In the early 1960s, uncomfortably aware of the optics, not to mention the illegality, of a segregated water fountain at the courthouse steps, Wilson County capped the fountain’s spigots and chiseled away the letters designating who drank where. By time I was born in 1964, local government had erased the public labels of Jim Crow. Most businesses followed suit, but some could not be bothered.

Wilson was deeply socially segregated for decades after civil rights legal rulings and legislation forbade legal enforcement. This meant, in practice, that while we could go into any public establishment and see a doctor or try on clothes or order a meal the same as any white person, the environment was not always inviting, nor the experience comfortable. This was the Wilson I grew up in. I never saw the old placards and partitions, but we bought chicken and barbecue from the back entrance of Parker’s, and I never played with, much less visited, my white friends away school. Still, we shopped freely at Belk’s and Barshay’s and Flower’s, guffawed at Disney movies in floor seats at the Colony and Wilson Theatres, and saw our white dentist and doctors at their West Nash and Tarboro Street offices.

Elsewhere, however, physical vestiges of codified segregation continued to leak radiation. I documented the ghosts of Jim Crow in a short-lived pandemic era Tumblr account. But the hand-painted White Water sign on a wall at Farmer’s Warehouse, starkly visible until the building’s demolition in 2023, confronted black workers and visitors well into the 1980s. The building’s owners never thought the sign’s poisonous message damaging enough to paint over. (Or maybe they understood precisely what it signaled.)

I have never believed that the Farmer’s Warehouse sign was the last of these signs. Downtown Wilson’s brick storefronts and former factories and warehouses are in the midst of a wave of redevelopment. Many old buildings, often long disused, have been demolished. Others have been renovated for exciting new uses. Surely, as investors and developers and contraction crews have scoured their interiors, they have encountered evidence of the rigid social structures that once locked black people  into (or out of) place.

Like this one.

That’s the door to the COLORED WOMEN TOILET. This five-panel door has been in storage since, it appears, about 1990. From about 1938 to at least the mid-1960s, it marked the restroom available for the few black female employees of the company that occupied this downtown building, all of whom likely all worked on the cleaning staff.

A different, unrelated company operated in the building in the 1970s and ’80s. I don’t know if they left the door where it originally hung or took it down and stored it, but they didn’t paint over its label or throw the door away.

This battered green door, still bearing stains from the oils of the countless hands that pushed through it, stands is an tangible, undeniable link to a past that many would now downplay. My deep thanks to those who shared this photograph with me and gave permission for me to publish it.