Wilson Advance, 30 May 1884.

Justice was merciless in 1884. In a single week of May of that year, Inferior Court, which handled low-level misdemeanors and minor civil matters, heard 23 cases. Two black men were convicted and sentenced to the state penitentiary. As a practical matter, as revealed in this news brief, that meant brutal work on the Western North Carolina Railroad under North Carolina’s convict leasing system. Between 1870 and 1890, roughly 65% of North Carolina’s prison population, disproportionately black men, was forced to cut through mountain rock, lay tracks, and blast tunnels under lethal conditions. They faced frequent cave-ins and landslides, rock-blasting accidents, and outbreaks of serious disease.

Ephraim Perry was sentenced to serve two years for stealing a shovel, and Nathan Herring got five for taking a clock out of the “colored Methodist church,” i.e. Saint John A.M.E. Zion.

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• Ephraim Perry — this possibly was the 26 year-old farm laborer Ephraim Perry listed in the 1870 census of Sparta township, Edgecombe County. In 1892, several years after his release from incarceration, Perry was arrested in Asheville on suspicion of theft.
• Nathan Herring