“Injury of heel and an open sore cause by wearing a plaster cast”
Four year-old Archie Henderson was my father’s cousin. A poorly fitting cast rubbed a raw spot on his heel, gangrene set in, and he quickly succumbed. Little Archie very likely was buried in Vick cemetery.
Lane Street Project’s fourth official clean-up day dawned blue and brilliant … and frigid. Dozens of stalwarts appeared, though, right on time. Any day we can come together for a common purpose is a good day, but today was extra special. Many thanks to LSP Team Member Raven S. Farmer, who first proposed a candlelighting service to honor those buried in these cemeteries; to Dr. Judy Wellington Rashid, who shared impactful words of prayer, reflection, and challenge; and to all who gathered. Many were moved to voice their thoughts about their Lane Street Project experiences, and we are grateful for your support and the example of unity and community that you embody.
LSP Team Members Charles Eric Jones, Raven S. Farmer, LaMonique Hamilton, Portia Newman, Joyah Bulluck, and Brittany Daniel with Rev. A. Kim Reives and Dr. Judy Wellington Rashid, our esteemed guests and allies.
A big “thank you” to Wilson County Sheriff Calvin Woodard, who showed up not just to show up, but to put in work! Sheriff Woodard’s Wilson County roots run deep, and he likely has family buried in one of the LSP cemeteries.
This chain-link fence divides Vick and Odd Fellows cemeteries. Before yesterday morning, it was nearly invisible under a heavy cloak of honeysuckle and weedy saplings. Targeted attacks on specific problem areas are yielding immediately visible results.
When we tell you this is a multigenerational effort, we mean it!
The young people of the Wilson Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have shown incredible commitment to the Lane Street Project’s work. Thank you!
A generous donor has provided a roll-off dumpster for LSP clean-ups. All of this brush is the result of just one work day!
Today’s great find — a brick burial vault, the first located in Odd Fellows cemetery.
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Dr. Rashid graciously shared the text of her responsive reading yesterday:
To our Ancestors here in these hallowed grounds, because you were, we are.
So we are here.
As in the song “The Impossible Dream” by the Temptations, we dare to fight the unbeatable foe and to run where the brave dare not go.
So we are here.
We will right the unrightable wrong and try even when our arms are too weary.
So we are here.
We understand that “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King Jr.
So we are here.
“We chose to tell OURstory, not HIStory.” Dr. Judy Rashid.
So we are here.
“We recognize that the whole truth is the matter, plus the hidden facts.” Dr. Judy Rashid.
So we are here.
“Never allow anyone to tell you that your history and culture are not important. Never let anyone tell you ‘it happened a long time ago — get over it!’ Make your history sacred.” Runoko Rashidi
So we are here.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Alvin Toffler.
So we are here.
“No people are really free until they become the instrument of their own liberation. Freedom is not legacy that is bequeathed from one generation to another. Each generation must take and maintain its freedom with its own hands.” John Henrik Clarke.
So we are here.
“Let us not forget who we were so we will know what we still can be.” John Henrik Clarke, paraphrased.
So we are here.
“It is up to us to tell our story in our own way without stuttering, without stammering, without whispering and without apologies.” Runoko Rashidi.
So we are here.
“We are not organized to hate other men but to lift ourselves and to demand respect for all humanity.” Marcus Garvey.
So we are here.
Finally, we know that “when your roots are so deep, there is no reason to fear the wind.” African proverb.
So we are here.
Many thanks to Brittany Daniel, Portia Newman, and A. Kim Reives for these photographs.
Wilson Daily Times, 5 July 1952.
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Jerry L. Cooke‘s open letter to Heilig-Meyers furniture company offers an unusual glimpse of private life. Cooke wrote of his health, his medical treatment, his work history, and his consumer preferences. Born in 1886 in New Bern, N.C., Cooke lived in Wilson from about 1920 to his death in 1976. Though this letter was published a few years outside the period of Black Wide-Awake’s focus, I post it for its unique insight.
Excerpt from my interview with my grandmother, Hattie Henderson Ricks, about where her family bought food during her childhood on Elba Street:
“But when I was a little girl, the only place you could get milk was from the Vicks. It was a quarter. That was the only place we had to get the milk, if you got any. Unless you used canned milk. She had a back porch. Closed-in back porch. Screened in. Anyway, glass in it all around, there on the back porch, and tables out there. One of them things you churn, what I mean, a great, old big urn out there where the milk get too old, and then she’d have buttermilk. And she had a ‘frigerator sitting out there, where she’d taken the shelves out, look like where she’d made a big thing to put it in there. But she would get fresh milk everyday. The cows was somewhere out there, I don’t know where, I didn’t see ‘em in the yard. They wont nowhere up there. But somebody was working for them would go out and get the milk and bring it in these cans where you have, where got the churn in the top of it. And she would put them out there on the porch. Miz Annie seemed to be pretty clean, and the house was clean. Didn’t nobody get sick. Yeah, and they had the two daughters, and I don’t know how many boys it was. Robert was the youngest boy, and I went to school with him, and Doris and I was in the same class in school. And — I didn’t know whether she was a sister to the man, or whether she was sister to the lady, I never did find out which way — but that house, they built that two-story house right next to the Vicks, and they didn’t stay in it, they went to Washington or somewhere. And they rented the house out. And I think somebody else bought it.”
My grandmother, right, and her sister Mamie Henderson Holt, around the time their family was buying milk from the Vicks.
All rights reserved.
Wilson Daily Times, 17 September 1948.
First: Saint Luke is an A.M.E., not an A.M.E. Zion church. A.M.E. Zion is a much larger denomination than A.M.E. in North Carolina and has had several churches in Wilson, including Saint John, Saint Stephen, and Trinity.
In 1906, a group of A.M.E. trustees bought a lot on Suggs Street and built a church there. The church was not organized as Saint Luke until 1910. In the 1930s, the congregation moved to a storefront at the corner of Vick and Atlantic Streets and erected its current edifice in 1948. The church had early struggles. In 1953, the Times carried a notice of sale for the property; the trustees had defaulted on a loan.
(I belonged to this church as a child, by the way. Thirty years after its construction, it was little changed, down to its handbuilt pews and wall-mounted gas heaters.)
The cornerstone of Saint Luke A.M.E. Church: “Erected to the glory of God.”
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Excerpt from my interview with my father, Rederick C. Henderson, who was born in Wilson in 1934:
My father with Darden classmates Helen Williams, Lillie Dixon and Eloise Parker in 1948-49.
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What do you remember about race relations? Or what were you told about dealing with white people?
Well. See, we never had a lot, the only white people that I saw had little stores in the black community. And you know, they said, you can’t, just don’t have a whole lot of dealings with white folks. And racism … things I saw about racism. I was, I remember I was maybe 12, 13, and I went downtown walking over to the stadium somewhere. I was walking over to one of my friend’s house stayed on Mercer Street, and they had these prisoners of war. Germans. And they had this “P.W.” on the back of their thing, and they were cleaning up ‘round the factory. And they had some MPs or something with them. And they were sitting down on a bench outside resting. One of them little regular benches. A wood bench that they used to advertise or something. And so I stopped – they had gone in – and I stopped, and I was sitting down, and a man came out, and he spit on my leg.
A German or an American?
Naw, this was a white American. He said, “You can’t sit on that bench.” I don’t know if he called me a boy or whatever, but had that tobacco spit on me. And he –
But the Germans were sitting on the bench. Prisoners of war in this country.
Right. And I couldn’t sit on the bench.
Then I remember they had an incident at the theater where something had happened, and this girl [Marie Everett] slapped a white girl. And they took her and put her in jail. Took her and put her in prison. She went off and stayed. She must have stayed ‘bout a year. And Mama and all them said, “Don’t y’all go downtown.” So far as I got to go was to the [Ritz] theater and then come back home.
And all over there behind Vick School [Academy, Crowell and Mayo Streets] was all white back in there. And they used to throw stuff at us on the [playground] — we’d be throwing rocks back and forth, back and forth. But the police didn’t ever come over there. Now the police would be downtown on Saturday afternoon ‘cause see in Wilson, like Friday and Saturday was when we’d go to the movie. And I’d go to the movies on Saturday and stay all day long. Stay in there ‘til it’d be almost dark. That’s how you’d know it was time to go home. Come down there, walk down there, say, “Can I look outside and see…?” Lady’d just: “Yeah.” Walk down there; look out there; see. If it’s still light, you’d come back up and watch the movie again. Sit upstairs in the movie. And so they had all the white police. They would walk from uptown, I guess, down to Pender Street. And on the sidewalk. And black folk had to get out the way. I mean, they’d walk right up, push you right out in the street. Or whatever. And just walk right on down to the end and turn around and come back and all.
All rights reserved.
This brief article about a confirmation class at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church offers lovely details of the provenance of the church’s furnishings.
Wilson Daily Times, 13 November 1948.
John Percy Maryland (1906-2004).
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In the 1910 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: John Maryland, 40, farmer; wife Margaret, 30; children Cora, 15, Mandonia, 15, Robert, 13, Della, 10, Charlie, 6, Richard, 4, Percy, 2, and William T., 1 month.
In the 1920 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: farmer John Maryland, 50; wife Margritt, 40; children Robert, 24, Della, 22, Charley, 18, Richard, 16, John P., 14, William, 13, and Primas, 11; nephew Walter, 14, and niece Hellen, 12; daughter-in-law Ether, 19; and grandchildren Maggie, 7, and Cuba, 2 months.
In the 1940 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: farmer John P. Maryland, 22; wife Lona, 19; and daughter Ila M., 1.
John Percy Maryland registered for the World War II draft in 1940 in Edgecombe County. Per his registration card, he was born 22 February 1906 in Wilson; lived at Route 1, Sharpsburg, Edgecombe County; his contact was wife Loanie Maryland; and he worked for W.D. Batchelor, Sharpsburg. He signed his name with an X.
John Percy Maryland died 29 March 2004 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
His obituary appeared in Greensboro’s News & Record on 1 April 2004:
“Mr. John P. Maryland, 96, died Monday, March 29, 2004. The funeral service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Interment will follow in Maplewood Cemetery.
“Visitation will be held 30 minutes prior to the service at the church and other times at 1507 Randolph Ave.
“Woodard Funeral Home is in charge of the arrangements.”
Photo courtesy of Ancestry.com user El maryland.
This excerpt from a news account of a commissioners’ meeting caught my eye. Barber Noah Tate‘s application for a pool room license was denied, and Alderman Lewis cried discrimination. What kind of discrimination was being decried by an elected official in Wilson in 1919?
…
Wilson Daily Times, 6 September 1919.
An article published nearly eighteen months before yields context. On 7 May 1918, the Times reported, “The city fathers last night refused to renew the license to the pool rooms and to the bowling alleys of the city, and the remarks regarding the places where cider is sold were also far from complimentary. … The meeting was opened by the reading of a resolution by … business men setting forth the fact that both white and colored frequent these places and thus remove from the busy marts of trade and industry labor that should be employed in producing something other than thriftless habits and viciousness.” Mayor Killette railed against the shiftless and bemoaned the legal victory that allowed a local man to sell cider made from his own apples. “The gist of the argument [against pool rooms] was that the colored pool room was full of men who should be at work producing something for their families and helping to make something rather than being consumers merely and drones upon the body politic. They were corrupting because it was almost impossible to prevent gambling in these places and in addition to shiftlessness it encouraged vice and vagrancy. A number of employers stated that their help could be found in the pool room below the railroad, and the bowling alley came in for equally critical remarks as a place to encourage loafing and bad habits.” The matter was put to vote, and no’s were unanimous. [The “colored pool room,” by the way, may have been Mack Bullock‘s establishment at 417 East Nash. See Sanborn map detail, below.]
In June 1919, Luther A. Barnes, the white proprietor of a pool hall at the New Briggs Hotel, and the subject of intense criticism during the May debate received his license over the objection of the mayor. Perhaps this turn of events sparked Commissioner Lewis’ objection to Tate’s rejection three months later?
Noah Tate finally got his pool room in 1921.
Wilson Daily Times, 8 July 1921.
“Over the railroad,” specifically, was 105-107 North Pettigrew Street.
The 1922 Sanborn fire insurance map shows that Tate Pool Room was located in a brick building just north of Nash Street on the railroad side of the street.
A modern aerial view at Google Maps shows that the rear of present-day 419 East Nash Street consists of two extensions. The first, with the striated roof below, sits in the footprint of Tate’s pool room and may even be the same building.
At street level, two bricked-up windows are visible, as well as the original roofline. The building appears to have been cinderblock though, which was not commonly used in Wilson in the era of Tate’s business.
Noah J. Tate did not long enjoy his victory; he died in 1926.
