A controversy erupted over the weekend stemming from the content and placement of two photographs in this year’s Eyes on Main Street  outdoor photo exhibit. The issues are complicated, and I have both thoughts and feelings about them, but I want to focus on the immediate aftermath of the brouhaha.

Black Wide-Awake is my ministry, and I do a fair amount of preaching here. This passage from a talk I delivered at Barton College in 2023 captures my main theme:

“The received history of Wilson is anchored in admiring tales of immigrant English younger sons, Mexican War soldiers, county fathers, Civil War generals, and money-minting tobacconists. Though we have been here from the beginning, dragged behind the colonizers, African Americans have largely been omitted from historical records, which inevitably has led to our erasure from both memory and place. Wilson County was built on the backs of Black people, but neither we nor our works are remembered or celebrated.

“Black History in general is often siloed – boxed into a single month that hyperfocuses on a small set of big names and grand feats. We all know Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman – as we absolutely should. But what of our own heroes? Our own freedom fighters? Our own revolutionaries? What great minds and deeds sprang from our own sandy soil?

…

“In researching for the blog, I have been astonished by what I’ve uncovered. How did I not know of these people? How have the aspirations and achievements, the trials and triumphs, the resistance and the resilience of so many Black people been so quickly rendered invisible? How much taller would we stand if we knew these stories? As singer and social activist Bernice Johnson Reagon has counseled, “when you are in touch with your history, you can see yourself as evidence of the success of your ancestors.””

After the furor died down, and some of the misassumptions and accusations were dispelled, some folks convened a community meeting at a 500 block business to open a dialogue among citizens, city leadership, and arts leadership. Others decided to find out for themselves what Eyes on Main Street and the related American Center for Photographers are about and what they have brought to Wilson.

Derrick Ruffin‘s Facebook post yesterday seized me by the throat. I am grateful that he allowed me to republish it here. From a slightly different angle, he is preaching Black Wide-Awake‘s gospel of reclamation, of discovery, of being “seen, celebrated, and respected.”

Derrick is speaking specifically to creative spaces, but I urge you to apply his message to the way you think about Wilson as a historic space, too. Contrary to some of the commentary over the weekend, the legacy of 500 block of East Nash Street is not confined to violence and desolation. We have forgotten so much of our greatness. The present blinds us to the past.

The principle of sankofa tells us to “go back and get it.” Wilson is ours, too. Get to know our heroes. Get to know our history.