Recommendation

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)

Signal Boost: Iredell County Public Library’s Black History Month schedule.

You know I love some good robust local history programming, and Iredell County (N.C.) Public Library is absolutely gold standard. Here are their 2026 Black History Month offerings — a February packed with panels, guest speakers, workshops, and a documentary film screening.

 

Recommended reading, no. 22: One Third of a Nation.

 

In the early 1930s, journalist Lorena Hickok traveled across the United States investigating the plight of Americans struggling through the Depression. One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression. is an annotated compilation of Hickok’s contemporaneous letters, composed as she moved from state to state.

Hickok passed through Wilson in February 1934 and duly filed a letter to Harry L. Hopkins, head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the agency charged with doling out relief to millions of unemployed and needy. She arrived in the midst of a farming crisis, as reductions in crop acreage forced hundreds of farm families off the land.

“As they move to town, they apply for direct relief. The intake office in Wilson today was so crowded you could hardly get into the place. Every house, every abandoned shack, is filled with them. They even break the locks off empty houses and move in.

“Members of the relief committee, two clergymen, the administrator, and the case work supervisor in Wilson today told me that 300 of these displaced tenants and their families have moved into Wilson — a town of about 13,000 population — in the last three years, and of that 300 families, 200 have moved in this winter. The case work supervisor told there were AT LEAST FIFTY CASES in which the landlord, to get rid of them, had moved them in himself and had paid their first week’s rent!

“Seventy-five percent of these families that have moved into Wilson, they told me, are Negroes. Most of them are illiterate. They are afflicted with tuberculosis and the social diseases. Of the white families many have pellagra and hookworm, although hookworm isn’t so common up here as it is farther South. They are a dead weight on the community, both from the social and the economic standpoints. They don’t even want to live in town. The administrator and the case work supervisor both said that there is a constant stream of them in and out of their offices, begging for a chance to ‘git a place on some farm.’

“They’re NOT all bums, either. They HAVEN’T come to town to get work in the mills or on CWA. They’ve come because there’s no place for them to live in the country. Every abandoned shack in the countryside is filled up.”

Podcast recommendation: Sugar Land.

An impassioned, but disrespected, community advocate; an abandoned cemetery filled with unmarked graves of African-Americans; historic racism; frustratingly opaque government response.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

“In 2018, construction crews building a new school in Sugar Land, Texas, discovered a long-forgotten cemetery containing 95 graves. Two years ago, we set out to tell the story of these 95 people – who were they? What happened to them? In the process, we learned that theirs is a story about power – who gets it and how they wield it.”

Sound familiar?

Listen to and follow Sugar Land on NPR or wherever you get your podcasts.

Recommended reading, no. 14: Miles Lassiter: An Early African-American Quaker.

Miles Lassiter did not live in Wilson County, but I recommend Margo Lee Williams’ book as a detailed chronicle of an African-American family history research journey and because Miles Lassiter may have been linked to Wilson County’s Hardy Lassiter through common roots in Gates County, North Carolina.

Recommended reading, no. 13: the long emancipation.

Priscilla Joyner was born in Nash County, not Wilson, but close enough for her life story — and the context in which it unfolded — to be of particular interest to Black Wide-Awake readers.

“Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

“Her life story—candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project—captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation—the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities ….

“… Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could.”

Priscilla Joyner’s family in the 1860 census of Dortches township, Nash County, N.C. She is believed to have been the daughter of Ann Liza Joyner and an unknown African-American man.

Review at www.wwnorton.com.

It wasn’t just wages we wanted.

On this Labor Day, I bring you “It Wasn’t Just Wages We Wanted, But Freedom”: The 1946 Tobacco Leaf House Workers Organizing in Eastern North Carolina, a compilation of all known scholarship related to the Tobacco Workers International Union and Food, Tobacco, Agricultural & Allied Workers’ mass organizing campaign. The campaign secured union contracts at more than 30 leaf houses, and workers engaged in voter registrations and political action that presaged the civil rights movement a decade later. 

In an introduction to the first edition, Phoenix Historical Society’s Jim Wrenn noted, “This movement began as early as March 1946 when three workers at Export Leaf in Wilson — Aaron Best, Harvey Moore and Chester Newkirk — met with TWIU organizer Dr. R.A. Young … at Best’s home on East Nash Street in Wilson. This meeting led to the establishment of TWIU Local 259 at Export Leaf, the leading tobacco local in Wilson. Best became its first president, Moore its first secretary and Newark its first treasurer. Local 259 members reached out to workers at five other Wilson leaf houses, who were organized as Locals 260, 268, 270, 271, and 272. Today, Local 259 has been absorbed into local 270, the last surviving union local of the 1946 movement.”

The work was published by the Phoenix Historical Society, an organization devoted to the preservation of the African American history of Edgecombe County, and I purchased this copy directly from them.

Recommended reading, no. 6.

I’m always on the lookout for kindred spirits. In today’s New York Times, a delightful piece on Sola Olusunde, a history and archival image enthusiast, who posts on Twitter photographs, video footage, and news clippings of all things “New York, Black, and urban.” Olusunde caught his hometown paper’s attention after a video he posted of a racist attack on Black children by white residents of Rosedale, Queens, in 1975 racked up 4.5 million views.

New York Times, 12 August 2020.

Segregation Chronicles.

Okay, Wide-Awake. I need testimony.

I’m starting a side project (working name: Segregation Chronicles) that will document the physical legacy of racial injustice in Wilson County. I was born in the waning days of legal segregation, and I haven’t lived here in almost 40 years, but I can reel off two dozen-plus sites that stand as mute testimony to trauma that continues to haunt us. I know y’all know more than I do, though, so I’m asking for your help. (Or your mama’s. Or your granddaddy’s.)

At which restaurants did we have to go around back for food? (Like Parker’s.) What theatres had separate entrances and black balconies? (Like the Drake.) What businesses had partitions in their sitting rooms — or whole separate sitting areas? (Like the train station.) Who wouldn’t let you eat at the lunch counter? Who had a colored water fountain (other than the county courthouse)? Where did the Klan rally? Where were German POWs allowed to rest, but your father was told to get his black ass up? Where was the black liquor house that had to pay off a white cop to sell white people liquor after midnight?

Please post here. Or email me at blackwideawake@gmail.com. Or let me know if you’d rather call. All responses from any source, black or white, appreciated. Thank you, and stay tuned. (Especially if you want to know what this photograph shows.)

UPDATE: Check out Segregation Chronicles here, blackwideawake.tumblr.com.