Economics

Notes on Booker T. Washington’s visit.

As we’ve discussed here and here, Booker T. Washington visited Wilson in October 1910 with a who’s who of educators, businessmen and A.M.E. Zion clergymen.

Certain documents from Greensboro History Museum’s A.H. Peeler Collection have been digitized by Gateway, a collaborative community history portal hosted by the University Libraries of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Peeler was a long-time principal and community leader whose personal archive is rich with resources related to African-American education in early 20th-century North Carolina, especially in Greensboro. Somewhere along the way, Peeler obtained a sheaf of lined note paper on which someone — perhaps Washington’s secretary Emmett J. Scott? — jotted brief notes about their stops.

Wilson was the ninth stop on the tour, and the local delegation received high marks for content and presentation. The city’s mayor, W.W. Briggs, met with Washington’s retinue, as did Charles L. Coon, who was basking in the heat of his controversial 1909 address, “Public Taxation in Negro Schools,” which argued that funding the education of Black children did not create a drain on white taxpayers.

The Colored Graded School was lauded as the “best public school facilities seen[,] suppose best in state[, with a] chapel for exercises.” [This is the first I’ve heard of the Graded School having a chapel. It’s too bad no architectural drawings of the building exist.] “Washington’s happy here,” the amanuensis continued, presumably because of quality of agricultural products grown by African-American farmers in the area, including “pumpkins, cotton, corn.” “Swellest banquet” speaks for itself. “One man rule — Vick: 400 houses” speaks to a recognition of the immense wealth and political influence Samuel H. Vick wielded in the city.

Wilson photographer O.V. Foust captured this grouping of Booker T. Washington, seated at center, his Tuskegee party, and leading North Carolina educators seated on Sam Vick’s front lawn. An unknown man in a slouch-brimmed hat photobombed them at far left. The photograph is part of the Peeler Collection.

Hat tip to former Congressman G.K. Butterfield Jr. for alerting me to this find!

Wilson’s 2043 comprehensive plan.

The homepage of the website for Wilson’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan declares: “The City of Wilson is a place for innovation, ideas, and creativity. Wilson’s strengths lie in its welcoming community, arts and culture, and nationally recognized programs and infrastructure. In the coming decades, Wilson will be poised to harness growth from the Triangle and take advantage of its place in the region to continue to build a welcoming place for all.”

More: “The Comprehensive Plan is a roadmap that provides guidance on where and how a community will grow and change over a period of time. The City of Wilson uses this as a policy document to set priorities and make important land use and investment decisions. The 2043 Update will revise sections of the Wilson Growing Together: The 2030 Comprehensive Plan to reflect the changes that have occurred in the community in the past decade and to support a renewed vision for the future of the community. In some cases, issue areas will be added that are not part of the original 2030 Plan. …

“The updated Comprehensive Plan will address land use, development, transportation, public investment, and identify other community priorities. The Project Team, led by City of Wilson staff, was supported by local consultants at Clarion Associates and VHB. As part of this process, the City of Wilson gathered input from the community to guide the development of a renewed vision for Wilson.”

The image below is a detail from the Comprehensive Plan’s Future Land Use Map. The parcels shaded blue have been designated “institutional” for future land use zoning. “Institutional” land has “uses related to community services, such as fire stations, libraries, schools, civic buildings, water treatment plants, and the like.”

I placed the upper circle over Maplewood Cemetery, which is appropriately shaded blue. What is going on in the oval though?

Here’s a close-up of Bishop LN. Forbes Street. The blue blocks on the left represent various churches colored “institutional.” The blue block at the top is B.O. Barnes Elementary School. The smaller blue blocks below it are Rountree Missionary Baptist Church and the two halves of its cemetery on B.L.N.F. Street. Strangely, though, the other five cemeteries on the street are shaded maize, “2-4 units/acre (med-density residential),” and part of Odd Fellows is green, “agricultural residential (rural residential).” Huh?

Why would these cemeteries be marked for the same future use as the neighborhoods around them? An oversight? Nefarious design?

The City is holding two more Open Houses for the public to review and provide feedback on the draft Comprehensive Plan. Ask why Vick Cemetery and Odd Fellows Cemeteries and the other L.B.N.F. cemeteries are not “institutional.”

Thanks to Jon Wesley Mullins for bringing this to my attention!

[Update: 9/18/2023 — the map has been updated, and the Masonic, Hamilton, and Rest Haven Cemeteries are now blue! Vick remains in limbo, but we appreciate this start.]

Wills and estates.

Even when they owned property, most African-Americans in Wilson County in the 19th and early 20th centuries, even the wealthiest and most prominent,  did not execute wills, and their estates passed informally to their descendants as “heir property.” (A major contributor to loss of land and wealth among African-American families.) Some bucked the trend, however, and this post comprises a running list of such wills and estates featured in Black Wide-Awake.

Men and women born enslaved are marked with an asterisk. Free people of color are indicated with a circumflex (^).

Last will and testament of Ella Clark Gaston Hinton, executed 15 August 1946.

Wills

Estates

Food demonstrations across the community.

Wilson Daily Times, 4 June 1943.

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Recommended reading, no. 15: Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque.

On a quick escape to New Orleans during that first pandemic summer, I dropped by my cousin Zella Palmer’s for a little socially distanced catching up. Sitting on her front porch, she told me that she’d been contacted about writing a cookbook/memoir with Wilson barbecue pitmaster Ed Mitchell and his son Ryan. In a time of scarce good news, the alignment of family, friends, food, and folkways in this project felt especially serendipitous, and I urged her to do it. 

My copy of their collaboration, its recipes interwoven with piquant stories and lush photographs of the Mitchell family and East Wilson, arrived yesterday. Surely you’ve got yours, too. 

M.D. Williams submits his dissertation.

After more than a decade as teacher, principal, and school administrator in Wilson, Malcolm D. Williams entered the doctoral program at Columbia University’s Teacher College. His dissertation, “A Suggested Plan to Improve Teaching and Learning in the Negro Schools Located in Wilson, North Carolina, Through Developing a Better Parent and Teacher Common Understanding of More Effective Concepts of Teaching and Learning,” was submitted in 1951.

Most interesting to me, at least initially, is Williams’ lengthy citation to a 1939 Study of Negro Education in Wilson prepared by Atlantic Christian College unit of the North Carolina Unit of Education and Race and sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the North Carolina Department of Education. (Where can I possibly find this document?)

The study asserts that the first school for African-Americans was started in 1869 at Mount Zion Methodist Church [Saint John A.M.E. Zion?], which stood “in the corner of a cemetery near the Stantonsburg highway.” (The predecessor cemetery to Oakdale Cemetery, which was established by the Town of Wilson very close by.) In 1870, Wilson established its first public school for Black children. It operated for four months a year and had no grades until 1880. The study skips to 1920, the year Wilson established a Black high school — only three years after the first in the entire state. (Actually, Wilson Colored High School, later C.H. Darden, did not open until 1923.) 

Thanks to J. Robert Boykin III for bringing this document to my attention.

“Wake Up, Negro, and Secure Your Position in Tomorrow’s World.”

Though some decades past its peak popularity, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association still retained a fervent following in the 1940s when Solomon Fitzhue delivered two speeches in Wilson.

Wilson Daily Times, 16 April 1948.

Arkansas native Fitzhue was active in Ohio’s division of U.N.I.A. into the 1960s.

Wilson Daily Times, 24 April 1948.

Recommended reading, no. 12: crossroads.

I am a champion of oral histories and memoirs as sources of information that adds texture and nuance to the dry data of documents. In Crossroads: Stories of the Rural South, Montress Greene has published her recollection of growing up in Pender’s Crossroads, a community anchored around Bridgers Grocery and Farm Supply, her family’s country store, in the 1940s and ’50s. Though Greene’s focuses her memories largely though the prism of family life, she offers invaluable granular detail for our imagining of the world through which the men and women of this blog moved. Though that world was legally segregated, whites and African-Americans interacted closely and regularly, and Greene addresses race relations forthrightly, if through the eyes of a child. “Much of this will revolve around the strength of women and especially black women,” she writes. Beyond these personal stories, however, Crossroads reveals the country store as public space vital to all in the community. 

Montress Greene in the early 1940s outside Bridgers Store. An older African-American man is seated on a box behind her.

News of Turner 4-H Club.

Wilson Daily Times, 6 March 1942.

Like all rural Wilson County schools, Turner Colored School had an associated 4-H Club. Turner School closed in 1949 when its pupils were assigned to the newly built Frederick Douglass High School.

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  • Maggie Dew — in the 1930 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: farmer Joseph Dew, 28; wife Mittie, 27; and daughters Julia, 4, and Maggie, 1.
  • Daisy Armstrong
  • Willie C. Maryland — in the 1940 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: Richard Maryland, 36; wife Mary, 30; and children Dasie Lee, 14, and Willie C., 12.
  • Frances Weaver — in the 1940 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: Lonnie Weaver, 40; wife Anner, 34; daughter Frances, 9; and widowed mother-in-law Clara Daws, 56.
  • Rose Armstrong
  • James Hall — in the 1940 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: Sela Hall, 34, and children Sylvester, 16, Joe and Joseph, 15, James, 13, Ora Lillie, 9, Erma Lee, 7, and Mildred R., 4.
  • Daniel Armstrong — in the 1940 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: farmer Henry Armstrong, 52; wife Minnie, 42; and children Mary, 19, Fred, 18, Rosa, 16, Clarence, 14, Nathan, 11, Daniel, 9, Louise, 8, David, 6, and Henry, 6 months.
  • C.W. Foster
  • Vera Armstrong — in the 1940 census of Toisnot township, Wilson County: farmer Harvey Lee Armstrong, 36; wife Lelah, 30; and children Vera, 11, James, 9, Harvey Lee, 7, Mary, 5, Shirley, 3, and William E., 1.

Save Your Spaces.

I’m honored to join these amazing women at Save Your Spaces Cultural Heritage and Historic Preservation Festival to talk about successes and challenges in the critical work of preserving African-American cemeteries.

If you’re intrigued by local history, have stories to tell or histories to preserve, are curious and want to learn more about cultural heritage and create ways to preserve it, please join us March 4 at Create ATL, 900 Murphy Avenue SW, Atlanta.