I’m overdue for a re-reading of Race and Politics in North Carolina 1872-1901, a 43 year-old classic.
Eric Anderson’s monograph focuses on North Carolina’s so-called “Black Second” Congressional district — one of the most remarkable centers of Black political influence in the post-Reconstruction, late nineteenth-century America. Though the work only touches lightly on Samuel H. Vick, it provides indispensable context for his life and work.
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.
Saint Paul (MN) Appeal, 18 June 1904.
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Samuel H. Vick was one of two African-American delegates from North Carolina to the 1904 Republican National Convention. The other was Henry Plummer Cheatham, former Second District Representative to the United States Congress.
Speaking to my home community at Wilson County Public Library has been a highlight of my Februarys lately, and I’m excited to return in person this year. I’ll be trying to do justice to the extraordinary life of Samuel H. Vick in an hour or so, and I look forward to seeing you there.
Please join me tonight for a little history of Wilson’s African-American cemeteries and of Lane Street Project. The Season 3 opening clean-up is in just a few days, and this will be an opportunity to ask anything you want to know about us!
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Lisa Y. Henderson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Lane Street Project Q&A
Time: Jan 10, 2023 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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Journal of the National Medical Association, volume 21, number 4 (1929).
Sharpsburg is not just a Nash County town. Parts of the town lie in Edgecombe and Wilson Counties, with its historical African-American community in the latter. Though the violence here did not directly involve Black people, I post it for its insight into prejudice so deeply ingrained that the mere image of a “negro office holder … dictating to a white stenographer” could provoke a former mayor to shoot down the police chief (who was also his brother-in-law).
Wilson Daily Times, 2 November 1928.
Wilson Daily Times, 5 September 1913.
Signed only “Colored Citizen,” this anonymous tribute to George Whitfield Connor gets in a little pointed jabs at the “enemies of our race” while praising Connor, who had been appointed resident judge of North Carolina’s Second Judicial Circuit six months earlier. Connor, like his father Henry G. Connor, later was appointed a North Carolina Supreme Court justice.Â
Clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.
Up until he killed his wife, Samuel Vick‘s sister Nettie Vick Jones, — A. Wilson Jones enjoyed a reputation as a gifted, if wily, orator.
Wilson Advance, 25 October 1894.
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Farmer & Mechanic (Raleigh, N.C.), 2 September 1902.Â
It’s not entirely clear, but this report seems to claim that Jack Sharp, a former Wilson County resident, boarded a train to unseat the county’s representatives on their way to the state Republican convention and to appoint a new set. William S. Hagans, the Wayne County native who provided the report, was African-American, and my guess is that the original delegates contained Black members.