Pittsburgh Courier, 5 February 1938.

WILSON, N.C., Feb. 3 — Sidney Ingram of this city, was nabbed by Federal Agents Friday after writing protest letters to the Presidents of  the Norfolk, Southern and Seaboard Airline railways over Jim Crow treatment while traveling.

He told operatives he bought a ticket from Wilson to Bailey, was told to get on Greenville train, then put off mile from Wilson station. His letters signed “David Ingram.” Not threatening but asked aid in getting “just calls” from railroad. Ingram was released after investigation.

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Two years later, Sidney Ingram was counted in the 1940 census among the “inmates” housed at the notorious Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum for Negroes.

1940 census, Fork township, Wayne County, North Carolina.

He spent the remainder of his life institutionalized and died at the state hospital in 1954. His death certificate notes that he was a New Jersey native, that he was married, that his usual residence was Wilson County, and that he had been at the asylum for 15 years, three months and 16 days. He died of bladder cancer and “insanity,” and his body was sent “to Chapel Hill to be used by Anatomical Board.”

Thus passed one of Wilson’s earliest civil rights activists.

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If you are interested in the world of the Eastern North Carolina Insane Asylum, please read Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner’s Unspeakable, the story of Junius Wilson (1908-2001), a deaf African-American man who spent 76 years there, including six in the criminal ward, though he had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge.