Freedom

Joyous Juneteenth 2026!

Though it’s not a precise reckoning, the 1870 federal census is the closest account we have of who was emancipated in Wilson County five years earlier. The 310 surnames inscribed above are those reported to the census taker by the newly freed (and a few freeborn).

We need no one’s permission to honor and amplify the memory of our forebears, and we needn’t wait for the government to teach us their stories and struggles. Today, we celebrate freedom, resilience, and the enduring legacies of the men, women, and children these names represent.

Pour one for the ancestors this Juneteenth!

——

Juneteenth, observed annually on June 19th and a federal holiday since 2021, commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the United States. It marks the day in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce the end of the Civil War and slavery—more than two months after Appomattox Court House and two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Signal Boost: Lives of the Greene County United States Colored Troops.

Far fewer men escaped Wilson County to join the U.S. Colored Troops, but the close ties between southeastern Wilson County and western Greene County will make this talk by my friend Trisha Blount especially interesting to Wilson County researchers.

Register here From Enslavement to Reconstruction: Lives of the Greene County USCT before June 30.

Black History Month Throwback: honoring acts of resistance, no. 1.

Wilson’s Art Deco bus station stood from 1938 to the mid-1990s.

In 1943, a dozen years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks’ celebrated acts of resistance, at least four young African-American men and women refused to move to the back of Wilson buses. Read again of their direct challenges to Jim Crow  and discrimination and lift up their memory.

Swift bound to a labor agreement.

According to the 1880 census of Bull Doze township, Greene County, Dennis Swift was born in Maryland. He did not remain in Wilson County long, as he appears in no other county records. Swift married in Greene County in 1877 and gave his age as 24, which would have made him about 14 when he entered into this labor agreement with John H. Winstead of Joyners township, Wilson County.

28 Books for 28 days.

Twenty-eight books I recommend to contextualize the history and culture of Wilson County, North Carolina,’s African-American people, in no particular order. Search for a review of one book every day this Black History Month. You’ve got the rest of the year to read them.

  1. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family, Norma Jean and Carole Darden (1978)
  2. African-American Music Trails of Eastern North Carolina, Beverly Patterson and Sarah Bryan (2013)
  3. Greater Freedom: the Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, Charles W. McKinney Jr. (2010)
  4. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman (2019)
  5. The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home, Melissa Holbrook Pierson (2006)
  6. Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia, Lynn Rainville (2014)
  7. Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina, Linda Flowers (1990)
  8. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist (2014)
  9. Sherrod Village: A Memoir, Barbara Williams Lewis (2014)
  10. Elm City: A Negro Community in Action, C.L. Spellman (1942)
  11. Race and Politics in North Carolina 1872-1901: The Black Second, Eric Anderson (1980)
  12. No Justice No Peace, Algernon McNeil (2015)
  13. The Rise of a Southern Town, Wilson, North Carolina 1849-1920, Patrick M. Valentine (2002)
  14. Jim Crow in North Carolina: The Legislative Program from 1865 to 1920, Richard A. Paschal (2020)
  15. To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner, Carole Emberton (2022)
  16. Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque, Ed and Ryan Mitchell (2023)
  17. Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds, Adam Rosenblatt (2024)
  18. ‘Make the Gig’: The History of the Monitors, John Harris (2024)
  19. In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning, Grace Elizabeth Hale (2023)
  20. Black Folks: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Blair LM Kelley (2023)
  21. Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, A National Movement, Emilye Crosby, ed. (2011)
  22. Historic Wilson in Vintage Postcards, J. Robert Boykin III (2003)
  23. Slavery in North Carolina 1748-1775, Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary (2000)
  24. From a Cat House to the White House: The Story of an African-American Chef, Jesse Pender (2007)
  25. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, David Zucchino (2020)
  26. North Carolina’s Free People of Color 1715-1885, Warren E. Milteer Jr. (2020)
  27. George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Game of Life, Benjamin Justesen (2001)
  28. History of African Americans in North Carolina, Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hadley Watelington (2002)

Black History Month 2026.

February is generally business as usual for Black Wide-Awake, but this year is the 100th anniversary of Dr. Carter G. Woodson‘s Negro History Week, and folks are ripping down exhibits, so I’m going to go a little harder on the promotion, research, preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of Black history, culture, and genealogy of Wilson County, North Carolina. I encourage you to do the same for a place you love. I wish there were a B.W.A. equivalent for every county in these United States. Starting one may not be your path, but you can search out your local history organizations, your cemetery preservation groups, your musicians and poets and playwrights, and show them and their work some tangible love this month. Discover your community’s historic heroes and shout their names!

Freedmen’s Bureau research.

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) in 1865 to assist millions of formerly enslaved black people (and impoverished whites) in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Bureau provided immediate relief in the form of food, clothing, and fuel; managed confiscated or abandoned land; established schools for African Americans; legalized marriages; negotiated labor contracts; and investigated and adjudicated disputes involving freed people.

Millions of Bureau records, including invaluable correspondence by and about freed men, women and children; labor arrangements; marriage records; and various reports are available for genealogical research via Familysearch.org, Ancestry.com, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. Many records have been digitized and indexed; many have not.

Researching Wilson County residents in Freedmen’s Bureau is complicated by geography. There was no Bureau office in Wilson, so those who sought the Bureau’s services had to apply to offices nearby. Wilson was officially under the jurisdiction of the Goldsboro Bureau office, and most relevant documents are found there. However, people who lived north of the town of Wilson, especially in the area of what is now Elm City, often looked to the Rocky Mount office.

The map above shows the locations of the five offices closest to Wilson County. A thorough search for documents of genealogical interest should touch Goldsboro, Rocky Mount, Kinston, Smithfield, and Raleigh.

January social scene, 1927.

Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Va.), 15 January 1927.

Among the early January social happenings reported to the Journal and Guide in 1927, we learn that attorney Glenn S. McBrayer was the keynote speaker at Wilson’s January 1 Emancipation Celebration, held in the Wilson Colored High School auditorium. We also learn that Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church had wrapped up a series of Good Will services at their new chapel, i.e. the building Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church now occupies.