright hostile based on their perceptions of King and the SCLC. Leaders and recruiters had to construct their images carefully in order to appeal to potential marchers across lines of wealth and denomination—they de-emphasized their middle-class status, wearing denim instead of suits. They faced the delicate challenge of simultaneously appealing to radicals and moderates (including campus liberals). Marchers Campaign leaders recruited across the country, first in the East and South, and then increasingly westward, reaching poor people in Texas and the Southwest, as well as California and the West Coast. People of all walks of life came from across the nation. Many volunteers were women and many had been involved in other civil rights protests. #IrememberOurHistory® People commenting on their reasons for participation explained that they wanted to participate in the decisions that affected their lives, and to explain how federal programs, intended to help them, sometimes left them behind completely. They stressed that they were deprived of their basic human rights, and they wanted to make their situations known in the nation's capital. Most did not own their homes or have basic utilities where they lived. Many did not receive federal benefits of any sort. Minority Group Conference In one of the campaign's more important recruitment efforts, SCLC hosted about 80 representatives of other poor, often minority groups in Atlanta, with whom the civil rights organization had had little to no relationship up to that point. On March 14, 1968, delegates attended the so-called "Minority Group Conference" and discussed the upcoming campaign and whether or not their specific issues would be considered. Among the delegates were Chicano Movement leaders Reies Tijerina, Corky Gonzales, José Ángel Gutiérrez, and Bert Corona; white coal miners from Kentucky and West Virginia; Native American and Puerto Rican activists; and Myles Horton, organizer and founder of the Highlander Folk School. With a skeptical and fast-weakened Cesar Chavez occupied by a farm workers' hunger strike, Reies Tijerina was the most prominent Chicano leader present. At the end of a long day, most delegates decided to participate in the campaign, convinced that specific demands that often revolved around land and treaty rights would be honored by campaign organizers. ENDORSEMENTS The National Welfare Rights Organization and the American Friends Service Committee were key partners in the campaign's organizing, including developing demands, fundraising, and recruitment. The American Federation of Teachers promised to set up "freedom schools" for children in the camps; the National Association of Social Workers also said it would help with child care The Youth International Party held its own rallies in support. #IrememberOurHistory® The campaign received an endorsement from the YMCA. Volunteer advocates from the Peace Corps and VISTA formed a speakers bureau, which helped publicize the campaign and educate outsiders. Organizers already in D.C. were enthusiastic about the campaign, and by March 1968 over 75 people were meeting in committees to prepare for the incoming marchers. The campaign was endorsed by a variety of local organizations, especially religious congregations. The campaign received a limited endorsement and financial support from SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC (soon to change its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee) announced that it would not march with the Poor People's Campaign in D.C. because it did not believe in strict adherence to nonviolence. SCLC also reported receiving major financial support for the march from middle-class whites. The Steering Committee Against Repression (SCAR)—which included members from SNCC as well as from a variety of other groups—also gave a partial endorsement, urging the SCLC to focus the campaign on state repression, surveillance, persecution, and political prisoners. #IrememberOurHistory® The campaign had support from within the organized labor movement, including endorsements by The Daily Worker, United Steelworkers, and Walter Reuther. However, the official leadership of the AFL–CIO—particularly President George Meany—would not endorse the campaign because of disagreement over the Vietnam War. Government reaction and preparations The prospect of an occupation of Washington by thousands of poor people triggered fears of rioting. Johnson administration The Johnson administration prepared for the campaign as though it might attempt a violent takeover of the nation's capital. Congress Some members of Congress were outspoken about their fear of the campaign. Democratic Senator Russell B. Long called for the censure of congresspeople whom he accused of "bending the knee" to the campaign, also saying: "When that bunch of marchers comes here, they can just burn the whole place down and we can just move the capital to some place where they enforce the law." Another Democratic Senator, John L. McClellan, accused the SCLC of attempting to start a riot, and decried a recent court decision that he said would allow marchers "to go to Washington one night and get on welfare the next day", rendering D.C. a "Mecca for migrants". #IrememberOurHistory® Richard Nixon Richard Nixon, campaigning for the 1968 presidential election, asked Congress not to capitulate to the campaigners' demands. Military preparations 20,000 army soldiers were activated and prepared for a military occupation of the capital should the Poor People's Campaign pose a threat. Operation POCAM The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) strove to monitor and disrupt the campaign, which it code-named "POCAM". The FBI, which had been targeting King since 1962 with COINTELPRO, increased its efforts after King's April 4, 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". It also lobbied government officials to oppose King on the grounds that he was a communist, "an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine the nation", and affiliated with "two of the most dedicated and dangerous communists in the country" (Stanley Levison and Harry Wachtel). After "Beyond Vietnam" these efforts were reportedly successful in turning lawmakers and administration officials against King, the SCLC, and the cause of civil rights. After King was assassinated and the marches got underway, reports began to emphasize the threat of black militancy instead of communism. #IrememberOurHistory® Operation POCAM became the first major project of the FBI's Ghetto Informant Program (GIP), which recruited thousands of people to report on poor black communities. Through GIP, the FBI quickly established files on SCLC recruiters in cities across the US. FBI agents posed as journalists, used wiretaps, and even recruited some of the recruiters as informants. The FBI sought to disrupt the campaign by spreading rumors that it was bankrupt, that it would not be safe, and that participants would lose welfare benefits upon returning home. Local bureaus reported particular success for intimidation campaigns in Birmingham, Alabama, Savannah, Georgia, and Cleveland, Ohio. In Richmond, Virginia, the FBI collaborated with the John Birch Society to set up an organization called Truth About Civil Turmoil (TACT). TACT held events featuring a Black woman named Julia Brown who claimed to have infiltrated the civil rights movement and exposed its Communist leadership. #IrememberOurHistory® Events, 1968 Memphis sanitation strike In February–March 1968, King directed his attention to the Memphis sanitation strike. Although King continued to tour to raise support for the marches to Washington, he declared the Memphis strike to be a major part of the campaign itself. On March 28, unusual violent incidents in Memphis brought negative media scrutiny to the Poor People's Campaign. The FBI released negative editorials for newspaper publication, implying that the Memphis outbursts foreshadowed mass violence by the Poor People's Campaign in Washington. The SCLC released counter-editorials which included the statement, "The issue at stake is not violence vs. nonviolence but POVERTY AND RACISM". Assassination King flew back to Memphis on April 3 and was murdered in the evening of the following day. The assassination of King dealt a major blow to the campaign, leading to greater emphasis on affirmative action than on race-blind policies such as King's recommendation of basic income in his last book. At King's funeral on April 9, 1968, tens of thousands marched through Atlanta with Coretta Scott King—following King's casket on a mule-drawn wagon. #IrememberOurHistory® The SCLC, now led by Ralph Abernathy, held a retreat in Atlanta on April 16–17. They resolved to proceed with the campaign after learning that the Memphis strike had ended in relative success. The SCLC applied for a permit to camp on the Washington Mall and reoriented the campaign away from civil disobedience and towards the creation and maintenance of a tent city. The edition of April 16 Look magazine carried a posthumous article from King titled "Showdown for Nonviolence"—his last statement on the Poor People's Campaign. The article warns of imminent social collapse and suggests that the campaign presents government with what may be its last opportunity to achieve peaceful change—through an Economic Bill of Rights. Source: Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Jerry Mitchell Source: Wikipedia Previous Next

< Back Oak Grove Cemetery Uncovering the past: City to help fund survey of Old Oak Grove Cemetery By Paul Nielsen Staff Writer /The Daily Advance-Nov 15, 2021 Elizabeth City officials have agreed to help fund an archaeological survey that will identify marked and unmarked graves at the city’s oldest cemetery for Black residents. Uncovering the past: City to help fund survey of Old Oak Grove Cemetery By Paul Nielsen Staff Writer /The Daily Advance-Nov 15, 2021 Elizabeth City officials have agreed to help fund an archaeological survey that will identify marked and unmarked graves at the city’s oldest cemetery for Black residents. The $50,800 survey of Old Oak Cemetery will be funded by a $30,480 state grant with the remaining $20,320 coming from the city. The state grant is from the state’s Historic Preservation Fund and required a match from the city. New South Associates of Stone, Mountain, Georgia, will conduct the survey. The city received five bids for the project and one bid came in slightly lower than New South. Because of the nature of the work the city did not have to select the low bid but instead could pick the firm with the best qualifications. In a memo to City Council, interim City Manager Ralph Clark said New South has surveyed more than 90 cemeteries across several states and has a staff of 116. The company has a branch office in Greensboro. “All the proposed members of New South’s project team have degrees in anthropology or archaeology,” Clark said. New South will use mapping and ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, to survey approximately 8 acres at the 13-acre historic Black cemetery in the 1300 block of Peartree Road. New South estimates there are around 2,450 recorded interments at Old Oak Grove. Because the cemetery is still in active use, marked internments date from the late 19th century to the present day. “There are an unknown number of unmarked graves present in the cemetery,” New South wrote in its proposal to the city. The firm said there is a possibility of some unmarked graves within the wooden perimeter of the cemetery that will not be accessible to a GPR survey. “The perimeter of the cemetery will be investigated by pedestrian survey by an experienced archaeologist,” New South said. The Old Oak Grove Cemetery was established in 1886 and one of its founders was Elizabeth City State Normal School founder Hugh Cale. It is the oldest cemetery for Black residents in the city. Persons buried there include Cale and Civil War soldiers who fought as members of the U.S. Colored Troops. The survey is expected to be completed next August and New South will present its findings to City Council when the report is completed. Photo credit: Paul Nielsen Article Source: https://www.dailyadvance.com/.../article_f187395d-fb4d... Previous Next

< Back Back to Arts, Entertainment & Media The Daily Record, Angry white supremacists burned down "The Daily Record," a black-owned newspaper, on Nov. 10, 1898. 3 of 3-Photograph:Angry white supremacists burned down "The Daily Record," a black-owned newspaper, on Nov. 10, 1898. These are some of the white supremists who started the Wilimington Riots of 1898, in which they destoryed the Black bussiness district and murdered Black people. Original Copies Of 1898 Black-Owned Newspaper Rediscovered By Frances Weller | February 28, 2019 at 1:30 PM EST - Updated March 1 at 6:56 AM WILMINGTON, NC (WECT) - A significant part of Wilmington’s black history has been rediscovered by a New York Times Magazine writer, some Wilmington students and a researcher. Seven copies of The Daily Record, a black-owned newspaper in 1898, have been located. Special report: Resurrecting the Record Thank you to all who watched this report today at 6 and for the many compliments that have come in. Our history is so important. And the surprise ending was definitely a surprise to me! http://www.wect.com/.../original-copies-black-owned.../ Posted by Frances Weller Wect on Thursday, February 28, 2019 John Sullivan of New York Times Magazine co-founded a non-profit group called Third Party Project that found the originals. “Three copies actually showed up at the Schomburg library, the African American history library in New York City. Three were at the Cape Fear Museum in the archives and Jan Davidson, the historian there, actually contacted us when we were first putting the project together,” Sullivan said. Another copy in the state archives. Jan Davidson says the three original copies the local museum has were donated by the family of the man who owned The Daily Record. "Alexander Manley was the editor of The Daily Record and was run out of town during the white supremacy campaign of 1898 so (copies of the newspaper) came to us from his family in the 1980s,” Davidson said. The Daily Record building was burned down at the start of the 1898 race riots. It’s believed an editorial in the black newspaper provoked the massacre. Manly, the owner, published an editorial responding to a speech supporting lynching black men who slept with white women. The Daily Record printed that many white women were not raped by black men, but willingly slept with them. "The Daily Record is responding to the editorial and saying, ‘You know, you call it rape after the fact many times because it’s so upsetting to you but in fact we are all human and sometimes attractions happen and that’s what it is,’” Sullivan described. “Those were words worth killing over.” But there was much more to what provoked the riots. Wilmington was a great city for black people who made up about half the population. There were prominent black businesses, and people of color were essentially running the city. “That drove the white supremacists crazy,” Sullivan said. “This was a good town to be black in. Blacks were starting to get elected to political offices and you might have a situation where a white person goes into the post office or the register of deeds or whatever it is and there’s a black person on the other side of the counter saying things like, ‘Well, you’ll have to sign for that.’” Davidson says the original copies of the newspaper are kept in the basement of the museum, a safe place for papers over 120 years old. “The best thing you can do for a newspaper is to keep it in the dark,” Sullivan explained. “Light is a terrible thing for newspaper artifacts.” Every Friday, Sullivan, and his fellow researcher, Joel Finsil, get together with the eighth graders at D.C. Virgo to discuss the history of 1898 and the importance of the papers. Sullivan says the greatest lesson he can share with the students is to believe that if something ever existed, there’s always a chance there’s a copy somewhere. “That seems like the most valuable thing we can give them — that particular love for coming up against a historical problem — reading that sentence in a book that says unfortunately this is lost, and we can’t know anything about it and instead of accepting that say, ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m going to poke around,’" Sullivan said. Previous Next

< Back People Are Underrepresented People are “underrepresented” because that’s a consequence of being "historically excluded" which is the cause. . . This is why we do what we do. #IrememberOurHistory® #TheGCFHawleyMuseum® Gathering our life stories, gathering the accounts of what has been done to us as a people, gathering our acts of determination and our will to live, survive and thrive; gathering our names and making all this accessible for those who want to know the truth..... Previous Next

< Back 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.” Previous Next

< Back Rosenwald Schools "Children Go Where I Send You": Rosenwald Schools In Hertford County, NC A Film By Caroline Stephenson & Jochen Kunstier CHILDREN GO WHERE I SEND YOU Rosenwald Schools In Hertford County, NC A Film By Caroline Stephenson & Jochen Kunstier This film tells stories about Rosenwald Schools in Hertford County, NC via first hand accounts and ruch photo documentation. It shines a bright light on the educational legacy of African Americans in rural Northeastern North Carolina during the early 20th sentury. Featuring Hertford County native, Dr. Dudley Flood. --- Filmmaker and educator Caroline Stephenson tells how Hurricane Irene started her on a journey to make a documentary about Rosenwald Schools in her native Hertford County, North Carolina. After many years working as an assistant director in Los Angeles on films and television shows, Stephenson moved back to the family farm to raise her children and teach elementary school. She enlisted students from a digital media class at the local high school to assist during the production of the film Children Go Where I Send You. Together, they interviewed alumni from Hertford County’s 10 Rosenwald Schools. The stories told by the alumni, the men and women who attended rain or shine, were living testimony to the vision and foresight of Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald. These were children of sharecroppers, and their families had little or no access to cash money or equal opportunities. Rosenwald Schools were prized as the center of the communities in which they were situated. They were the center of black culture in these areas, where people of color could gather without fear, carry on the legacy of those that had come before them, and proudly prepare future generations for self-determination and leadership. It was from the interviews that the significance of these schools and their relevance today became even more apparent. Both the filmmaker and digital media class students came away from this project with a greater understanding of the important connections between past, present, and future. *NOTE-This dvd can be purchased from Cultivator Book Store-Here is their FB page link https://www.facebook.com/cultivatorbookstore/ Source:https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667915?seq=1... Previous Next

< Back Fisk University-Paul T. Kwami, Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Longtime Director, Dies at 70 ​ Paul T. Kwami, Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Longtime Director, Dies at 70 He took the storied Black musical group to new heights, including its first Grammy win and a National Medal of Arts. By Clay Risen/NYT Obituaries Published Sept. 15, 2022 Updated Sept. 18, 2022 Paul T. Kwami, the longtime director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who cemented the ensemble’s reputation as one of the country’s premier interpreters of African American spiritual music, died on Sept. 10 in Nashville. He was 70. His wife, Susanna Kwami, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not provide a cause. The Fisk Jubilee Singers put Nashville on the musical map long before the city became famous for its honky-tonks and slide guitars. The group, based at Fisk University, a historically Black institution that was founded a year after the Civil War, was originally intended as a fund-raising tool; it toured the country in the 1870s to bring in money for the struggling college. The group, many of whose members were formerly enslaved people, was among the first to perform spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and “Wade in the Water,” songs that many white audiences had never heard, especially in the North. Their first tour, in 1871, earned enough money to retire the school’s debt, pay for a 40-acre parcel of land north of downtown Nashville and erect the school’s first permanent building, Jubilee Hall. They sang for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House and performed for six weeks in New York City. “They used the power and beauty of their music, and the beauty of their singing, to win the love of people,” Dr. Kwami said in a radio interview in February. A native of Ghana and a Fisk graduate, Dr. Kwami continued that tradition when he took over as the group’s music director in 1994. He insisted that the singers — eight men and eight women, all Fisk undergraduates — keep to a rigorous rehearsal and touring schedule. He also made sure that they understood not just the history of Fisk and its musical heritage, but the roots of the songs they sang. Spirituals, he told them, played many roles in slave communities. They could be lamentations or celebrations; at the same time, they could serve as a means of stealthy communication, spreading news outside the ken of white slavers. “He made us understand the language of love that was in the middle of those spirituals,” Michangelo Scruggs, who was a Jubilee Singer from 1993 to 1996, said in a phone interview. “A spiritual is not just a song. It’s a communication. It talks about the struggles and how slaves were able to overcome their struggles, whether it was through the end of slavery or whether it was even through death.” Dr. Kwami also impressed upon his students the African roots of the music they sang. In 2007, he took the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Ghana to perform during the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence; while there, they visited the grave of the Black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was also a Fisk graduate. Under Dr. Kwami’s direction, the Jubilee Singers recorded several albums and also appeared on albums by other artists, some of them outside the group’s usual gospel and spiritual fare. They were featured alongside Neil Young in “Heart of Gold,” a 2006 concert documentary directed by Jonathan Demme and recorded at the renowned Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, where the singers performed regularly. “Reverence was a huge thing for him, but in that reverence he was open to going into places that the group had never gone before,” Ruby Amanfu, a Nashville-based singer and Dr. Kwami’s niece, said in an interview. In 2000, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame. In 2008, Dr. Kwami appeared on the group’s behalf at the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts, the country’s highest award for cultural achievement. In 2020, the Fisk Jubilee Singers released “Celebrating Fisk!,” an album of 12 songs recorded at the Ryman featuring guest appearances by musicians like Ms. Amanfu, Keb’ Mo’ and Lee Ann Womack. It won the group its first Grammy Award, for best roots gospel album. That year, Dr. Kwami told NPR: “When I remember the life stories of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, some of whom were slaves, some who did not know their parents and yet left this rich legacy for us, if they were to come back today, I am sure they will be very happy that we are still singing the Negro spirituals and also still talking about them.” Paul Theophilus Kwami was born on March 14, 1952, in Amedzofe, a small Ghanaian mountain town about 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital, Accra. His father, Theophilus Kwami, was a music teacher and a farmer; his mother, Monica Rosaline (Dikro) Kwami, raised him and his six siblings. When Paul wasn’t picking coffee on his family plantation, he was sitting with his father at his piano, learning the basics of music theory. He decided to follow his father into music education, studying for two years at a teachers college; in 1982, he received a bachelor’s degree in music education at the National Academy of Music in Ghana. He returned home to teach and play the organ at his local church, but a chance encounter with a missionary from the United States introduced him to the idea of continuing his education at Fisk. Although he had grown up listening to gospel music on the radio, he had never heard of the university or its heralded singing group. He left his job and family in Ghana and moved to Nashville, with the intention of rounding out his education and then returning home. Instead, a friend persuaded him to join the Jubilee Singers, who were under the direction of his mentor at the time, McCoy Ransom. He stayed in the United States after graduating from Fisk with a second bachelor’s degree, also in musical education, in 1985. He received a master’s degree in the same subject from Western Michigan University in 1987, then worked for a music publishing company in Nashville before returning to Fisk, and the Jubilee Singers, in 1994. He received a doctorate from the American Conservatory of Music in 2009. Along with his wife, Dr. Kwami is survived by his daughter, Rachel Kwami; his sons, Paul E. Kwami and Delali Kwami; his sisters, Ruby F. Kwami, Patricia S. Kwami and Joan A. Kwami; and his brother, Dickson K. Kwami. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/.../music/paul-t-kwami-dead.html Previous Next

< Back J. Kenneth Lee J. Kenneth Lee, Civil rights lawyer fought to integrate Greensboro schools. *Photo-Civil rights attorney J. Kenneth Lee talks about the many social changes he has witnessed over his long career during an interview in Greensboro in 2009. He died recently at the age of 94.* Civil rights lawyer J. Kenneth Lee, who fought to integrate Greensboro schools has died. by Nancy McLaughlin Jul 23, 2018 GREENSBORO — J. Kenneth Lee, a civil rights attorney who represented five black children who sued Greensboro City Schools so they could attend an all-white elementary school — among the first students in the South to successfully do so — has died. The funeral for the 94-year-old Lee, a quiet force in the nation's fight for equality, is 11:30 a.m., July 30, at Providence Baptist Church in Greensboro. Visitation is 30 minutes before the service. A private burial is planned. Over a lifetime, Lee fought for equality not only for schools open to all children but also in economic opportunity that he knew could be life changing. He was a plaintiff in a case argued by Thurgood Marshall, then chief legal counselor with the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, to desegregate UNC's law school, opening the university's doors for entry to other black students. Marshall would go on to become the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice and, upon graduation, Lee would argue civil rights cases across North Carolina. "My brother saw problems and got to work on solutions," said his sister, Winona Fletcher, of Maryland. Lee, who earned a degree in electrical engineering from N.C. A&T, decided to go to law school to fight Jim Crow laws. He represented the majority of the 1,700 civil disobedience cases in North Carolina that started with the Woolworth sit-ins of 1960 and included the arrest of his own son, Michael. He also founded American Federal, the first black federally-chartered savings and loan bank in the state. Lee, who sold his Benbow Park home and moved into assisted living recently, was preceded in death by his college sweetheart and wife, Nancy Young Lee, and an only child, Michael Lee. Source:https://www.greensboro.com/.../article_e6d0e593-5f8f-5fa4... Previous Next

< Back Black and British: A Forgotten History Paperback – Illustrated, January 1, 2018 David Olusoga On Race and Reality: ‘My job is to be a historian. It’s not to make people feel good’ By Aamna Mohdin / The Guardian - Mon. 6.7 2021 The professor and broadcaster discusses writing black Britishness back into history, the backlash this provokes – and why he’s so proud of his heritage Aamna Mohdin @aamnamohdin Mon 7 Jun 2021 05.30 EDT Last modified on Mon 7 Jun 2021 06.50 EDT History’s purpose isn’t to comfort us, says David Olusoga, although many in the UK seem to think it is. “History doesn’t exist to make us feel good, special, exceptional or magical. History is just history. It is not there as a place of greater safety.” As a historian and broadcaster, Olusoga has been battling this misconception for almost two decades, as the producer or presenter of TV series including Civilisations, The World’s War, A House Through Time and the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. His scholarship has been widely recognised: in 2019, he was awarded an OBE and made a professor at the University of Manchester. (He is also on the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group.) Yet apologists for empire, in particular, like to dismiss him as a “woke historian” in an attempt to politicise his work or flatly deny the realities that he points out. Now he can expect more flak, thanks to the new edition of his book Black and British: A Forgotten History. First published in 2016, and made into a TV series the same year, the book charts black British history from the first meeting between the people of Britain and the people of Africa during the Roman period, to the racism Olusoga encountered during his own childhood, via Britain’s role in the slave trade and the scramble for Africa. It is a story that some of Olusoga’s critics would prefer was forgotten. Hostility to his work has grown since the Brexit vote, shooting up “profoundly since last summer”, he says, speaking over Zoom from his office in Bristol. “It has now got to the point where some of the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is that they know that this is not true, but they have decided that these national myths are so important to them and their political projects, or their sense of who they are, that they don’t really care about the historical truths behind them. “They have been able to convince people that their own history, being explored by their own historians and being investigated by their own children and grandchildren, is a threat to them.” For Olusoga, 51, this hostility can in part be explained by ignorance. “If you were taught a history that the first black person to put his foot on English soil was stepping off the Windrush in 1948, then this can seem like a conspiracy,” he says. But there is a deeper issue at play. “If you have been told a version of your history and that is part of your identity, it’s very difficult when people like me come along and say: ‘There are these chapters [that you need to know about].’ People feel – wrongly in my view – that their history is being undermined by my history. But my history isn’t a threat to your history. My history is part of your history.” When the book was published in 2016, it ended on a hopeful note. Olusoga was writing just a few years after the London Olympics, in which a tantalising view of Britain emerged – a country at ease with its multiculturalism, nodding with pride to the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948. Black Londoners dressed up as their ancestors for the opening ceremony, “with long, baggy suits, holding their suitcases”, says Olusoga. “You have to have a real tenure in the country to play your ancestors.” That moment, he says, was profoundly beautiful. But that upbeat note has begun to feel inaccurate – an artefact of a more optimistic time. In the new edition of Black and British, which includes a chapter on the Windrush scandal and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, Olusoga describes that moment in 2012 as a mirage. The summer afterwards, vans bearing the message “Go home or face arrest” were driven around London as part of Theresa May’s notorious “hostile environment” strategy, aiming to make the UK inhospitable for undocumented migrants. Thousands of people who had lived legally in the UK for decades, often people who had arrived from the Caribbean as children, were suddenly targeted for deportation. In 2020, protesters in more than 260 British towns and cities took part in BLM protests, thought to be the most widespread anti-racist movement since the abolition of the slave trade. A statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol; a Guardian analysis suggests about 70 monuments to slavers and colonialists have been removed, or are in the process of being removed, across the UK. But this movement for racial justice has been met with a severe backlash. In January, Robert Jenrick, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, said he would introduce laws to protect statues from what he called “baying mobs”. The government’s recent review on racial equality concluded controversially that there was no institutional racism in areas including policing, health and education, despite all the evidence to the contrary. “I’m really frightened about the future of this country, and frightened about people using forces of race and racism for electoral reasons and not being cognisant about how difficult it is to control those forces after elections have been counted,” says Olusoga. “I’m really frightened about the extent to which people are able to entirely dehumanise people who they deem to be their enemies in this culture war.” Olusoga was born in Lagos in 1970, to a white British mother and a Nigerian father, moving to his mother’s home town, Gateshead, at an early age. As one of a handful of mixed-race families on the council estate where they lived, they were regularly terrorised by the far right. The violence culminated in a brick being thrown into the family’s home, wrapped in a note demanding they be sent “back”. He was 14. Eventually, the family had to be rehoused. His early experience of education was also distressing. “I experienced racism from teachers in ways that are shocking if I tell them to young people at school now,” says Olusoga. He was dyslexic, but the school refused to get him tested until he did his GCSEs: “It was the easier story to believe that this kid was stupid because all black kids are stupid.” When he finally got his diagnosis and support – thanks in large part to his mother’s fierce determination – Olusoga went to study history at the University of Liverpool, followed by a master’s degree at Leicester. Olusoga was confident about having two identities, despite the prejudice he had encountered. He was proud of being a black Nigerian of Yoruba heritage and was perfectly happy being part of his mother’s white working-class geordie tradition. But he has always had a third identity. “I’m also black British – and that had no history, no recognition. It was presented as impossible – a dualism that couldn’t exist, because whiteness and Britishness were the same thing when I was growing up. So, to discover that there was a history of being black and British, independent from being half white working-class and being half black Nigerian, that was what was critically important to me,” he says. His book does its best to uncover that history, exploring the considerable presence of black people in Britain in the age of slavery, as well as the part played by black Britons in both world wars. He says that some of the aggression shown towards black historians who write honestly about Britain’s past comes from people who think “this history is important because it gives black people the right to be here”. They hold on to the belief that the UK was a “white country” until the past few decades and refuse to accept evidence that shows the presence of black people goes back centuries. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand what drives him and also why this history is important for black people. “I don’t feel challenged in my right to be proud to be British,” he says. “I’m perfectly comfortable in my identity. I’ve looked at this history because it’s just exciting to be part of a long story. This comes out of wanting to enrich life, not seeking some sort of needy validation of who I am.” He found it refreshing to see the UK’s history of empire and colonialism acknowledged in last summer’s anti-racist placards, with one popular slogan stating “The UK is not innocent”. “A generation has emerged that doesn’t need history to perform that role of comfort that its parents and grandparents did,” he says. As for black people’s experiences in Britain, he says, there is a “hysterical” level of anger if you point out that many have lived in some form of slavery or unfreedom. Recently, historians have uncovered notices of runaway enslaved people or advertisements for their sale. This adds to the evidence that thousands of black people were brought to Britain, enslaved as well as free. “It brings slavery to Britain and therefore undermines the idea that it doesn’t really matter because it happened ‘over there’,” says Olusoga. “It short-circuits an idea of British exceptionalism. And there are a lot of people for whom that idea of exceptionalism is a part of how they see themselves. I’m really sorry that the stuff I do and that other people do is a challenge to that, but my job is to be a historian. It’s not to make people feel good.” Olusoga is often accused of pursuing a political agenda. He is asked, for instance, why he doesn’t speak about the Barbary slave trade of the 16th to 18th centuries, in which Europeans were captured and traded by north African pirates. He has a simple response: that he has been trying to get a programme made about it for his entire career and it is finally happening. Advertisement He gives another example: “I have been accused literally hundreds of times of ignoring the slavery suppression squadron that the Royal Navy created after 1807.” Its task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of west Africa. “I think the chapter in Black and British about that is 30,000 words, which is as long as some books.” What his more extreme critics fail to understand, he adds, is that he is loyal to history and not a political agent. He remains committed to one goal: to uncover the stories of those who have long been deemed unimportant. When he wrote his first book on the 1904-08 Namibian genocide, he went to mass graves where he saw bones sticking out of the ground. “We promised the victims of that genocide that we would be their voice, we would fight for them and we would tell their story – and we use every skill we have to do that. “I care deeply about people who were mistreated in the past. I care about the names on slave ledgers, I care about the bones of people in Africa, in mass graves in the first world war and in riverbeds in Namibia. I care about them. I think about them when I read the letters, when I look at their photographs and their faces. No one gave a damn about them. That’s my job – to care about them. And I will be ruthless in fighting for them.” Previous Next

< Back The Plots Against the President FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right Hardcover, 273 pages ------- AUTHOR INTERVIEWS/NPR When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR February 12, 20123:59 PM ET NPR/Heard on All Things Considered It was a dangerous time in America: The economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system. The newly elected president pursued an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. "This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty," one senator wrote to a colleague. "The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom." Those words could be ripped from today's headlines. In fact, author Sally Denton tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, they come from a letter written in 1933 by Republican Sen. Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia, bemoaning the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Denton is the author of a new book, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. She says that during the tense months between FDR's election in November and his inauguration in March 1933, democracy hung in the balance. "There was a lot at play. It could have gone very different directions," Denton says. Though it's hard for us to imagine today, she says fascism, communism, even Naziism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills. "There were suggestions that capitalism was not working, that democracy was not working," she says. Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression. When Roosevelt finally took office, he embarked on the now-legendary First Hundred Days, an ambitious legislative program aimed at reopening and stabilizing the country's banks and getting the economy moving again. "There was just this sense that he was upsetting the status quo," Denton says. Critics on the right worried that Roosevelt was a Communist, a socialist or the tool of a Jewish conspiracy. Critics on the left complained his policies didn't go far enough. Some of Roosevelt's opponents didn't stop at talk. Though it's barely remembered today, there was a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the president. The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers. "They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government," Denton says. "It was a cockamamie concept," she adds, "and the fact that it even got as far as it did is pretty shocking." The conspirators had several million dollars, a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler, to lead their forces. "Had he been a different kind of person, it might have gone a lot further," Denton says. "But he saw it as treason and he reported it to Congress." Denton says that as she was writing the book, she was struck by the parallels between the treatment of Roosevelt and that of Barack Obama. For example, a cottage industry much like the birther movement grew up around proving that the Dutch-descended Roosevelt was actually a secret Jew. "It seems to me that going through history here, there are times that we need to have a demon, somebody that's not of us, in order to solidify our fears and our anxieties," Denton says. "And I don't know what that is in the impulse of the American body politic, but... this is 75 years later, and some of these same impulses continue." Previous Next

< Back Rock Hill AME Church & Cemetery Left image: Photograph circa 1952- Rock Hill AME Church with John Henry Moore and grandson Larry Parks in the foreground. The church began as a worshipping congregation around 1865. The size of the membership decreased after the construction of Lake James. Left image: Photograph circa 1952- Rock Hill AME Church with John Henry Moore and grandson Larry Parks in the foreground. The church began as a worshipping congregation around 1865. The size of the membership decreased after the construction of Lake James. It was closed to regular worship in 1962. The structure deteriorated over time. All that remains today is a graveyard located near the site where the church once stood. (Lou Ella Moore submitted the image to, "Picture Burke", a digital photograph preservation project of the NC Room of the Burke County Public Library) Right image: The Rock Hill graveyard as it looks today. It was entered as “Stony Point” in a cemetery census book, but the real name is Rock Hill. More than half the graves are only marked with stones. This graveyard is located in Longtown, Burke County, in Lake James State Park, North Carolina. Photograph credit: Find A Grave ----- Rock Hill Cemetery is located in Lake James State Park. This African American burial ground was established in 1865. Rock Hill AME Church was once located here and began as a worshipping congregation around 1865. At one time, this area was a thriving farming community until Lake James was built. The size of the membership decreased after the construction of Lake James. It was closed to regular worship in 1962. The church structure deteriorated over time and all that remains today is a cemetery located near the site where the church once stood. More than half of the graves are marked only with stones. If you go to visit, please check with the ranger for access. Here is a link to the graves located here: https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2377629/memorial-search Source: Shared from: You know You're From Marion, NC fb page Previous Next

< Back 1938 Durham Black Sox Team Photograph This rare image is a team photograph of the 1938 Durham Black Sox and was taken at El Toro Park in Durham, NC which burned down in 1939 1938 Durham Black Sox Team Photograph This rare image is a team photograph of the 1938 Durham Black Sox and was taken at El Toro Park in Durham, NC which burned down in 1939. The Black Sox were one of several Negro League teams that played in the city of Durham, along with the Durham Eagles and Durham Rams, from the 1920s through 1963. El Toro Park would later become the Durham Bulls Stadium after it was rebuilt . The back of the 8x10" photo has handwritten "Black Sox Ball-Team - Eltoro Park (1938)," and also has the team roster written in hand and taped on back with three white-out strips underneath. The contemporary writing indicates the players to be: Sowell, W. Barbee, Lee (coach) L. Barbee, Cradock, Johnson, B. Barbee, Henderson, unknown, Stanley (business mgr.), Hayes, Holeman (manager), Mangum, Rice, C. Barbee, Fairley, Cunningham. It is increasingly difficult to find Negro Leagues information from this period, especially one with identifications. **Here is a link to the Carolina Times online newspaper July 9, 1938 edition that has an article about the Durham Black Sox Negro baseball team's games. Link: https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/.../1938-07-09/ed-1/seq-8/ Previous Next

< Back William E. Artis Untitled (Idealized Head of a Woman) UNTITLED (IDEALIZED HEAD OF A WOMAN) William E. Artis ca. 1946 marble Previous Next

< Back Ivy Leaf pledge club, Gamma Mu chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated , Alabama A&M University 1961. ​ Ivy Leaf pledge club, Gamma Mu chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated , Alabama A&M University 1961. Source: A&M Archives. . . Previous Next

< Back Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital was an important civil rights legal case that led to the racial integration of hospitals. ​ Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital was an important civil rights legal case that led to the racial integration of hospitals. Before the case, hospitals and access to medical care were segregated along the racial lines established in the “Jim Crow” era and beyond, using the “separate but equal” doctrine established under Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). As in the case of other facets of ordinary life under segregation, there was the very definite separation but no equality. Not only were African American physicians not allowed to practice within hospitals frequented by Whites, but African American patients were denied access to the same medical facilities as Whites. As a result, medical care for African Americans was often deficient in resources and funding, despite the valiant efforts of African American physicians to provide the best for their patients. A group of African American physicians and patients in Greensboro, led by dentist and local NAACP chapter president George C. Simkins, filed suit against Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital and Wesley Long Community Hospital in 1962. Dr. Simkins had fought previously to integrate the city-owned golf course and tennis courts in Greensboro. The hospital case centered on the use of federal funding for the construction of the facilities under the provisions of the Hospital Survey and Construction Act of 1946 (the Hill-Burton Act). The Hill-Burton Act provided for matching grants from the federal government to support the costs of construction of public and nonprofit private hospitals and other medical facilities. Both Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital and Wesley Long Community Hospital had received federal funding through the Hill-Burton Act. As originally written, the act operated under the “separate but equal” doctrine. Planned medical facilities were prohibited from accepting federal construction funding if they discriminated, unless separate facilities were also planned that were likely to give equal treatment. Of the two hospitals in Greensboro, one refused to treat African Americans at all, while the other imposed limited access. The suit filed by Simkins and his colleagues sought equal access for African American patients and their physicians and dentists at the hospitals. The suit went further than merely challenging the fact that not one of the hospitals provided fully equal accessibility for African American patients and medical professionals, however. Building on the body of casework established since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the suit also argued that the “separate but equal” provisions should be struck down altogether, as they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Department of Justice concurred with the latter argument, and subsequently joined the case. The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled in favor of the defendants on December 5, 1962, determining that use of federal construction funding did not connect private hospitals to the government and that they did not therefore fall under the purview of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The plaintiffs subsequently filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The ruling was issued in a close 3-2 split decision on November 1, 1963, reversing the Middle District ruling. The appeals court found that the receipt of federal construction funding made private hospitals subject to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, and thus separate but equal policies in such institutions were unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1964, thereby leaving intact the appeals court decision. The ruling laid the groundwork for the desegregation of all public facilities in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. References: Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, 211 F. Supp. 628 (M.D.N.C. 1962), U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina – 211 F. Supp. 628 (M.D.N.C. 1962), December 5, 1962, Justia U.S. Law website, http://law.justia.com/.../district.../FSupp/211/628/1888070/ 323 F2d 959 Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, decided November 1, 1963, OpenJurist website, http://openjurist.org/.../simkins-v-moses-h-cone-memorial... U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Equal Opportunity in Hospitals and Health Facilities: Civil Rights Policies Under the Hill-Burton Program,” Commission on Civil Rights Special Publication No. 2 (March 1965), https://www.law.umaryland.edu/.../usccr/documents/cr1102.pdf William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1980) Robert L. Phillips, “History of Integration of Medicine in Greensboro, North Carolina Chronological Documentation” (unpublished typescript report, Greensboro Medical Historical Library and the Greater Greensboro Society of Medicine, November 1990) P. Preston Reynolds, “Hospitals and Civil Rights, 1945-1963: The Case of Simkins v Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital,” Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 126, no. 11 (June 1997): 898-906 Karen Kruse Thomas, “Simkins v. Cone,” NCPedia website, http://ncpedia.org/simkins-v-cone Marker Location: North Elm Street alongside Cone Hospital in Greensboro County: Guilford Source: North Carolina Highway Historical Markers Previous Next

< Back Alice H. Parker ​ Alice H. Parker - Inventor - The Mother of Modern Heating. (1895 – 1920?) Image: Drawing of Parker's invention awarded the US Patent No. 1,325,905, to Alice H. Parker. Note: There are no known verified photographs of Alice H. Parker. - . . Alice H. Parker was a Black inventor in the early 20th-century, best known for patenting a central heating system that uses natural gas. Her invention played a key role in the development of the heating systems we have in our homes today. Granted on December 23, 1919, Parker’s patent was not the first for a gas furnace design, but it uniquely involved a multiple yet individually controlled burner system. Although her exact design was never implemented due to concerns with the regulation of heat flow, her system was an important precursor to the modern heating zone system and thermostats as well. Parker’s legacy endures with the annual Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Awards via the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce. The award recognizes the contributions of women to innovation in New Jersey, Parker’s home state. Source: LemelsonMITdotedu . Alice H. Parker was born in 1895 in Morristown, New Jersey, where she grew up some of her life. Parker was a highly educated woman who graduated with honors in 1910 from Howard University Academy, a historically African American university that accepted both male and female students since its founding in November 1866, shortly after the Civil War. According to census data, Parker worked as a cook in the kitchen in Morristown, NJ and lived with her husband, who was a butler. Despite her revolutionary impact on today's modern heating system, there is almost no information recorded on her personal life. Although the specific date of her death is unknown, it is thought she died in 1920 due to a fire or heat stroke. Much of the information regarding Parker’s early life and education history is unknown and debated due to the lack of records that were maintained detailing her life. Parker is widely recorded as being born in 1895 in Morristown, New Jersey. However, recent investigations on Parker’s early life have uncovered contradicting evidence that suggests her year of birth being 1885, including the 1920 patent for a gas furnace filed under her name. Parker graduated with honors from Howard University in 1910, a notable achievement considering the educational opportunities presented to members of the minority during the time period. In 2022, an investigation by Audrey Henderson of the Energy News Network found that a photo commonly said to be of Parker is actually of an unrelated white woman born five years after Parker's furnace patent was issued. Invention At the time, central gas heating had yet to be developed, so people relied on burning coal or wood as their main source of heating. While furnaces and the concept of central heating have been around since the Roman Empire, the science hardly advanced in the years that followed, and the heating methods utilized by the end of the nineteenth century were still relatively primitive in nature. Parker felt that the fireplace alone was not enough to keep her and her home warm during the cold New Jersey winter, and went on to design the first gas furnace that was powered by natural gas and the first heating system to contain individually controlled air ducts that distributed heat evenly throughout the building. In more technical terms, Parker's heating system used independently controlled burner units that drew in cold air and conveyed the heat through a heat exchanger. This air was then fed into individual ducts to control the amount of heat in different areas. What made her invention particularly unique, was that it was a form of "zone heating" where temperature can be moderated in different parts of a building. Although the invention had massive positive impacts, it also came with a few downsides. Her design posed a few health and safety risks as it made certain appliances like the oven more flammable and unsafe to touch. The regulation of the heat flow also posed a few security risks. On the other hand, Parkers invention also decreased the risk of house or building fires that heating units posed by eliminating the need to leave a burning fireplace on throughout the night. With her idea for a furnace used with modifications to eliminate safety concerns, it inspired and led the way to features such as thermostats, zone heating and forced air furnaces, which are common features of modern central heating. Additionally, by using natural gas, it heated homes much more efficiently than wood or coal counterparts (which were more time consuming and expensive). Parker's invention was further improved in 1935 by scientists who created forced convection wall heaters that use a coal furnace, electric fan, and ductwork throughout a home. Nowadays, homes utilize thermostats and forced air furnaces which can be attributed to Parker's design and invention of the central heating furnace. Her filing of the patent precedes both the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Liberation Movement, which made her accomplishments especially impressive, since black women of her generation faced many systematic barriers. Parker’s patent for her gas furnace stemmed from her desire to improve household heating solutions available at the time. Homeowners at the time largely relied on fireplaces requiring the usage of wood or coal, and these fireplaces were ineffective in heating entire homes for the lengthy winters of Northeastern United States. While the usage of natural gas for heating purposes was not a newfound idea at the time, as such concept had been around since the Roman Empire and natural gas heating systems were used to heat water systems in certain parts of the United States before Parker’s invention, her patent was the first to employ this concept for heating homes and offices. Parker’s invention demonstrated a new and unique heating system that utilized air ducts to control the amount of heating a specific part would receive–a system of “zone heating” that was nonexistent at the time. Parker’s invention would have hopefully provided a safer method for household heating, replacing the traditional fireplaces which have always been a fire hazard especially in a time period with less protective technology, and an avoidance for homeowners to stock up on wood and coal providing savings in cost and house space. Legacy In 2019, the National Society of Black Physicists honored Parker as an "African American inventor famous for her patented system of central heating using natural gas." It called her invention a "revolutionary idea" for the 1920s, "that conserved energy and paved the way for the central heating systems". The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce established the Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Awards to honor women who use their "talent, hard work and ‘outside-the-box’ thinking to create economic opportunities and help make New Jersey a better place to live and work." Parker’s patent for her gas furnace, although groundbreaking, was never chosen to enter full-fledged production and usage. This was mainly due to the safety concerns behind her design, as the technology available at the time did not possess the capability to regulate the heat flow as outlined in Parker’s invention. However, Parker’s patent has served as a basis for the development of heating systems throughout the 20th century and today. Parker’s design, which allows for an individual to control the heating received for each room in a house, is recognizable in the zonal heating system, and especially the “smart home” technology, that is used by nearly all households in the current century. Parker’s legacy lives on numerous awards and grants, and most noticeably in the annual Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Award that is given out by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce to celebrate outstanding women innovators in Parker’s home state. However, the details regarding her later years are as unknown as the details available for her early life. The specific date for her death, along with the cause, is largely unknown with the information currently available. Most shockingly, the photo that has long been associated with Parker was proven to be a photo of a completely unrelated British woman born five years after the filing of Parker’s patent. Source: Wikipedia Previous Next

< Back Titus Kaphar-"Behind the Myth of Benevolence"- 2014 ​ Titus Kaphar-"Behind the Myth of Benevolence"- 2014 Previous Next

< Back Dr. Tamara Holmes Brothers Dr. Tamara Holmes Brothers Named Deputy Director Of The NC Arts Council May 5, 2020 Dr. Tamara Holmes Brothers Named Deputy Director Of The NC Arts Council May 5, 2020 (Dr. Holmes Brothers is the first Black woman to be chosen for this NC Arts Council position-ncmaahc admin. ) Dr. Tamara Holmes Brothers has been named Deputy Director of the North Carolina Arts Council, effective May 11. Dr. Brothers comes to the Arts Council from Duke University, where she is Director of Development & Major Gifts at the Nasher Museum of Art. In addition to her experience at one of the premier visual art museums in the state, Dr. Brothers worked as Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations where she led development efforts and played a central role in achieving the university’s capital campaign goals. “North Carolina’s arts industry is at a pivotal time as we work together on the recovery from the pandemic. Tamara’s experience in development will be extremely valuable to our agency as it strives to raise more resources for the arts from the private sector,” said Wayne Martin, Executive Director of the Arts Council. “Her extensive ties to arts programs at historically black colleges and universities across our state will provide opportunities for new collaborations with communities served by our state’s extensive HBCU network.” Dr. Brothers is a native of Fayetteville, N.C., and has a bachelor's degree in art and a Ph.D. from Hampton University. Her dissertation at Hampton focused on the potential of arts integration to help students learn more effectively. Dr. Brothers also has a master's degree in sport management from West Virginia University, a certificate in historic preservation from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a certificate in art as an alternate investment from Sotheby’s Art Institute, and a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke University. “My career trajectory has led me to the North Carolina Arts Council, and I’m honored to join the team,” said Dr. Brothers. “The Arts Council is at a critical juncture and I look forward to harnessing my background and passion to benefit arts organizations and artists across the state.” As a volunteer, Dr. Brothers serves as a member of the boards of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, the North Carolina Arts Foundation, Arts North Carolina, and the North Carolina National Register Advisory Committee and on the national advisory board of Museum Hue, an arts platform for professionals of color. She was the second African American female president of the West Fayetteville Rotary Club and is a former member of the boards of the Second Harvest Food Bank and the Partnership for Children of Cumberland County, a former member of the City of Fayetteville’s Historic Resources Commission, and a founding steering committee member of the Friends of African & African American Art at the Fayetteville/Cumberland County Arts Council. She was president of the board of the Hampton University Museum Foundation. Photo credit: Photo by J Caldwell. Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Source: The North Carolina Arts Council News Letter Previous Next

< Back Mollie Huston Lee Mollie Huston Lee was born on January 18, 1907 in Columbus, Ohio. "After graduating from Columbia in 1930, she moved to North Carolina to begin working as a librarian at Shaw University. She was instrumental in organizing the North Carolina Negro Library Association in 1934. It became the first association controlled by blacks to be admitted as a chapter of the American Library Association. Mollie Huston Lee was born on January 18, 1907 in Columbus, Ohio. "After graduating from Columbia in 1930, she moved to North Carolina to begin working as a librarian at Shaw University. She was instrumental in organizing the North Carolina Negro Library Association in 1934. It became the first association controlled by blacks to be admitted as a chapter of the American Library Association. But in 1935 there were only twelve black public libraries in North Carolina, and the Olivia Raney Library in Raleigh only served white citizens. So Lee and a group of community members met with the white mayor George A. Isley to start a public library that would serve blacks" Black Libraries ~ Mollie Huston Lee Mrs. Lee was the founder of Raleigh's Richard B. Harrison Library. Mrs. Lee also was instrumental in the foundation of the North Carolina Negro Library Association (NCNLA). Lee started and maintained a collection chronicling the African American experience both locally and nationally. The collection has grown to over 5,000 volumes, composed of both adult and juvenile fiction and nonfiction, serials, pamphlets, and vertical file materials. The vertical file collection has a special focus on documenting the lives of African Americans in Raleigh communities. The online collection consists of biographical information about Lee and African American actor Richard B. Harrison, for whom the library is named. The selections include flyers and clippings related to the 1960 boycotts and sit-ins in Raleigh as well as documents about the library's history. Mollie Huston Lee (January 18, 1907 – January 26, 1982) was the first African American librarian in Raleigh, North Carolina and the founder of Raleigh's Richard B. Harrison Public Library, the first library in Raleigh to serve African Americans. Her greatest achievement was developing, maintaining, and increasing public library service to the African American people of Raleigh and Wake County, North Carolina while striving to achieve equal library service for the entire community. Mollie Huston Lee was born in Columbus, Ohio on January 18, 1907 to Corrina Smith Huston and Rolla Solomon Huston, a private business owner and politician. As the only child of "learned parents," there were always books around the family home and growing up, Lee developed an interest in public affairs. She married Dr. James S. Lee in 1935 and had one son, James S. Lee Jr While attending Howard University, Lee worked as a student library assistant under the direction of E..C. Williams, (Edward Christopher Williams), the man she described as the first black librarian to ever receive a library degree in this country. Lee acknowledged E. C. Williams as the inspiration for her future efforts as a pioneering librarian. After earning an A.B. from Howard University, Lee received a scholarship to attend library school at Columbia University. Upon earning a bachelor of library science from Columbia University, Lee returned to North Carolina in 1930 and began working as a librarian at Shaw University. During her five-year employment at the Shaw University Library, Lee recognized the need among blacks in the surrounding community for a special African-American literature collection. She recognized that this need could be met through the services of a public library. In 1905 public library service was extended to blacks in Charlotte, North Carolina but Raleigh had to wait another thirty years. By 1935 there were only twelve black public libraries in North Carolina, however little action was taken in most areas of North Carolina to open libraries to blacks. Mollie Huston Lee was an advocate for bringing a library that would serve African Americans to Raleigh. Lee and a group of community members met in 1935 with the white mayor, George A. Isley, to discuss the creation of a public library that would serve blacks. Fulfilling a goal to establish a black literary collection at a library, the Richard B. Harrison Public Library opened on November 12, 1935. Lee valued community outreach and frequently brought the library to patrons when they were unable to visit the library themselves. Her actions encouraged community members to use the library and its resources. Despite trying economic conditions, the library's resources continued to expand due to Lee's efforts. In addition to establishing a library and services for African Americans in Raleigh, Lee also assisted in the training of future librarians. Library science students from Atlanta University, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill learned from firsthand experiences at the Harrison Library under the direction of Mollie Huston Lee. She served as the supervisor of Negro School Libraries in North Carolina from 1946 to 1953. Lee was known as a "librarian's librarian." Reflecting on her career as a librarian, Lee expressed, "I don't know of anything else that can help anyone grow more than working in a library." Mollie Huston Lee told a radio audience in 1951, "a public library is the recorded memory of mankind, serving the community. Its function is to make available to all, information and thought in all fields of human knowledge and experience and to help each person, whatever his interest may be, to find and use the books and other library facilities and material which best serve his needs." During her thirty-seven year career at the Harrison Library, she saw the library evolve from a tiny, one-room storefront library on Hargett Street to a $300,000 structure on New Bern Avenue. She retired from a forty-two year library career on June 30, 1972 to "have fun and do some of the things I have not had time for. The Mollie Huston Lee Collection Of Black Literature Lee's dedication to the African American populations in Raleigh, Wake County, and North Carolina are best evident in the extensive collection of books and other resources by and about African Americans she established, making the Harrison Library groundbreaking. It was her hope and desire that the African American community would know and be proud of their African American heritage. Lee established this quality collection as a result of meticulous efforts to collect publications about African Americans. In an interview, Lee stated, "I felt there was a need to emphasize black books. Black collections were not popular then like they are today. I felt more people should know about black history, black authors, and the contributions of black people." Commonly, publications about African Americans were only in print for two years, as a result, Lee attentively monitored publishers and vendors of African American books. She would even visit the University Place Book Shop in New York City to select and purchase rare items for the collection. This collection of over 5,000 volumes ranging from adult and children's fiction and nonfiction, serials, pamphlets, and vertical file materials grew gradually but slowly during the thirty-eight years Lee served as librarian at the Harrison Library. An annual appropriate from the State Library of North Carolina over the period of twelve years provided the greatest financial assistance for the collection. The collection now became accessible to the public libraries of North Carolina through the State Library's Interlibrary loan, thus recognizing the value of the collection. In 1972 the "Negro Collection" was renamed the Mollie Huston Lee Collection of Black Literature. Mollie Huston Lee viewed the civic education of community members as essential and she created a well-defined philosophy of community affairs that is evident throughout her career. Lee stated: "If you're a public librarian, you have to be with the people to find out their wants and needs and supply them with the materials to give them the insight to a more wholesome life through reading materials. You can't just sit behind a desk and issue books." Programming at the Harrison Library included lectures featuring black and white speakers, children's authors, and an expanded story time. An emphasis was placed on adult education, "[teaching] them how to live better, longer, fuller and more enjoyable lives." Educational programs directed to residents of the rural Raleigh area provided instruction in the development of reading and writing skills. Discussion groups on relevant topics were also created for patrons of all ages with the idea of keeping community members informed and aware of current news issues. The Harrison Library was well known regionally and nationally for providing services and programs for the aged, blind, disadvantaged, and illiterate. Programming at the Harrison Library fulfilled a need within the community. Children were provided with educational and recreational tools to assist with their formation as good citizens and adults were provided with materials to aid with their wholesome and useful life within their community The esteem to which Mollie Huston Lee was held is indicated by her selection as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) library delegate and her appointment as a trustee of the State Library of North Carolina. Lee also was instrumental in the foundation of the North Carolina Negro Library Association (NCNLA) which dissolved once the American Library Association (ALA) and the North Carolina Library Association opened membership to African Americans. She was the second African American elected at-large to the ALA council, serving from 1950 to 1954 and in 1971 Lee represented ALA at the White House Conference on Aging. In 1971, Lee was the first African American woman elected "Tar Heel of the Week" as a result of her numerous professional and civic contributions to the state of North Carolina. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollie_Huston_Lee Source:http://www.candidslice.com/not-so-famous-north.../ Previous Next

< Back The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration In the winter of 1916, as Americans read the news of unimaginable slaughter in a distant yet rapidly spreading European war, it was easy to overlook stories like the one in The Chicago Defender reporting that several Black families in Selma, Ala., had left the South. A popular ­African American weekly, The Defender would publish dozens of such stories in the coming years, heralding the good jobs and friendly neighbors that awaited these migrants in Chicago, even printing train schedules to point the way north. Smuggled into Southern railroad depots by Pullman porters, dropped off by barnstorming black athletes and entertainers, The Defender emerged as both cheerleader and chronicler of an exodus that would lead about six million African Americans to abandon the states of the Old Confederacy between 1915 and 1970. “If all of their dream does not come true,” it confidently predicted, “enough will come to pass to justify their actions.” Prophetic words, indeed, Isabel Wilkerson insists in “The Warmth of Other Suns,” her massive and masterly account of the Great Migration. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The New York Times in 1994 and currently teaches journalism at Boston University, has a personal stake in the story. Her mother left rural Georgia, her father southern Virginia, to settle in Washington, D.C. Wilkerson knows well the highly charged nature of this field. For many years, commentators routinely demeaned these migrants as the dregs of a failed society. Even the distinguished Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier fretted over the “ignorant, uncouth and impoverished” throngs that had invaded his beloved Chicago. Arguments raged for decades about the tangled pathology of black families divided from their rural roots and thrown together in dead-end Northern slums. “The migrants were cast as poor illiterates,” Wilkerson says, “who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.” But the more recent scholarship, which Wilkerson embraces, tells another story. Today, these Black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What linked them together, Wilkerson writes, was their heroic determination to roll the dice for a better future. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that blacks who left the South had far more schooling than Blacks who stayed. Or that the migrants had higher employment numbers than Northern-born blacks and a more stable family life, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage. Put simply, Wilkerson says, the well-known “migrant advantage” has worked historically for Americans of all colors. “The Warmth of Other Suns” is Wilkerson’s first book. (Its title is borrowed from the celebrated black writer Richard Wright, who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s to feel the warmth of those other suns.) Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch. Wilkerson follows the journey of three Southern Blacks, each representing a different decade of the Great Migration as well as a different destination. It’s a shrewd storytelling device, because it allows her to highlight two issues often overlooked: first, that the exodus was a continuous phenomenon spanning six decades of American life; second, that it consisted of not one, but rather three geographical streams, the patterns determined by the train routes available to those bold enough to leave. People from Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi boarded the Illinois Central to Midwestern cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit; those from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia rode the Seaboard Air Line up the East Coast to Washington, Philadelphia and New York; those in Louisiana and Texas took the Union Pacific to Los Angeles, Oakland and other parts of the West Coast. Wilkerson is superb at minding the bends and detours along the way. She notes, for example, that some migrants, unfamiliar with the conductor’s Northern accent, would mistakenly get off at the cry of “Penn Station, Newark,” the stop just before Penn Station, New York. Many decided to stay put, she adds, giving Newark “a good portion of its Black population.” The first of Wilkerson’s three main characters, and plainly her favorite, is Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi. Married at 16, the mother of three, Ida Mae lived to serve her husband, George, whose dire prospects reflected the feudal Southern agriculture that had replaced slavery after the Civil War. Each December, at “settling time,” George would meet with Mr. Edd, the White landowner, to learn how he had done. In a malevolent ritual, played out across the cotton South, Mr. Edd would open his ledger book to prove that the annual debt for supplies bought on credit almost exactly matched the value of George’s annual crop. George Gladney didn’t know much about arithmetic, but he did know the dangers of challenging a white man’s figures. So he’d thank Mr. Edd and return to his shack with a few dollars to show for a year’s worth of backbreaking toil. In 1937, a cousin down the road was beaten almost to death by a White posse that wrongly suspected him of stealing a few of Mr. Edd’s turkeys. Fearing he’d be next, and tired of working dawn to dusk for pennies, George told Ida Mae to pack up the family. A few days later, they boarded the Jim Crow car of an Illinois Central train heading north. They eventually settled in Chicago, where George found work in a Campbell Soup factory, Ida Mae in a hospital. There no longer were “colored” and “white” signs to degrade them, but the specter of racial caste was omnipresent. The Gladneys survived by exploiting the small but significant advantages of Northern life, while retaining the work ethic of their rural Mississippi roots. In one especially telling episode, Ida Mae had to decide whether to join a strike against her hospital or cross an angry picket line in order to pay the monthly bills. It wasn’t a hard decision, Wilkerson explains. “The concept of not working a job one had agreed to do was alien to Ida Mae.” The other main characters, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, also had compelling reasons to leave the South. Starling, the valedictorian of his “colored” high school class in central Florida, had dropped out of college when his money ran out and gone to work picking citrus in the fields. Appalled by the conditions, he tried to organize a work stoppage; a friend warned him that the local growers, backed by a homicidal sheriff, were planning to lynch him. In 1945, Starling boarded the Silver Meteor bound for New York. Foster, from Monroe, La., had the most privileged background of the three. The son of demanding middle-class parents, educated at Morehouse, the most prestigious black college in America, trained as a surgeon, Foster wasn’t about to waste away in the small-minded South, delivering sharecroppers’ babies and being paid with “the side of a freshly killed hog.” Monroe was known for sending its migrants to California, a route taken by the parents of the future basketball star Bill Russell and of the Black Panther leader Huey Newton. In 1951, Foster joined that western stream. Both Starling and Foster represent the contradictions of the Great Migration. Starling took a porter’s job on the same Silver Meteor that once brought him north. The life he led in Harlem was richer than anything he could have imagined. But he also knew that the migrants now riding his train would reap the blessings of a civil rights movement that were unavailable to him: history had come too late for the once promising student from the citrus groves. Foster, for his part, matured into one of Los Angeles’s finest surgeons. But his rejection of his Southern roots was so exaggerated, Wilkerson says, as to leave him adrift, nursing ancient wounds, unable to relish the blessings of his life. The book is not without problems, however. One is repetition: a number of anecdotes and descriptions appear more than once. Another is omission. Though she relies on many sources, Wilkerson ignores Nicholas Lemann’s classic 1991 account of the Black migration to Chicago, “The Promised Land,” which paints a somber portrait of its impact upon the migrants and their progeny. In contrast, Wilkerson has little to say about the following generation or its problems beyond a cheerful listing of politicians, athletes, musicians, writers and film stars who got the opportunity “to grow up free of Jim Crow and to be their fuller selves” because their parents had joined the Great Migration. Some historians, moreover, may question Wilkerson’s approach to her subject. She tends to privilege the migrants’ personal feelings over structural influences like the coming of the mechanical cotton picker, which pushed untold thousands of Southern Blacks from the fields, or the intense demand for wartime factory labor, which pulled thousands more to manufacturing cities in the North. Wilkerson is well aware of these push-pull factors. She has simply chosen to treat them in a way that makes the most sense to her. What bound these migrants together, she explains, was both their need to escape the violent, humiliating confines of the segregationist South and their “hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” In 1998, Wilkerson accompanied Ida Mae Gladney on a visit to Mississippi. It was October, and cotton was still in the fields. “We cross a gravel road,” Wilkerson writes, and “Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big, ‘Let’s go pick some.’ ” Wilkerson wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of two Black women trespassing on what was very likely a White man’s plot of ground, but Gladney insisted. “It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to,” Wilkerson writes. “It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.” The experience fired old memories. “I just couldn’t do it,” Gladney confessed. “I’d pick and cry. I ain’t never liked the field.” The next day found her at the local cemetery, surveying the headstones of people she left behind long ago. “Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?” her brother-in-law asks. “No, I’m gonna be in Chicago,” she replies. The South is behind her. Chicago is home. Previous Next

< Back Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 1, Adams-Hunter Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 1, Adams-Hunter Library Of Congress Title Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 1, Adams-Hunter Genre Interviews Notes - Includes narratives by Addy Gill, Adeline Crump, Alex Huggins, Alice Baugh, Alonzo Haywood, Analiza Foster, Andrew Boone, Barbara Haywood, Betty Cofer, Bill Crump, Blount Baker, C.H. Hunter, Chaney Hews, Charity Austin, Charles Lee Dalton, Charles W. Dickens, Charlie Barbour, Charlie Crump, Clay Bobbit, Cornelia Andrews, Cy Hart, David Blount, Doc Edwards, Dorcas Griffeth, Elbert Hunter, Emma Blalock, Essex Henry, Eustace Hodges, Fannie Dunn, Fanny Cannady, Frank Freeman, George Eatman, George W. Harris, Georgianna Foster, Hannah Crasson, Harriet Ann Daves, Hecter Hamilton, Henry Bobbit, Herndon Bogan, Ida Adkins, Isabell Henderson, Jane Arrington, Jennylin Dunn, Jerry Davis, Jerry Hinton, Joe High, John Beckwith, John C. Bectom, John Coggin, John Daniels, John Evans, Joseph Anderson, Julia Crenshaw, Kitty Hill, Laura Bell, Lindsey Faucette, Lizzie Baker, Louisa Adams, Lucy Ann Dunn, Lucy Brown, Mandy Coverson, Margaret E. Dickens, Martha Adeline Hinton, Martha Allen, Mary Anderson, Mary Anngady, Mary Barbour, Mary Wallace Bowe, Mattie Curtis, Midge Burnett, Milly Henry, Ora M. Flagg, Rev. Squire Dowd, Robert Glenn, Robert Hinton, Sarah Anne Green, Sarah Debro, Sarah Gudger, Sarah Harris, Sarah Louise Augustus, Susan High, Tempie Herndon Durham, Thomas Hall, Viney Baker, W. L. Bost, W.S. Debnam, William George Hinton, Willie Cozart, Zeb Crowder. - Interviews were conducted by Daisy Whaley, Esther S. Pinnix, Marjorie Jones, Mary A. Hicks, Miss Nancy Woodburn Watkins, Mrs. Edith S. Hibbs, Mrs. W. N. Harriss, T. Pat Matthews, and Travis Jordan. - Interviews were conducted by Asheville, Cary, Durham, Durham County, Madison, Method, Raleigh, Smithfield, Staggville, Wake County, West Raleigh, Wilmington, Wilson, and Zebulon, North Carolina. Medium 465 pages Source Collection Federal Writer's Project, United States Work Projects Administration (USWPA) Repository Manuscript Division Digital Id http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.111 Online Format image online text Source:https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn111 Previous Next

< Back ‘Toxic Wastes and Race’ ‘Toxic Wastes and Race’ 'This is environmental racism’ How a protest in a North Carolina farming town sparked a national movement By Darryl Fears and Brady Dennis / WAPO - April 6, 2021 Article photo descriptions: Left Image -Protests against PCB dumping in Warren County, N.C., on Sept. 24, 1982. The protests in Warren County didn’t halt a toxic dump. But they fueled a national movement. (Ricky Stilley) -Middle image- A historical marker now stands in Warren County where the PCB protests took place in 1982. (Brady Dennis/The Washington Post) -Right image- Dollie Burwell Fought to protect her community-(Justin Cook for The Washington Post) ---- WARREN COUNTY, N.C. — Ben Chavis was driving on a lonely road through rolling tobacco fields when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the state trooper. Chavis knew he was a marked man. Protests had erupted over North Carolina’s decision to dump 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in a poor Black farming community in Warren County, and Chavis was a leader of the revolt. The trooper pulled him over. “What did I do, officer?” Chavis asked that day in 1982. The answer shocked him. “He told me that I was driving too slow.” Chavis was arrested and thrown in jail. When the cell door slammed shut, he gripped the metal bars and declared: “This is racism. This is environmental racism.” The term stuck, and now — nearly 40 years after Chavis spoke the words that have come to define decisions by governments and corporations to place toxic pollution in communities of color — the issue has risen from the fringes of the American conservation movement to the heart of President Biden’s environmental agenda. One week after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order vowing to steer clean energy investments to minority communities battling pollution, placing environmental justice at the core of his plan to fight climate change. He named a Native American and African Americans to powerful environmental posts. And last week, he tapped more than two dozen advocates from around the country to counsel his administration — “for the first time ever, bringing the voices, perspectives, and expertise of environmental justice communities into a formal advisory role at the White House,” said Cecilia Martinez, a Biden appointee on the issue. Systemic racism has long influenced where major sources of pollution are located within communities. Beginning in the early 20th century, White government planners in many municipalities drew redlining maps that identified Black and Latino neighborhoods as undesirable and unworthy of housing loans. Heavy industry was permitted to cluster in those places, adding a toxic dimension that persists today. Given little support by White philanthropists, environmental justice groups run by Black, Latino, Native American and Alaskan Native advocates historically have been as impoverished as the communities they represent. While White environmental groups tended to focus on wilderness and wildlife, activists fighting everything from toxic dumps in Alabama to massive oil and gas refineries in California have largely worked in the shadows. Today, Black people are nearly four times more likely to die from exposure to pollution than White people. According to “Fumes Across the Fence-Line,” a recent study by the Clean Air Task Force, African Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than White Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live in communities that border a plant or factory. During the coronavirus pandemic, the consequences have proved particularly deadly. More than half of all in-hospital deaths from the start of the U.S. outbreak through July 2020 were of Black and Latino patients, according to researchers at Stanford and Duke universities. Black patients were far more likely to require ventilation. “If your Zip code is buried with garbage, chemical plants, pollution … you’ll find there are more people that are sick, more diabetes and heart disease,” said Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University and the author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality.” “Covid is like a heat-seeking missile zeroing in on the most vulnerable communities.” Though the cry “I can’t breathe” has come to define today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Chavis, now 73, said it echoes generations of environmental activists of color, including those who fought the toxic waste dump in North Carolina in 1982. “There were public outcries of ‘We can’t breathe’ and ‘I can’t breathe,’” Chavis said, “by African American environmental justice protesters in Warren County.” Even before the protests, the federal government had recognized the danger PCBs posed to human life. Short for polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs were widely used in paints, plastics and adhesives, and as industrial coolants. Then scientists discovered that, if inhaled or absorbed through the skin, the chemicals can cause birth defects, cancer and other disorders in multiple human organs. In 1977, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to ban their domestic production. Enter Robert Burns, the owner of a New York trucking company, who hatched a plan to become America’s “PCB king” by amassing discarded PCBs and selling them to companies that still needed the chemical, court records show. Burns approached a friend, Robert Ward Jr., owner of the Ward Transformer Co., which had stored thousands of gallons of PCB-laden oil in a warehouse near Raleigh. The plan, however, was a disaster. The high cost of driving hundreds of 55-gallon drums of toxic liquid to a storage facility in Pennsylvania made the operation financially untenable. So Burns “devised a scheme, for which he sought Ward’s approval,” court records said. He would dump the chemicals instead. The first location was a range at Fort Bragg, but the soil there failed to absorb the liquid. So Burns told Ward that his sons, Randall and Timothy, would spray the oil along rural North Carolina roads. For more than three months, driving under cover of darkness, they poisoned an area spanning 14 counties with 30,000 gallons of PCBs, government records show. It didn’t take long for state officials to notice the 211-mile stain. The men, all White, were convicted of committing an environmental crime. Burns pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges and was sentenced to a year in prison. Ward was acquitted of state charges but convicted in federal court, where he was sentenced to two years in prison. North Carolina was left to clean up the mess. Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. (D) first proposed to treat the PCB-contaminated soil where it lay, but the EPA nixed that plan. So Hunt pursued another option: dumping 10,000 truckloads of contaminated dirt in a soybean field in rural Warren County, a largely poor area that was nearly 60 percent Black. There, in a modest ranch house off Tower Road, lived a young, Black mother of two named Dollie Burwell. Barely 30, she was already a fierce civil rights activist, raised by sharecroppers who had instilled in her an unwavering sense of right and wrong. Her parents had hammered home a Bible verse that Burwell still quotes by heart: “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Burwell said her mother “always made us believe we were the hands, the eyes, the feet of God on Earth.” It wasn’t enough to believe in justice; the scripture said to fight for it. So Burwell assembled a small group of Black women to fight against the dump. They feared it would contaminate groundwater, and make their community a magnet for future toxic waste disposal. During a recent interview not far from the protest site, Burwell said her community was an easy target: “We were poor, we were Black and we were politically impotent.” But they were not silent. The women organized gatherings at Coley Springs Baptist Church, a large brick and stained-glass building near the township of Afton. They “did the cooking and feeding the protesters and doing the fliers and passing out fliers and calling people to make sure we had people to participate,” Burwell recalled. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded by Martin Luther King Jr., Burwell “had the ability to call on people to come and march and go to jail with us.” Civil rights titans came: the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the SCLC in Atlanta, and his wife, Evelyn; Walter Fauntroy, the delegate representing Washington, D.C., in Congress; and the Rev. Leon White, a field director for the United Church of Christ racial justice commission. White also called Chavis, a member of the Wilmington 10 — nine Black men and a White woman wrongly convicted of a 1971 firebombing at a grocery store in Wilmington, N.C. After they spent years behind bars, their sentences were commuted in 1978. Years later, Gov. Bev Perdue (D) would pardon the group, saying the trial was infected by “naked racism.” Investigators uncovered notes by the prosecutor showing he preferred jurors who were Ku Klux Klan members and that he described a Black juror as an “Uncle Tom type.” Just three years out of prison, Chavis believed he was still being closely watched by the state. He worried about being locked away again. But the women of Warren County had his back. Over the six-week protest, women lay in the path of massive dump trucks beside men. Children often protested with their parents. More than 500 people were arrested, including Burwell, who was hauled away five times. “A couple of times, I didn’t even intend to get arrested,” she said. “But you just saw the injustice in it all, and the next thing you know, you were blocking the trucks.” The struggle took a toll not only on Burwell, but also her 8-year-old daughter, who attended some of the protests. One day, “just as I was being put in the paddy wagon, I saw all the reporters around her,” Burwell recalled. Bound in handcuffs, she saw her daughter in tears. “It just tore me up.” The protests failed to stop the landfill. On Sept. 15, 1982, the state began piling contaminated dirt into a 22-acre dump carved out of farmland. Hunt vowed to oppose future landfills in the county and to detoxify the site as soon as technology to eliminate PCBs became available. But that would take decades. In Warren County, a battle had been lost. But across America, the larger fight was just beginning. National television networks and major newspapers had covered the Warren County demonstration, a first for a Black environmental protest. Activists as far away as Alaska were paying attention. In poor, racially segregated communities across the country, people had been quietly fighting pollution from rail yards, coal-fired power plants, sewage treatment facilities, oil and gas refineries, and concrete batch mills. They saw their own stories playing out in Warren County. Charles Lee, a Chinese American researcher, traveled there from New Jersey. Later, he read a 1983 federal report commissioned by Fauntroy that showed that 3 out of 4 major landfills in the South were surrounded by Black communities. Lee suspected that environmental racism was more widespread. “I said, ‘We need to replicate this on a national scale,’” Lee recalled. With the backing of the United Church of Christ, he began to assemble the first major study of the environmental justice era, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.” Published in 1987, the study found that “communities with greater minority percentages of the population are more likely to be the sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities.” But the report does not use the term “environmental racism.” “The conversation we started having was about ‘environmental racism,’” recalled Vernice Miller-Travis, who worked with Lee. “Because everybody was uncomfortable with racism, we called it ‘environmental justice.’ It’s not accidental. It’s all intentional.” For the report, Lee networked with hundreds of local activists. One was Richard Moore, a Latino man in New Mexico. Moore was frustrated that mainstream, mostly White environmental groups were not fighting environmental racism, focusing instead on land use, climate change, general air quality and wildlife protections. Several green groups were established by white supremacists. Sierra Club founder John Muir once described African Americans as lazy “Sambos” and Native Americans as “dirty.” Madison Grant, a prominent early conservationist, argued for white supremacy in his book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History” — a tome Adolf Hitler called “my bible.” In March 1990, Moore and 90 activists fired off a letter to the National Wildlife Federation calling for more diversity. “Although environmental organizations calling themselves the ‘Group of Ten’ often claim to represent our interests, in observing your activities it has become clear to us that your organizations play an equal role in the disruption of our communities,” Moore wrote. Once again, Lee saw an opportunity. “Let’s do something that really kind of makes a statement about the leadership that already exists in people across color communities on these environmental issues … and use it as a way to coalesce a movement,” he recalled thinking. Lee pitched the idea for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. If 300 people showed up, organizers thought, it would be a success. When the summit began on Oct. 24, 1991, at the Washington Court Hotel on Capitol Hill, about 1,000 people flooded into Washington. “We sold out the hotel,” Lee said. They came from Prince William Sound, Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez oil spill had ruined Native American fisheries; from Albuquerque, where open uranium mines were emitting high levels of radiation; from Chicago, where power plant pollution had dirtied neighborhoods. They came from Houston, where garbage dumps were located next to Black communities. Some of their homes had terrible names, such as the strand of tiny towns between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as Cancer Alley. On opening day, only organizations with people of color in executive positions were allowed to participate. Over the four-day summit, activists prayed into microphones in English and Sioux, Korean and Spanish, long prayers seeking deliverance from suffering. “The summit was about people of color taking charge of their destiny,” said Bullard, who had published “Dumping in Dixie,” his groundbreaking book about the siting of toxic facilities in the South, a year earlier. Among the attendees was civil rights legend Jesse Jackson, a gifted orator who had made remarkable runs as the first Black presidential nominee in 1984 and 1988. Jackson had not been deeply involved with the environmental justice movement, but after sitting quietly and listening for portions of the summit, he finally spoke. “Your challenge to the anemic character and the exclusivity and the elite policies of the essentially White environmental movement is right on time,” Jackson said. “There can be no elite environmental movement. There must be a universal movement.” The roar that followed sounded like a battle cry. At his home near Logan Circle, Lee keeps a 234-page synopsis of the conference proceedings, including 17 principles of environmental justice, which instructed participants “to carry back home and institute in all of our communities.” The principles demand “respect and justice without discrimination,” an end to the placement of polluting industries and toxic waste sites in communities of color, and accountability for polluters. After the summit, activists saw some progress in Washington. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush established the first EPA Office of Environmental Justice. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order creating an environmental justice working group. But there was no action from Congress. Later, President George W. Bush weakened the office, proclaiming that it should advocate for all Americans rather than concentrating on racial minorities disproportionately affected by pollution. In 2004, the EPA inspector general took issue with Bush’s stance, and also found that the EPA had failed to incorporate environmental justice into its day-to-day decision-making. “It has not developed a clear vision or a comprehensive strategic plan,” the inspector general said. In 2008, President Barack Obama revived the office’s original mission and put renewed focus on affected communities, though some activists argued the administration should have been more aggressive. President Donald Trump later tried to zero out the office’s budget. And then, in 2020, came a racial reckoning. A Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes as onlookers recorded his last moments. A global pandemic preyed on Black, Latino and Indigenous people in polluted communities. And a presidential candidate who spoke passionately about environmental injustice started to rise in the polls. It happened a lifetime ago, but Joe Biden still talks about it. When he was 10 years old, Biden’s family lived in the shadow of an oil refinery in Claymont, Del. On the ride to school, his mother, Catherine, sometimes switched on the windshield wipers “and there would be a slick in the window.” “That’s why so many people in my state were dying and getting cancer,” Biden recalled while campaigning last year. “The fact is, those front-line communities, it doesn’t matter what you’re paying them. It matters how you keep them safe.” As president, Biden has vowed to funnel 40 percent of relevant climate investments to disadvantaged communities. He has promised to weave environmental justice considerations into virtually every federal agency, and to issue a yearly scorecard that measures progress. What will success look like? So far, the administration has not set clear goals. In a recent interview, White House domestic climate czar Gina McCarthy promised to make environmental justice activists “part of the decision-making.” And EPA Administrator Michael Regan, a former North Carolina official who established the state’s first environmental justice and inequity advisory board, has called the issue “near and dear to my heart.” “We have a lot of ground to make up, and I’m sure that I will be back before this committee asking for additional resources in this area to be sure that all Americans have access to clean air and clean water,” Regan said during his confirmation hearing. Activists are withholding judgment until they see results. “You’ve got to make a commitment that you are going to clean up X number of landfills, and you are going to reduce pollution in X number of communities,” said Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of We Act for Environmental Justice in New York. “I’m impressed that these first steps have been out of the ordinary. But there are high hopes and high expectations.” Christy Goldfuss, a senior vice president for energy and environmental policy at the Center for American Progress, said Biden should emulate states like California, where officials have targeted communities most in need of funding. “When you look at the fossil fuel infrastructure across the country,” she said, “it becomes more obvious which communities bear the brunt of this industry.” Certain places stand out. The 85-mile chemical corridor along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — home to 14 major manufacturing companies, including DuPont and Shell Chemical — is one example. The town of St. Gabriel alone is surrounded by 30 petrochemical plants, according to one analysis. Another study, conducted the year of the Warren County protest, found that people who lived within a mile of factories in the corridor were more than four times more likely than the average American to develop lung cancer. Miller-Travis hopes Biden can secure additional federal funding for environmental justice issues, so activists today won’t have to endure the intimidation she felt as a Black woman asking White philanthropists for help in the late 1980s. She likened the experience to “taking an elevator to heaven to talk to God.” Some advocates worry that federal dollars could be diverted by less-committed officials at the state and local level. Mustafa Ali, who directed the environmental justice office in Obama’s EPA, said, “It’s going to take folks in the press watching and trying to hold people accountable.” Back in Warren County, a historical marker commemorating the protest that “sparked [the] environmental justice movement” now stands along the lonely stretch of road where Chavis was arrested. On a recent afternoon, Burwell stood near the aging toxic waste site. “It was the first time that environmental issues had been looked at through the lens of civil rights,” she said. The marker doesn’t tell the whole story. Warren County residents never stopped fighting the landfill. State and federal officials eventually spent more than $17 million on detoxification. In 2004, more than 20 years after the protests started, Warren County finally was declared clean. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../environmental.../... Previous Next

< Back Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina Photo collage description: Photo top left corner is David Caldwell, Jr.,he and fellow activists have tried for decades to push local, state, and federal officials to counteract environmental racism. Photograph by Jeremy M. Lange Photograph by Jeremy M. Lange. Photo at bottom left is of a land field- Despite an agreement with the surrounding community, the landfill in Rogers-Eubanks, outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has continued to expand over the past forty years.Photograph by Jeremy M. Lange. Photo on right side North Carolina State Troopers pick up protesters on the road to the Warren County Landfill in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) These protesters are Black community residents and supporters; they are on the ground refusing to move. The NC state patrol are attempting to pick them up to remove them from the road. --Warren County NC Is the Birthplace of the Environmental Justice Movement! Environmental Racism - 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. ------------ NY Times Article Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina By Vann R. Newkirk II - January 16, 2016 On an autumn afternoon in 1972, the people of Rogers-Eubanks, a historically black community just outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, gathered beneath a tree to witness the end of a dispute. They were led by David Caldwell, Sr., one of Chapel Hill’s first black police officers, in whose back yard they stood. Before them was a delegation of local politicians, including Howard Lee, Chapel Hill’s first black mayor. For the previous five months, the community had been at odds with the county, the city, and the state university over the placement of a new landfill on Eubanks Road. Now Lee made a proposal. In exchange for agreeing to the construction of the landfill, Rogers-Eubanks would receive some of the municipal services that it lacked—sidewalks, water and sewer connections, a community center. After the landfill reached capacity, it would be turned into a recreation area. Caldwell and his neighbors relented. They looked on as an agreement was signed. Chapel Hill purchased eighty acres of land and began development. More than four decades later, the landfill has been expanded and there is no recreation area. A manhole cover near the site of the agreement serves as a symbol of services not rendered; many of the original residents of the community still lack sewer connections. “The most disgusting thing that I have with Chapel Hill was that it did not follow through with what I thought was an honest commitment,” Lee, who is now retired from public life, told me recently. “Unfortunately, when I left, they had amnesia.” Local residents have been fighting continuously to see Lee’s promises realized, first under the auspices of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association (rena), then with the Coalition to End Environmental Racism (ceer). The movement has spanned generations. David Caldwell, Jr., the son of the man under whose tree the original meeting took place, and who was present there as a boy, is one of today’s activists. “We had to learn how to fight,” he said. The American environmental-justice movement began in Afton, a small town sixty miles north of Chapel Hill, ten years after the agreement in Rogers-Eubanks. In 1978, Jim Hunt, who would go on to serve four terms as governor of North Carolina, faced one of his first political crises. A local trucker and his sons had dumped thousands of gallons of oil on state roads, rather than disposing of it lawfully. The oil contained polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a class of chemicals so toxic that Congress banned their production the following year. With the support of the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency, state officials—including Lee, who had by then become the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development—chose a site in Afton for a landfill to contain the hazardous waste from the cleanup effort. Warren County, where Afton is located, is one of the most vulnerable counties in North Carolina, with a quarter of its population living in poverty. Like Rogers-Eubanks, it was a landing place for former slaves during Reconstruction, and it continues to have one of the highest proportions of black residents of any county in the state. Four years of litigation, independent scientific examination, and criticism in the local media could not dissuade Hunt and the E.P.A. from disposing of the PCBs in Afton. In 1982, as construction moved along on the landfill, organizations such as the United Church of Christ and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sent in organizers to assist the protesters there. One of those organizers was Benjamin Chavis, a longtime activist in the civil-rights movement. “Warren County made headlines,” he said. “And because it made headlines in the media, we began to get calls from other communities. But you know that in the eighties you couldn’t just say there was discrimination. You had to prove it.” In 1987, the United Church of Christ, through its Commission for Racial Justice, prepared a report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which provided the concrete evidence that had so far been lacking. The church’s researchers found that race was more strongly correlated with the placement of a hazardous-waste facility than any other single factor, and remained so even when they controlled for income and geographic area. The report also indicated that three of the country’s five largest commercial hazardous-waste landfills, comprising forty per cent of the nation’s entire commercial-landfill capacity, were located in black or Hispanic communities. Subsequent studies of the health effects of living near such facilities have been indeterminate, in part because it is difficult to track residents through a lifetime of exposure. Nevertheless, a review of fifty epidemiological studies, published in 2000, found that increases in self-reported health problems were common, and that adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as low birth weight, genetic defects, and infant mortality, were associated with living near a landfill that handles toxic chemicals. Two decades after its initial report, the United Church of Christ published a follow-up, “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty.” It found that little had changed in the intervening years; most of those living within 1.8 miles of a hazardous-waste facility today are people of color. Rogers-Eubanks provides an object lesson in the political and regulatory difficulties that communities of color can face once a hazardous-waste facility is built. For three decades, none of the parties listed on the original deed of sale for the 1972 landfill—the Town of Chapel Hill, the Town of Carrboro, and Orange County—followed through on Lee’s promises. In the same time period, the county requested grants from the E.P.A. to extend water and sewer services to two mostly white communities in the same watershed. Then, in 2007, instead of closing the landfill on Eubanks Road, the board of county commissioners voted unanimously to approve a solid-waste transfer station as an addition to the already sprawling complex. Later, facing stiff opposition from the community and local media, the board backpedalled. According to the Reverend Robert Lee Campbell, the leader of rena and ceer, local governments relied on the legal concept of extraterritorial jurisdiction, which allows municipalities to make decisions about areas beyond their official limits. Even though Rogers-Eubanks citizens could vote for county commissioners, they were politically excluded from Chapel Hill, the town that managed and used the land, and neither the county nor Chapel Hill had any obligation to provide services, aside from places to drop off waste. “Most of the council members didn’t even know where [the landfill] was,” Campbell said. In 2007, Campbell filed a claim with the E.P.A.’s Office of Civil Rights. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents government entities that receive federal funds from discriminating and provides mechanisms by which individuals can seek redress. But as Chavis noted, the burden of proving discrimination is extraordinarily high. An independent review of the E.P.A.’s track record, conducted by Deloitte in 2011, found that the agency had “not adequately adjudicated Title VI complaints.” In its forty-five years of existence, the agency has yet to make a single formal finding of discrimination. It rejects the vast majority of Title VI claims before investigation. At the time that Campbell filed his claim, the E.P.A. had performed no civil-rights investigations in North Carolina since digital record-keeping began, in 1993. Ultimately, the agency rejected most of Campbell’s claim, on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction, because it had not granted funds to Chapel Hill or Carrboro. rena and ceer continued their push. In November, 2009, representatives of the organizations were invited to the White House Clean Energy Forum on Public Health to present their case to the E.P.A., which had recently been taken over by its first black administrator, an Obama appointee named Lisa Jackson. ceer activists also waged a grassroots campaign in Orange County. Residents learned how to perform land, soil, and water studies with equipment that they borrowed from university scientists. What they discovered—raw sewage seeping from yards, elevated levels of fecal and E. coli contamination in local water sources, toxic chemicals in the air—was startling enough to bring in investigators from the Orange County Department of Health, whose findings were even more serious than what residents expected. Less than half of all septic systems were in compliance with code, numerous sources of drinking water were contaminated with fecal bacteria, and nine out of eleven wells tested failed to meet health standards. Finally, in 2012, soon after the E.P.A. announced that it would investigate part of Campbell’s claim, Orange County yielded, pledging to build a community center in Rogers-Eubanks. The following year, county officials decided to extend water and sewer services. The community center was finished in 2014, and engineering studies are under way for laying down sewer and water lines sometime this year. Local, state, and federal officials are finally moving to keep the promises that were made forty-three years ago. Community leaders are pleased with the progress but not yet content. “I don’t feel anybody should fight as long as we’ve been fighting to get something that’s God-given,” Caldwell told me. “It’s not a temporary thing. You fight until the end. You fight until you can’t fight anymore. And that’s my goal, to fight until it’s done.” Previous Next

< Back Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition In 2011, the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters set the Guinness World Record for leading the largest recorded ring shout, during the “Word, Shout, Song” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D. C. Photograph: In 2011, the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters set the Guinness World Record for leading the largest recorded ring shout, during the “Word, Shout, Song” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D. C. Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition A ritual of the GullahGeechee, who are the descendants of slaves brought to America from West Africa. Those slaves worked on plantations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. After the Civil War, their culture was largely neglected until the 1990s, when a revival began. The most venerable African American song and movement traditions — the "shout," also known as the "ring shout." The ring shout, associated with burial rituals in West Africa, persisted among African slaves and was perpetuated after emancipation in African American communities, where the fundamental counterclockwise movement of the participants used in religious ceremonies integrated Christian themes, expressed often in the form of spirituals. They move to the beat of clapping and a stick that is banged on a wooden surface. The stick takes the place of drums, because slaves were forbidden to beat drums on plantations in the 18th century First written about by outside observers in 1845 and described during and after the Civil War, the shout was concentrated in coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. . Before slavery ended, slaves who were from different African countries but worked on the same plantations created their own language and folk traditions in order to communicate easily with one another and to stick together. The Creole language they devised is a mix of words and phrases from West African languages combined with words from European languages, including English. After the end of the Civil War and slavery, many Gullah people rejected their traditions as they sought to assimilate into mainstream American culture. The social and linguistic history of the Gullah people back to their ancestral homeland of Africa, The language of the Gullah people, which was previously dismissed simply as “bad English,” and discovered that the dialect was actually a mix of 32 diverse African languages. The Gullah people have their roots among the 645,000 Africans captured, enslaved and brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. There are only a handful of groups that practice the tradition in the U.S., these groups do their best to preserve and protect the culture of the Gullah people, who today live in areas of South Carolina and Georgia. Part of the reason the tradition has faded out is that after the Civil War, many Gullah did their best to adapt to mainstream American culture in order to better fit in, often abandoning traditions like the Gullah language of Geechee and rituals such as the ring shout. Being a Geechee was super unpopular–many were taught not to be Geechee, They were told ‘You’re too Geechee, Because it wasn’t mainstream, and they were told they couldn’t get the better jobs, because they talked funny. Most members of the remaining Ring Shout groups are direct descendants of enslaved Africans on American plantations. Previous Next

< Back The musical family of John Wesley Allen Pictured here is the musical family of John Wesley Allen. Pictured here is the musical family of John Wesley Allen. Left to right, Laura, Carrie Mae, Johnny, John Wesley (father), Daisy, Della, Lille, and Henry. Source: PC.2154.v11.pg21-From the Allen, Carter, and Gwynn Family Papers and Binders, State Archives of NC. Previous Next

< Back The Wilmington Ten - Continued Photo: SEATED (L to R) – Margaret Jacobs, mother of deceased Wilmington Ten member Jerry Jacobs; Marvin Patrick of the Wilmington Ten; Mary Alice Jervay, NNPA Board member and publisher of The Wilmington Journal; Fran Farrar, publisher of the County4You News; James McKoy, Wilmington Ten member; Willie Earl Vereen, Wilmington Ten member; Connie Tindall, Wilmington Ten member. STANDING (L to R) – Pastor John Thatch and his daughter Shawn Thatch from the Wilmington Journal; Dorothy Leavell, NNPA Board member and publisher of the Chicago Crusader; Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., Wilmington Ten member; unknown female; Rev. Kojo Nantambu, president of the Charlotte NAACP; Cloves Campbell, Jr., chairman of the NNPA, and publisher of the Arizona Informant; John B. Smith, NNPA member and publisher of Atlanta Inquirer; Jan Perry and Judy Mack, daughters of deceased Wilmington Ten member Anne Shepard; LAST ROW STANDING (L to R) – Unknown male; attorneys Irving Joyner and James Ferguson; Peter Grear, publisher of Greater Diversity News; and Willie Moore, brother of Wilmington Ten member Wayne Moore, who could not attend. Photo by: John Davis/Wilmington Journal ---------- Part Two-The Wilmington Ten Continued October 17, 1972—Chavis and the "Wilmington 9" convicted on charges of conspiracy to assault emergency personnel and burning with an incendiary device. Anne Shepard convicted on charges of "accessory before the fact" of firebombing. Her original charges had been reduced sometime after the mistrial was declared. Chavis was sentenced to 25-29 years for arson, and 4-5 years for conspiracy to assault emergency personnel. The sentences are to run concurrently and therefore total 29 years. Other sentences were: Marvin Patrick and Connie Tyndall, 22-26 years for fire bombing and 4-5 years for conspiracy to assault emergency personnel; Jerry Jacobs, 22-26 years for arson and 3-5for conspiracy to assault emergency personnel; Willie E. Vereen, Reginald Epps, James McCoy, Joe Wright and Wayne Moore 20-24 years for arson and 3-5 for conspiracy to assault emergency personnel; Anne Shepard, 7-10 years. Bonds for the defendants were: Ms. Shepard, $20,000; all others except Rev. Chavis, $40,000-$45,000; Rev. Chavis, $50,000. Dec. 1972 - UCC Executive Council, complying with promise to support staff arrested in the line of duty, post $50,000 bond for Chavis. June 17, 1973 - Angela Davis holds rally at Antioch Church Of God In Christ in support of the Wilmington 10 June 1973 - UCC General Synod votes to borrow $350,000 bail to free the nine defendants still in prison December 1974. North Carolina Court of Appeals affirms the convictions. May 1975 - North Carolina Supreme Court refuses to hear the case. November 17, 1975 - The Hon. Charles B. Rangel enters the Wilmington 10 case into the Congressional Record. January 1976 - U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear the case. Wilmington 10 are jailed, without bail. August 1976. Witness Hall admits he lied in implicating the 10. January 1977 - A second prosecution witness admits he lied, accusing the 10 in exchange for a mini-bike and job from the prosecutor. February 1977. - The third and only other prosecution witness with knowledge of the crimes indicates serious irregularities in his testimony. May 9,1977 - Civil Rights Activist Angela Davis and U.S Rep. Don Edwards, express support for the Wilmington 10 standing on the Pender County Courthouse steps at Post Conviction hearing. May 20, 1977 - Activist trial lawyer William Kunster says he sees the 10 case as part of a federal conspiracy launched by the Nixon administration. May 1977 - Despite the recantation of all three key prosecution witnesses, new defense testimony, and the contention of more than 2,000 legal irregularities in the original trial, Superior Court Judge George Fountain finds “no denial” of the constitutional rights of the Ten and denies them a new trial and bail. January 1978 - After a year-long personal review of the case, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt refuses to pardon or free the 10 and reduces sentences of 20-25 years to 13-17 years. Anne Sheppard had been paroled by that time. The other nine remained in prison. February 1978 - 55 congressmen sign a petition urging U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell to direct the Justice Department to intervene in Federal Court on behalf of the Wilmington 10 May 3,1978 - Congressional delegation including John Conyers, Ron Dellums and Don Edwards, visit members of the Wilmington Ten in prison. July 15, 1978 - Speaking in Paris, France, U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young says there are “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of political prisoners in the United States. July 17, 1978 - Gary Indiana Mayor Richard Hatcher supports Young’s position, saying Young was “telling the truth” and that the presence of political prisoners in U.S. is a “known fact”, citing the Wilmington 10 case and the case of Reuben “Hurricane” Carter as examples. July 31, 1978 - The Wilmington Ten are the first group of prison inmates in the United States of America to be officially declared “political prisoners” by Amnesty International in 1978. This conclusion by Amnesty International was published and distributed worldwide November 15, 1978 - U.S Justice Department files a petition in Federal Court stating that it had uncovered evidence that indicates the Wilmington 10 were denied a fair trial in 1972. It petitioned the court to either throw out the state convictions or hold a hearing on the government’s findings. December 4, 1980 - U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of the Wilmington Ten, citing gross misconduct on the part of the prosecution in obtaining convictions. Source: http://ftpcontent4.worldnow.com/.../W-10%20TIMELINE.pdf Previous Next

< Back Mike Wiley Mike Wiley has dedicated his life's work as a cultural preservationists from North Carolina. Mike Wiley has dedicated his life's work as a cultural preservationists from North Carolina. Using his artistic skills and talents for preserving the stories, memories and contributions of African Americans from our state. 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 play. Morphing from young to old, man to woman, African American to white, his gripping stories enlighten and inspire audiences of every age to apply history’s lessons to events and situations in the present. Mike Wiley’s theatrical repertoire includes: The Parchman Hour, Downrange: Stories from the Homefront; Dar HE: The Story of Emmett Till, One Noble Journey: A Box Marked Freedom, Jackie Robinson: A Game Apart, Breach of Peace, The Fire of Freedom, and the theatrical adaptation of Blood Done Sign my Name. In the gripping independent film adaptation of his play Dar He, Wiley himself portrays more than 30 characters in a tour-de-force performance that garnered major film and acting awards at numerous film festivals across North America, Europe and Australia—including “Best Actor” at the Harlem International Film Festival. Wiley has dedicated fifteen years to documentary theatre for young audiences. He has been featured in News and Observer’s “Tar Heel of the Week,” Our State magazine, UNC-TV’s “North Carolina Now,” and North Carolina Public Radio’s “The State of Things.” He was named the 2012 Indie Artist of the Year by the Independent Weekly. His extended educational residencies have been funded through grant programs of the North Carolina Arts Council, and his plays have been selected for spotlight showcases at major industry conferences, including Arts Northwest, Performing Arts Exchange, Arts Midwest and ArtsMarket. Wiley completed a 20+-performance tour of One Noble Journey in Ontario, Canada in 2014. An Upward Bound alum and Trio Achiever Award recipient, Wiley is an M.F.A. graduate and Distinguished Alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a former Lehman-Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Wiley’s overriding goal is to expand cultural awareness for audiences of all ages through dynamic portrayals based on pivotal moments in African-American history and, in doing so, to help unveil a richer picture of the total American experience. [Adapted from materials submitted by the honoree’s agent at Mike Wiley Productions: http://www.goingbarefoot.com/artist_wiley.php and http://www.goingbarefoot.com/.../mike.../Mike_Wiley_Bio.pdf] Previous Next

< Back [Untitled photo, possibly related to: One mule drag on North Carolina farm] 1938 Apr. Photo shows possible sharecroppers- African American men and women stoop planting tobacco or cotton in furrows, with mule in foreground. [Untitled photo, possibly related to: One mule drag on North Carolina farm] 1938 Apr. Photo shows possible sharecroppers- African American men and women stoop planting tobacco or cotton in furrows, with mule in foreground. Photographer: John Vachon, (1914-1975) Source: LOC - Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Previous Next

< Back Eliza Dyer Eliza was the baby nurse for many Goldsboro children. She was the first Black person to be buried in Willowdale Cemetery. She was buried by white friends as a Testimonial Token, Loyalty, and Faithfulness. She died 10-10-1910; aged ca. 96 years. Eliza Dyer Credit: Stan Best ----- Article From: Museum's Display Will Reveal Local Black History By Bonnie Edwards / The Goldsboro News-Argus Published in News on February 6, 2007 1:47 PM An exhibit depicting the stories and memories of local black history will open today at the Wayne County Museum. Wayne County NAACP member Linda Wilkins Daniels has set up the exhibit, which will run through February as part of the county's observance of Black History Month. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from noon until 4 p.m. Mrs. Daniels said she was amazed when her research revealed so many intriguing stories. After finding a picture of a slave house on the Poplar Hill Plantation in the "Wayne County Heritage Book," she kept digging. She learned that slaves were not allowed to fight against the North during the Civil War. "The owners didn't want their slaves to be a part of an uprising," she said. "If they were freed and in the North, they could join the Army." Slavery was a part of Wayne County's history, like it or not, she said. The national Black History Month theme this year is "From Slavery to Freedom: Africans in the Americas." The purpose of the exhibit, she said, is not to point fingers and blame ancestors but to take a look at the county's history and to understand the struggles of the black man. "The hope is that the person leaving the exhibit will leave enriched, informed, knowledgeable and appreciate the plight of the African from the day he set foot in Wayne County until the present," she said "I want people to come to the exhibit and leave with an appreciation and respect for each other's cultures and understand that this is history." This is Mrs. Daniels' first time creating a historical museum exhibit. But she's a history lover, and she said she has caught the history bug. She said she enjoyed doing the research and gathering the artifacts. She even convinced an artist from Greenville, Josh Roche, to loan his paintings portraying famous black people for the exhibit. She said she's going to keep on digging. "There's a lot more here than we know," she said. Mrs. Daniels found many surprises during her research. She discovered a prep school, the Goldsboro Normal and Classical Institute, which the Quakers started to prepare black students for college between 1886 and 1898. Then there was Eliza Dyer, a "baby nurse" for many children in Goldsboro. Mrs. Daniels' research revealed baby nurses were like today's midwives. "She was so well-liked she was buried in Willowdale because of her involvement with all the children. Back then, they didn't allow blacks to be buried with whites." During the 1940s, the Gordons were the only black family allowed to shop in the Weil's Department Store. "Dr. Edmund W. Gordon grew up in a family of privilege. His mother was a teacher. His father was a doctor. They weren't considered the average black family," Mrs. Daniels said. Gordon grew up to become a teacher, too, and was professor emeritus at the Yale and Columbia universities. He wrote more than 175 scholarly articles and a dozen books. She found some stories of heroism, too. She learned that, on Sept. 18, 1968, a black teenager altered his birth certificate and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of 14 and became PFC. Dan Bullock. He arrived in Vietnam on May 18. 1969 and died a month later at the age of 15. His body was returned and buried in Elmwood Cemetery. Many black people made history in Wayne County, she found. In the 1980s, Sam Jones of Mount Olive became an Olympic athlete. In the 1990s, Warren Greenfield was the first black magistrate in Wayne County. And when Mrs. Daniels arrived in Wayne County in 2000, she didn't realize she would become a part of history, too, when she campaigned to help Jerry Braswell become the first black judge in the county's history. Source Link: http://savannah.newsargus.com/.../museums_display_will.../ ---- Excerpt From an article in the Goldsboro News-Argus - Jan 28, 2008 "Like the plot where black baby nurse Eliza Dyer is buried. The monument to her memory is significant because it was an era of slavery and segregation, Mrs. Rosemann explained. "She took care of the children and the (white) family was so honored, they buried her with the family," she said. "She may have thought her life didn't matter or that she was not contributing something important, but to the family they apparently thought she hung the moon." Source Link: http://savannah.newsargus.com/.../01/28/gathering_memories/ Previous Next

< Back African American Grave Site Disturbed By Subdivision Development The G.C. and Frances Hawley Museum March 19, 2021 · African American Grave Site Disturbed By Subdivision Development By Kassie Simmons | March 16, 2021 at 6:30 PM EDT - Updated March 16 at 7:50 PM WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - Work by developers ground to a halt after residents complained they were getting too close to a community cemetery last week, but for some graves it was too late. The G.C. and Frances Hawley Museum March 19, 2021 · African American Grave Site Disturbed By Subdivision Development By Kassie Simmons | March 16, 2021 at 6:30 PM EDT - Updated March 16 at 7:50 PM WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - Work by developers ground to a halt after residents complained they were getting too close to a community cemetery last week, but for some graves it was too late. Steve Edens always knew he lived on old plantation land. He even knew about the plantation owner’s graves by his house and the slave cemetery just a stone’s throw away. To some extent, Pender County knew the graves were there too. “There is one cemetery that is marked on that layer out there that’s right along the border of Cardinal Acres,” said Pender County planning director Travis Henley. The slave cemetery eventually turned into a community cemetery. Edens said he recalls people buried there as recently as the 1950s. As time passed and the area grew, the plots were long forgotten by most people — but not everyone. Both Marshall Moore and Wil Hanley have grandfathers buried in the cemetery. Last week, Edens and his wife noticed construction was getting a little too close for comfort, threatening the historic burial grounds. “Pender County has not issued approval of the preliminary plat for this site, which is required prior to commencement of any land development activities,” said Henley. “Therefore, the property is in violation of the Unified Development Ordinance.” Officials put a halt to the work immediately, but relatives are still upset by what’s going on. “Now, they come in and just take land,”said Moore. “They need to be punished for this.” Luckily, Hansley’s grandfather’s plot was spared. “It’s amazing, you know, to know where your past relatives are,”said Hansley. “Especially a granddad.” Others weren’t as fortunate. Many graves were already missing headstones and at least one of those left behind is now shattered. Moore and Edens believe its the work of heavy equipment plowing through what’s supposed to be a place to rest in peace. With only a handful of graves left to salvage, descendants want answers — and most of all, justice — so their loved ones can rest in peace. Pender County had surveyors on-site Monday to attempt to determine the presence of any additional unmarked graves. So far, they have found six, but Edens says there are dozens more buried there. The county staff anticipates receiving the results of this survey in the coming days. Local historians and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, North Carolina Department of Cultural and Natural Resources, and the US Army Corps of Engineers are working with county officials to ensure compliance with historic regulations regarding cemeteries. Site work will not continue until the developers are no longer in violation of the county’s unified development ordinance. WECT obtained the application for master development plan identifying Logan Developers Inc. as the company applying to develop the land. The company could not be reached for comment. Source: https://www.wect.com/.../african-american-grave-site.../... Previous Next

< Back American History-African Americans Who Changed This Country: A Medical Perspective of Achievements These are not all of the Black People who forged paths through racism to become change agents in the American Medical Field. 1721 Onesimus, an enslaved African, describes to Cotton Mather the African method of inoculation against smallpox. The technique, later used to protect American Revolutionary War soldiers, is perfected in the 1790's by British doctor Edward Jenner's use of a less virulent organism. 1783 Dr. James Durham, born into slavery in 1762, buys his freedom and begins his own medical practice in New Orleans, becoming the first African-American doctor in the United States. As a youngster, he was owned by a number of doctors, who taught him how to read and write, mix medicines, and serve and work with patients. Durham had a flourishing medical practice in New Orleans until 1801 when the city restricted his practice because he did not have a formal medical degree. 1788 Dr. James Durham is invited to Philadelphia to meet Dr. Benjamin Rush, who wanted to investigate Durham's reported success in treating patients with diphtheria. Dr. Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of America's foremost physicians, was so impressed that he personally read Durham's paper on diphtheria before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Durham returned to New Orleans in 1789, where he saved more yellow fever victims than any other physician (During an epidemic that killed thousands, he lost 11 of 64 patients). 1837 Dr. James McCune Smith graduates from the University of Glasgow, becoming the first African American to earn a medical degree. 1847 Dr. David Jones Peck becomes the first African-Amercan medical student to graduate from a medical school in the United States (Rush Medical College, Chicago, IL). 1852 Augusta, GA: The Jackson Street Hospital is established as the first institution of record solely for the care of colored patients. The founders were a group of charitable minded whites led by Dr. Henry Fraser Campbell, University of Georgia School of Medicine. There was no colored staff in this three story structure, which housed fifty beds, operating quarters, and a lecture hall. 1862 Freedmen's Hospital is established in Washington, D.C., and is the only federally-funded health care facility for Blacks in the nation. Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, Susie Baker (who later became known as Susie King Taylor) is the first African-American U.S. Army nurse during the Civil War. King served in a newly formed regiment of Black soldiers organized at Port Royal Island off the South Carolina coast by Major General David Hunter, commander of the Union's Department of the South. After the war, she helped to organize a branch of the Women's Relief Corps 1864 Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African-American female to earn a medical degree, graduates from New England Female Medical College, Boston. 1867 Robert Tanner Freeman is one of the first six graduates in dental medicine from Harvard University, thus becoming the first African American to receive an education in dentistry and a dental degree from an American medical school. (Freeman was born in 1847 to slave parents in North Carolina.) 1868 Washington, DC: Howard University School of Medicine, established for the purpose of educating African-American doctors, opens to both black and white students, including women. 1878 Dr. James Francis Shober earns his M.D. from Howard University School of Medicine, Washington, D.C. and later becomes the first known African-American physician with a medical degree to practice in North Carolina. 1879 Mary Eliza Mahoney becomes the first African-American professional nurse, graduating from the New England Hospital for Women and Children (Now Dimock Community Health Center), Boston. 1881 Atlanta, GA: The first school of record for Black student nurses is established at Spelman College. 1891 Chicago, IL: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams establishes the Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the first Black-owned and first interracial hospital in the United States. Dr. Austin Maurice Curtis, Sr. (a Raleigh, North Carolina native) becomes the hospital's first intern. 1893 Chicago, IL: At Provident Hospital, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performs the first successful operation on a human heart. (The patient, a victim of a chest stab wound, survived and lived a normal life for twenty years after the operation.) 1895 Atlanta, GA: The National Medical Association is founded, since African Americans are barred from other established medical groups. Philadelphia, PA: Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell founds the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School for Nurses. 1896 Saint Agnes Hospital established in Raleigh, North Carolina on the grounds of St. Augustine's College. Despite obvious handicaps, it was referred to in 1922 as the "only well equipped hospital for Negroes between Washington and New Orleans, serving not only North Carolina, but adjacent Virginia and South Carolina." The hospital closed in April 1961 after nearly 65 years of service. Source: Journal of the National Medical Association, 53(5):439-446; Sept. 1961. Nashville, TN: Dr. John Henry Jordan, a son of slaves, graduates from Meharry Medical College, defying his father and the ways of the Deep South. He was the first Black doctor in Coweta County, Georgia, and built the first Black hospital in the county. 1900 Washington, DC: The Washington Society of Colored Dentists, the first organization of Black dentists, is founded. 1901 Durham, NC: Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore convinces Washington Duke to donate money for the construction of Lincoln Hospital. 1904 Alois Alzheimer selects five foreign visiting students at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital, University of Munich, as his graduate research assistants, including African American Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller. After leaving Germany in 1906, Fuller continued his research on degenerative disorders of the brain and was a widely published pioneer in Alzheimer's disease research. At the time of his death in 1953, the only acknowledgment of his Fuller's work was an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree awarded in 1943 by his alma mater, Livingstone College, Salisbury, NC. 1908 The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) is established. (NACGN was dissolved in 1951, when its members voted to merge with the American Nurses Association.) 1912 Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller, recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the country's first Black psychiatrist, publishes the first comprehensive clinical review of all Alzheimer's cases that have been reported up to this time. He was the first to translate into English much of Alois Alzheimer's work on the disease that bears his name. 1915 The NAACP awards Dr. Ernest E. Just the first Springarn Medal for his pioneering research on fertilization and cell division. 1917 Camp Upton, NY: Dr. Louis T. Wright, a pioneer in clinical antibiotic research, develops a better technique (intradermal injection) for vaccinating soldiers against smallpox. 1921 Dr. Meta L. Christy, a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, is the world's first African-American osteopathic physician. 1927 Boston, MA: Dr. William Augustus Hinton develops the Hinton Test for diagnosing syphilis. (He later develops an improved version, the Hinton-Davies Test, in 1931.) 1936 Dr. William Augustus Hinton's book, Syphilis and Its Treatment, is the first medical textbook written by an African American to be published. 1938 Sara Delaney's article entitled "Bibliotherapy in a Hospital" is published in the February issue of Opportunity magazine. (Delaney, chief librarian at the U.S. Veteran's Administration Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, was a pioneer in the use of selected reading to aid in the treatment of patients.) 1940 Dr. Charles R. Drew presents his thesis, "Banked Blood," at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. The thesis covers two years of blood research, including the discovery that plasma could replace whole blood transfusions. 1943 Vivien Theodore Thomas, laboratory researcher and surgical technician, makes history with Dr. Alfred Blalock as co-developer of the "Blalock" clamp, the first clamp for temporary occlusion of the pulmonary artery which is used in the first successful surgical treatment for "Blue-Baby" Syndrome in 1944. Although Thomas, who had previously been a carpenter and janitor, never completed his original plans for medical school, he was supervisor of Johns Hopkins surgical laboratories for 35 years and later appointed instructor in surgery at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. The 2004 HBO television movie "Something the Lord Made" was based on his role in the historic Blue Baby surgery, as was the 2003 public television documentary, Partners of the Heart.Partial Partial Source: African-American Contributions to Medicine -- part 6 of 7 1946 A group of African-American medics land on Utah Beach/Normandy on D-Day + 4, as part of a nine-person, all Black team of medics, which included two officers. Serving with the 687th and the 530th Medical Detachments, they spent most of the rest of the European campaign attached to the 3rd Army while participating in many of its major actions. Leonidas Harris Berry becomes the first black physician on staff at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, IL, but he continued to fight for an attending position, which he finally received in 1963. He also chaired a Chicago commission in the 1950s that worked to make hospitals more inclusive for black physicians and increase facilities in underserved parts of the city. Berry helped to organize the "Flying Black Medics" in 1970, a group of practitioners who flew to Cairo from Chicago to bring medical care and health education to those remote communities 1950 Dr. Helen O. Dickens becomes the first African-American woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons. 1951 African American Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer and treated at Johns Hopkins University, where a doctor took cells from her cervix without her knowledge. These cells were found to be unique in that they could be kept alive and would also grow indefinitely. Since that time, Lacks' cells, now known as HeLa cells (in Lacks' honor), have been cultured and used in experiments ranging from determining the long-term effects of radiation to testing the live polio vaccine. Read more 1954 Dr. Peter Murray Marshall is installed as the President of the New York County Medical Society, becoming the first African American to lead a unit of the American Medical Association. 1964 Dr. Geraldine Pittman Woods becomes the first African-American woman appointed to the National Advisory General Medical Services Council. In this position, she addressed the need to improve science education and research opportunities at minority institutions. 1967 Dr. Jane C. Wright, pioneer in chemotherapy research and daughter of Dr. Louis T. Wright (see "1917"), is appointed an Associate Dean and Professor of Surgery at New York Medical College. At the time, this was the highest post ever attained by an African-American woman in medical administration. 1969 Alfred Day Hershey, PhD, geneticist, becomes the first African American to share a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He received the award for his research on the replication and genetic structure of viruses. Please note: Although Alfred Day Hershey appears in African American Firsts in Science and Technology (1999), there is controversy regarding his ethnicity, as there is no reference to him being African American in his New York Times Obiturary. 1973 Patricia Bath is the first African American to complete a residency in ophthalmology, which led to her appointment two years later as the first woman faculty member at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research 1975 Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, is the only Black medical school founded in the United States during the 20th century. It is among one of the nation's leading educators of primary care physicians and has been recognized as the top institution among U.S. medical schools for their social mission which emphasizes underserved urban and rural populations. Dr. Louis Wade Sullivan, founding dean and president of Morehouse School of Medicine, is also noted as the serving as the Secretary of the Dept. of Health & Human Services under the George H. W. Bush Administration, where he directed the creation of the Office of Minority Programs in the National Institutes of Health’s Office of the Director. 1976 Patricia Bath, a pioneer in the treatment and prevention of blindness and an advocate for eyesight as a basic human right, founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research 1978 Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall becomes the first African-American President of the American Cancer Society. 1981 Alexa Canady becomes the first African-American woman neurosurgeon in the U.S. She served as chief of neurosurgery at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan from 1987-2001. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research Dr. Yvonne Thornton becomes the first black woman board certified in special competency in maternal-fetal medicine. The challenges surrounding Thornton and her sisters' struggle to obtain higher education were detailed in her Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Ditchdigger's Daughters: A Black Family's Astounding Success Story, which was later made into a movie. Source: African-American Contributions to Medicine -- part 3 of 7 1986 Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston's groundbreaking study of sickle-cell disease led to a nationwide screening program to test newborns for immediate treatment. 1987 Baltimore, MD: Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon, leads a seventy-member surgical team at Johns Hopkins Hospital in separating Siamese twins joined at the cranium. 1988 Patricia Bath is the first African-American woman physician to receive a medical patent with her Laserphaco Probe, which improved cataract treatment. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research 1990 Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston becomes the first female and first African American physician to direct the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Bureau of Primary Health Care. She was also the second black woman to serve as assistant surgeon general, achieving the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service. Her 1986 study of sickle-cell disease led to a nationwide screening program to test newborns for immediate treatment. 1991 Dr. Vivian Pinn is the first female and first African-American woman Director of the Office of Research on Women's Health, National Institutes of Health, which oversees research on women and insures that they are represented in broad clinical trials. 1992 Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first Black woman astronaut in NASA history, becomes the first Black woman in space, as part of SPACELAB J, a successful joint U.S. and Japanese science mission. A graduate of Cornell University Medical School, Jemison served in the Peace Corps as its area medical officer from 1983 to 1985 in the West African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia. 1993 Dr. Edward S. Cooper is the first African American elected as National President of the American Heart Association. Dr. Joycelyn Elders is the first African American to be appointed as U.S. Surgeon General. Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee is the first African-American woman to be appointed Dean of a U.S. medical school (Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine) 1995 Dr. Helene Doris Gayle is the first female and first African-American Director of the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Lonnie Bristow becomes the first African American President of the American Medical Association (AMA) in its 148 year history. His work as president focused on many of the issues he addressed throughout his career including sickle cell anemia, coronary care, and socio-economic issues impacting health care. 1996 Dr. Ernest E. Just is recognized for his contributions to the biological sciences with a commerative U.S. Postal Service stamp. 1997 Dr. Donna Christian-Christensen is the first woman physician and first African-American woman physician in the U.S. Congress. Des Moines, IA: Drs. Paula Mahone and Karen Drake are members of a team of forty specialists involved in the delivery of the McCaughey septuplets at Iowa Methodist Medical Center. 1998 Dr. David Satcher is sworn in as both the Assistant Secretary for Health and U.S. Surgeon General. 2000 Dr. Sharon Henry is the first African-American woman to be elected into membership as a fellow in the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma. The nation's largest group of African-American physicians, the National Medical Association (NMA), charge that many managed care plans effectively discriminate against them, forcing some of their physicians to cease practicing medicine or relocate, and discouraging others from establishing practices in certain areas. Although NMA members conceded that they lacked comprehensive national data to buttress their claims, the doctors claimed to have plenty of anecdotal accounts of instances where they had been left out. 2002 Dr. Roselyn Payne Epps is the first African-American woman to serve as President of the American Medical Women's Association. 2007 Emmette Chappelle, a renowned NASA biochemist and inventor and holder of 14 U.S. patents, is inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work in bioluminescence. A World War II veteran whose research enabled the more accurate detection of bacteria in water, Chappelle worked in support of NASA’s manned spaceflight missions. Source: African-American Trailblazers in Medicine & Medical Research 2011 The National Library of Medicine, in collaboration with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, releases The Charles R. Drew Papers on the Library's Profiles in Science Website. William G. Coleman, Jr., PhD, is appointed as NIH's National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities first permanent Scientific Director and the first African-American Scientific Director in the history of the NIH Intramural Research Program. Dr. Coleman, a microbiologist, has had a long career as a scientist in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Intramural Research Program. 2016 Carla D. Hayden, longtime chief executive of the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in Baltimore and a former president of the American Library Association, is sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress. Hayden, who was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, is the first woman and the first African American to serve in this role. The collections of the Library of Congress include books, pamphlets, and periodicals in a vast number of languages and classifications including medicine. 2018 Dr. Patrice Harris becomes the first black woman President-Elect of the country's largest physician organization, the American Medical Association (AMA). First elected to AMA's board of trustees in 2011, Harris most recently was the group's point person on the opioid epidemic. Beverly Murphy, a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals and a Medical Library Association (MLA) Fellow, begins her term as the first African-American President of the Medical Library Association, established in 1898 as a global, nonprofit educational organization of institutions and professionals in the health information field. Source: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nimhd-14.htm Previous Next

< Back Biddle College (Johnson C. Smith College) and Livingstone College football teams ​ 131 years ago on On December 27, 1892 these two North Carolina Black colleges, (HBCU’s) played the first Black College Intercollegiate football game. The game was the Cricket Celebration Bowl and the trophy commemorates the inaugural game the players. Left Image: Biddle College football team. The college is now named Johnson C. Smith University. Year unknown. Right image: Livingstone College football team. Year unknown. -- The Livingstone Bears of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, were formally organized in the fall of 1892. The team included J.W. Walker (captain), W.J. Trent (manager), R.J, Rencher, Henry Rives, C. N, Garland, J. R. Dillard, J.B.A. Yelverton, Wade Hampton, Charles H Patrick, and J.J. Taylor, and F.H. Cummings. As documented in the college's newspaper's 1930 edition, The two teams put their money together to purchase a regulation football and the players equipped their street shoes with cleats, taking them off after practice. The young women of the school's industrial department made the players' uniforms for the first game. The teams played two 45-minute halves on Livingstone's front lawn. W.J. Trent scored Livingstone's only touchdown on a fumble recovery. By then, the snow had covered the field's markings, and Biddle argued that the fumble was recovered out of bounds. Biddle won the contest 5-0. In 1956, an athletic marker was erected at Livingstone in honor of the historic game. Source: Courtesy AAREG ----- Here's a different article about this historic football game. The 1892 Biddle football team represented Biddle University—now known as Johnson C. Smith University—in the 1892 college football season as an independent.[1] On December 27 of 1892, Livingstone College and Biddle College, (Johnson C. Smith) University played in the snows of Salisbury, North Carolina, just two days after Christmas. A writer of a story in the 1930 year-book of Livingstone College provided a glimpse of that December experience when the team from Biddle Institute traveled to Livingstone's Old Delta Grove campus in Salisbury to play while writers recorded the results of a historic moment in sports history. According to historian T.M. Martin, the men of Biddle spent two years studying and practicing the sport of football. In 1892, they challenged the men of Livingstone, whose team was formally organized in the fall of that year. "It is doubtful that when Biddle University and Livingstone College teed it up on Dec. 27, 1892, in what was described as little more than a cow pasture, no less, if the contestants in this momentous occasion had the slightest inkling of the legacy they were about to give birth to. Games of monumental historical significance, coaches of legendary proportions and players of extraordinary brilliance ultimately emerged from the mother lode that was to become known as the historically Black colleges and universities. The teams played two 45-minute halves on Livingstone's front lawn. W.J. Trent scored Livingstone's only touchdown on a fumble recovery. By then snow had covered the field's markings and Biddle argued that the fumble was recovered out of bounds. The official ruled in Biddle's favor, allowing them to keep the 5–0 lead that they had established early on and giving JCSU the historic 1st victory! And the rivalry continues." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1892_Biddle_football_team Previous Next