In 1949, Charlotte, North Carolina,’s Hollywood Film Company produced a 32-minute promotional film touting Wilson’s businesses, churches, schools, and neighborhoods. Predictably, not a single African-American person or place was mentioned, much less featured, though the town’s population was about 40% Black. This is the kind of erasure that will have you thinking your people never contributed, never built institutions, never thrived. Black people, however, can be glimpsed throughout the film, hard at work. Below, a few stills, starting with a scarfed African-American woman crossing Nash Street at Goldsboro Street, the courthouse and Confederate monument visible behind her. The other images depict tobacco warehouse and factory laborers, a laundry worker, and a bakery worker. The film also showed men working in a lumber yard and a concrete pipe manufacturer. Do you recognize anyone?
My thanks to the late Steve Brown for a DVD copy of this film.
Lisa, I am so glad that you asked whether the reader recognized anyone because that was my first impulse, before I read your opening, as I first went straight to the pictures.
Though I didn’t’ recognize anyone by name, I am always grateful to look at the those who came before me as I acknowledge that, indeed, they were here and left a legacy of generations that carried on their efforts to make them proud of what they started.
Yes!
look at those