The deaths of African Americans in early 20th century Wilson generally did not merit mention in the newspaper unless their lives could be framed in terms of their personal service to white people. This obituary could serve as a template in this regard.
It surely was not the Millie Smith Sutton who murdered her brother O.L.W. Smith‘s wife Lucy in 1891. I can find no death certificate for a Millie Sutton in Wilson or surrounding counties in 1936. However, Millie Bryant died 17 October 1936. Per her death certificate, she was 70 years old; was born in Goldsboro, N.C., to unknown parents; lived at 608 East Green Street. Celia A. Norwood, 205 Pender Street, was informant. Was Millie Bryant, in fact, “this good woman”?
Per the 1900 census of Wilson, she was. Millie Bryant is listed as the live-in cook for widower John Selby and family.
From 1900 federal census, Wilson, Wilson County.
Ten weeks before she died, Millie Bryant made out her last will and testament, leaving all her property to her niece Celia Norwood.
Once upon a time, back yards in East Wilson were dotted with outbuildings — auto garages, sheds, chicken coops, outdoor toilets, and other small structures. The whitewashed brick shed above, now standing in a side yard on East Green Street, may once have been used as a root cellar.(Note the diagonal wedge of brick on the shed’s gable end, indicating a re-purposing of the original structure that required partial reconstruction.]
At the rear of Noah J. Tate’s house at 307 North Pender — two adjoining sheds, an auto garage, and an open-sided car port. Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn fire insurance map.
Sheds and garages behind the houses of Hardy Tate (611), Della Hines Barnes (613), William Hines (615), and Walter Hines (617). Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn map.
Sheds in backyards in the 400 block of North Vick Street. Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn map.
The sheds and chicken coops behind these houses on East Green Street are believed to have belonged to Samuel and Annie Vick at 622. Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn fire insurance map.
I’m not sure what to make of this. Who was Socrates A.E. O’Neil of Wilson? What was the Ethiopia International School? And what was the “wrong sort of propaganda”?
A search for information about O’Neil primarily yielded newspaper articles, all remarkably consistent in tone over the span of more than twenty years. The first reference I found was in a 1918 Baltimore Sun ad Rev. Socrates O’Neil of God Charitable International Ethiopian Organization, Inc., Baltimore, Maryland, placed touting his 37-cent pamphlet, “Negro Problem Solved.”
Baltimore Sun, 5 November 1918.
In 1922, the Shreveport Journal published a partial transcript of one of O’Neil’s speeches, presumably delivered to a white audience. It’s eye-popping. (The piece also resolves one question: O’Neil’s Ethiopian School was 60 miles north of Wilson in Weldon. Whew.) Asserting that he aspired to fill the late Booker T. Washington’s shoes, O’Neil declared that “southern white people are better to negroes than northern white people,” Black people “need to be educated with [his] common sense ideas or driven on old boss’s farm to learn common sense,” he was “representative of white supremacy and teach it in my school with Biblical authority,” and “[t]he lynching question will be abolished, if science is accurate, when the negroes, men and women, morally live in their own places.”
Shreveport Journal, 8 December 1922.
Shreveport Journal, 4 January 1923.
A 1925 New York Age piece took O’Neil apart.
New York Age, 8 August 1925.
Finding North Carolina Negroes insufficiently grateful, Bishop O’Neil headed south, but ran into trouble. He was arrested for theft in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1931.
Baltimore Afro American, 29 August 1931.
In November 1932, O’Neil was convicted of larceny in Savannah, Georgia, and sentenced to two months on the chain gang.
He bounced back. A year later, O’Neil delivered a speech in Biloxi, Mississippi, in which he described the Ku Klux Klan as “a help to the negroes.”
Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.), 13 November 1935.
In 1939, O’Neil — whose real name may have been Abelard E. O’Neil — was sent to prison in Indiana on an intoxication charge. This is the last I found of him.
As promised, we’re following the Darden High School Trojans through their 1947 football season. The opening game, played before a crowd of 2000 against Goldsboro’s Dillard High School, ended in a 6-0 loss.
In a September 1940 “Wilsonia” column, John G. Thomas memorialized Saturday afternoon rummage sales carried out by white women from cars parked along Stantonsburg (now Pender) Street. Their customers? Black tobacco factory workers whose weekly pay was burning a hole in their pockets.
A.M.E. Zion minister Russell Buxton Taylor filed this notice of application for parole of his son William G. Taylor, who had pled guilty four months before on a prostitution charge.
A prostitution charge? Was he charged with being a prostitute or a john?
As it turns out — neither.
William Taylor had originally been charged with raping an unnamed African-American girl. A judge agreed to accept his guilty plea on a prostitution charge, however, and sentenced him to 12 months in jail, to be served performing road work.
The first few pages of Wilton M. Bethel‘s photo album contained pages in which to memorialize and be memorialized by friends.
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My Friends
Flora R. Clarke, 706 E. Nash Street, Wilson, N.C., May 31, 1929, Class of ’24, “Je vous aime, toujours.”
Geneva P. Brown, 1013 E. Martin St., Raleigh, N.C., June 2, 1929, Class of ’22, Live not without a friend.
Inez Middleton, 807 East Davie St., Raleigh, N.C., June 2, 1929, Class of ’27, “Be humble or you’ll stumble.”
Bernice Taylor, Box 233, Windsor, N.C., Live for “Lil Flo.”
J. Whiteside Chippey, St. Augustine’s College, Raleigh, N.C., May you always be the “Con.Sten.”
Edith E. Thompson, 504 Weinacker Ave., Mobile, Ala., In your golden chain of friendship always consider me a link.
Alleen J. Poitier, 1837 N.W. 3rd Ave., Miami, Florida, June 9, 1929, Class of ’31, “Always look toward the sunshine and the shadows will fall behind you.”
Arthesa S. Douglas, 117 Edgecombe Ave., New York, N.Y., Always be your very self for to you nature is kind.
A. Zenobia Howse, 816 East Fifth Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee, May you always regard me as one of your friends.
Louise Cherry, 1119 E. Nash St., Wilson, N.C., “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”
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A section for personal notes contained brief letters from Bethel’s sister Jessica Bethel and friends Arthesa Douglas and Louise Cherry.
The stonework caught my eye. This is, I am fairly certain, the Nestus Freeman-built house at 1115 East Nash Street. Bethel’s good friend Louise Cherry lived two houses down at 1119. Is she one of the young women shown?
Ojetta C. Harrison was listed in the freshman class of Saint Augustine’s College in 1936-37. She does not appear in subsequent school catalogs.
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In the 1930 census of Bailey township, Nash County: farmer Ellie W. Harris, 45; wife Rosa A., 44; and children Carrie L., 21, William E., 19, Ojetta, 18, Lila M., 16, Ethel M., 14, Mattie E., 13, Robert H., 10, Jessie L., 10, Beatrice, 8, George L., 6, and Hellin J., 2. Ellie, Rosa, and their four oldest children were born in South Carolina; Ethel in Virginia; and the remaining in North Carolina.
On 25 November 1937, Ojetta C. Harrison, 25, married Fred D. Palmer, 25, in Washington, D.C. She remained in D.C. the rest of her life.
