Civil rights

Julia Armstrong goes North for help.

The People’s Voice (New York, New York), 9 March 1946.

With Marie Everett battling imprisonment, Julia Armstrong went North for help. Direct from New York City’s Penn Station, she headed to the office of The People’s Voice, the Harlem newspaper founded in 1942 by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. She gave a literal blow-by-blow of the events at the Carolina Theatre and pled for funds to assist Everett. For her own part, Armstrong said she planned to sell her “tourist home” and move North after Everett was released. (Wilson, of course, is not “a few” miles from Tennessee.)

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In the 1940 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 411 East Green, Hallie Armstrong, 48, pool room operator; wife Julia, 29; and lodgers Annie M. Brown, 39, of Mooresville, Iredell County, hospital nurse; Jeanett M. Lee, 24, of Mount Olive, Wayne County, hospital nurse; and Lawrence Peacock, 27, of High Point, sewer project laborer.

Hallie Armstrong died 18 June 1947 at his home in Farmville, Pitt County, N.C. Per his death certificate, he was 55 years old; was born in Halifax County, N.C., to John Armstrong and Marina Lark; was married to Julia Armstrong; operated a show repair shop; and was buried in Rest Haven Cemetery, Wilson.

However, in 1950, she was still in Wilson: in the 1950 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 411 East Green, widow Julia Armstrong, 39, born in Kentucky, and lodgers Mary Rose, 29; Anne Everette, 2; Herbert Rose Jr., born in July; Edward Harris, 20, construction company bricklayer; McDonald Hayes, 33, electric power company laborer; Josephine Hayes, 28, cotton picker on farm; and Willie Mack Hayes, 15, cotton picker on farm.

Julia Miller Armstrong died 9 March 1964 in Jacksonville, Onslow County, N.C. Per her death certificate, she was born 14 September 1904 in south Carolina to John F. Miller and Bessie Scruggs; she did domestic work as a cook; and she was buried in Rest Haven Cemetery, Wilson.

There has been an astonishing occurrence in Wilson.

We continue our celebration of Mary C. Euell! Her letter to W.E.B. DuBois about the attack on her by Wilson school officials resulted in an article two months later in the N.A.A.C.P.’s The Crisis magazine.

The Crisis, volume 16, number 2 (June 1918).

 

Wilson County admits African Americans to jury duty.

The Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City, Okla.), 13 June 1935.

Of course, I went looking to find out what the Daily Times had to say about this.

Not a whole lot. On page 4 of the 4 June 1935 edition, halfway down a column headlined “Salary Increases Given to County Employees Today”:

Wilson Daily Times, 4 June 1935.

The lead case challenging the systematic exclusion of African-Americans from juries was Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935). Wilson County Attorney Harry G. Connor Jr.’s advice was terse and understated: “… it would be wise and safe[,] I might say wiser and safer, to put the names of several hundred negroes in the jury list. In doing this, care should be taken to get the best negroes in the county and not only that, I think it would be equally wise and safe to distribute them by townships as nearly as possible.”

The question, of course, is whether any of these “best negroes” made it onto juries.

Physician’s house bombed.

In January 1952, in the midst of the N.A.A.C.P.’s push to integrate Cairo, Illinois, schools, the home of Dr. Urbane F. Bass; his wife, Wilson native Mary Della Wilkins Bass; and their four children was rocked by a dynamite blast. No one was injured, but the rear of the house was heavily damaged. The bombing followed burning crosses set as a warning to Black parents seeking to transfer their children to all-white Cairo schools.

Clinton Daily Journal and Public Record, 30 January 1952.

Within days, the police arrested and charged five white men with the crime. A year later, used car salesman Robert Hogan pleaded guilty and received a one-year suspended sentence. Charges against the rest were dismissed.

The early activism of Dr. Evangeline Royall Darity.

Barber-Scotia College’s Evangeline Royall was among a multiracial group of students who lived together at a Black family’s home while working to build a credit union office for African-American farmers. A mob, led by a sawmill operator (straight out of central casting), gave white students 24 hours to get out of Columbia, North Carolina, and milled around their bus as they packed up to leave.

This news report of the incident is studiously neutral in its account of events, but carefully sets out the names and school affiliation of each student, as well as the ethnicity of non-white students like Royall.

Hope Star (Hope, Ark.), 21 August 1947.

We first met Evangeline Royall as the high school student regarded as the first “librarian” of Wilson’s Negro Library.

Per http://www.prabook.com, Evangeline Royall Darity was born 16 June 1927 in Wilson, North Carolina. She received a Bachelor of Science in Religious Education, Barber-Scotia College, 1949; Master of Education, Smith College, 1969; and Doctor of Education, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1978. She held various positions with the Young Women’s Christian Association, 1949-1953, and was executive director in Holyoke, Massachusetts, 1979-1981; taught in Egypt, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, 1953-1967; and was the assistant to class deans at Smith College, 1968-1975. Dr. Darity was vice-president of Student affairs at Barber-Scotia College, 1978-1979; associate dean at Mount Holyoke College, 1981-1994; and a member of the Amherst (Mass.) Town Meeting, 1971-1980. She was a member of the American Association of University Women; the American Association of Counseling and Development; the National Association of Women Deans, Counselors and Administrators; the League of Women Voters; Phi Delta Kappa; and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.

Her husband, William Alexander Darity, was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her son, William A. Darity Jr., is Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University. Her daughter Janki E. Darity is an attorney.

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In the 1940 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 203 Pender Street, widow Ossie M. Royall, 33, an elevator girl at the courthouse; her mother Tossie Jenkins, 53, stemmer at a tobacco factory; daughters LaForest, 16, and Evauline Royall, 14; and a roomer named Ed Hart, 45, a laborer employed by the town of Wilson.

On 23 December 1950, William A. Darity, 26, of East Flat Rock, Henderson County, N.C., son of Aden Randall Darity and Elizabeth Smith Darity, married Evangeline Royall, 23, resident of “(Wilson) Charlotte, N.C.,” daughter of Dock Moses Royall and Ossie Mae Jenkins Royall, in Wilson. Presbyterian minister O.J. Hawkins performed the ceremony in the presence of Mary B. Moore, Grace L. Coley, and Solomon Revis Jr.

In the 1952 Danville, Virginia, city directory: Darity Evangeline R Mrs (c) dir Y W C A h 330 Holbrook; Darity Wm A (c; Evangeline R) insp City Dept Pub Health h 330 Holbrook

Wilson Daily Times, 20 April 1963.

Evangeline Royall Darity died 27 September 1994.

A road trip to an Edgecombe County historical marker (and a familiar “face.”)

Yesterday, I drove up to north Edgecombe County to see the new Equal Rights League historical marker for myself. It stands on Highway 33, between Whitakers and Leggett,  adjacent to Red Hill Missionary Baptist Church, which was founded in the 1870s. The  church’s cemetery is across the road, and as I looped through it, I spotted the familiar long-tailed 9’s of Clarence B. Best‘s work. 

Oscar Lyons’ headstone is classic Clarence Best — the deeply incised font, the off-center epitaph, the recycled tablet itself, with its top surface showing a chiseled-out panel.

And nearby — not Wilson County-related, but just because I love a good local artisan — was the concrete Williams marker, which may be related to the delicately engraved headstones I’ve seen at Saint Delight in Greene County. 

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, December 2023.