Lane Street Project: Who gets to speak for the dead?

“Underneath America lies an apartheid of the departed. Violence done to the living is usually done to their dead, who are dug up, mowed down, and built on. In the Jim Crow South, Black people paid taxes that went to building and erecting Confederate monuments. They buried their own dead with the help of mutual-aid societies, fraternal organizations, and insurance policies. Cemeteries work on something like a pyramid scheme: payments for new plots cover the cost of maintaining old ones. ‘Perpetual care’ is, everywhere, notional, but that notion relies on an accumulation of capital that decades of disenfranchisement and discrimination have made impossible in many Black communities, even as racial terror also drove millions of people from the South during the Great Migration, leaving their ancestors behind. It’s amazing that Geer survived. Durham’s other Black cemeteries were run right over. ‘Hickstown’s part of the freeway,’ Gonzalez-Garcia told me, counting them off. ‘Violet Park is a church parking lot.'”

I’m inspired — and encouraged — by Friends of Geer Cemetery and Friends of East End Cemetery and others doing this work for descendants. Please read.

“Whosoever live and believeth in me, though we be dead, yet, shall we live.”

Six weeks later, white man charged with murder of Lovett Cameron.

Wilson Daily Times, 16 May 1927.

Lovett Cameron died six weeks after Tom Moore struck him in the head with a glass bottle at Rose Bud crossroads, near the modern-day Bridgestone Firestone plant.

I have not been able to find Cameron’s death certificate or anything further about his murder.

 

 

The obituary of Millie Sutton. (Who was not named Sutton.)

Wilson Daily Times, 20 October 1936.

The deaths of African Americans in early 20th century Wilson generally did not merit mention in the newspaper unless their lives could be framed in terms of their personal service to white people. This obituary could serve as a template in this regard.

It surely was not the Millie Smith Sutton who murdered her brother O.L.W. Smith‘s wife Lucy in 1891. I can find no death certificate for a Millie Sutton in Wilson or surrounding counties in 1936. However, Millie Bryant died 17 October 1936. Per her death certificate, she was 70 years old; was born in Goldsboro, N.C., to unknown parents; lived at 608 East Green Street. Celia A. Norwood, 205 Pender Street, was informant. Was Millie Bryant, in fact, “this good woman”?

Per the 1900 census of Wilson, she was. Millie Bryant is listed as the live-in cook for widower John Selby and family. 

From 1900 federal census, Wilson, Wilson County.

Ten weeks before she died, Millie Bryant made out her last will and testament, leaving all her property to her niece Celia Norwood.

Clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.

Outbuildings.

Once upon a time, back yards in East Wilson were dotted with outbuildings — auto garages, sheds, chicken coops, outdoor toilets, and other small structures. The whitewashed brick shed above, now standing in a side yard on East Green Street, may once have been used as a root cellar.(Note the diagonal wedge of brick on the shed’s gable end, indicating a re-purposing of the original structure that required partial reconstruction.]

At the rear of Noah J. Tate’s house at 307 North Pender — two adjoining sheds, an auto garage, and an open-sided car port. Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn fire insurance map.

Sheds and garages behind the houses of Hardy Tate (611), Della Hines Barnes (613), William Hines (615), and Walter Hines (617). Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn map.

Sheds in backyards in the 400 block of North Vick Street. Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn map.

The sheds and chicken coops behind these houses on East Green Street are believed to have belonged to Samuel and Annie Vick at 622. Detail of 1922 Wilson, N.C., Sanborn fire insurance map.

Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, June 2021.

Negro white supremacist given 24 hours to leave.

Wilson Daily Times, 24 January 1925.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Who was Socrates A.E. O’Neil of Wilson? What was the Ethiopia International School? And what was the “wrong sort of propaganda”?

A search for information about O’Neil primarily yielded newspaper articles, all remarkably consistent in tone over the span of more than twenty years. The first reference I found was in a 1918 Baltimore Sun ad Rev. Socrates O’Neil of God Charitable International Ethiopian Organization, Inc., Baltimore, Maryland, placed touting his 37-cent pamphlet, “Negro Problem Solved.” 

Baltimore Sun, 5 November 1918.

In 1922, the Shreveport Journal published a partial transcript of one of O’Neil’s speeches, presumably delivered to a white audience. It’s eye-popping. (The piece also resolves one question: O’Neil’s Ethiopian School was 60 miles north of Wilson in Weldon. Whew.) Asserting that he aspired to fill the late Booker T. Washington’s shoes, O’Neil declared that “southern white people are better to negroes than northern white people,” Black people “need to be educated with [his] common sense ideas or driven on old boss’s farm to learn common sense,” he was “representative of white supremacy and teach it in my school with Biblical authority,” and “[t]he lynching question will be abolished, if science is accurate, when the negroes, men and women, morally live in their own places.” 

Shreveport Journal, 8 December 1922.

Shreveport Journal, 4 January 1923.

A 1925 New York Age piece took O’Neil apart. 

New York Age, 8 August 1925.

Finding North Carolina Negroes insufficiently grateful, Bishop O’Neil headed south, but ran into trouble. He was arrested for theft in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1931. 

Baltimore Afro American, 29 August 1931.

In November 1932, O’Neil was convicted of larceny in Savannah, Georgia, and sentenced to two months on the chain gang.

He bounced back. A year later, O’Neil delivered a speech in Biloxi, Mississippi, in which he described the Ku Klux Klan as “a help to the negroes.”

Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.), 13 November 1935.

In 1939, O’Neil — whose real name may have been Abelard E. O’Neil — was sent to prison in Indiana on an intoxication charge. This is the last I found of him.

Palladium-Item (Richmond, Ind.), 18 April 1939.

First clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III; City Court Criminal Minute Books, Savannah, Georgia, Court Records, 1790-1934, database online, http://www.ancestry.com.

Wilson’s queerest market.

In a September 1940 “Wilsonia” column, John G. Thomas memorialized Saturday afternoon rummage sales carried out by white women from cars parked along Stantonsburg (now Pender) Street. Their customers? Black tobacco factory workers whose weekly pay was burning a hole in their pockets.

Wilson Daily Times, 16 September 1940.

Application for parole.

Wilson Daily Times, 26 September 1942.

A.M.E. Zion minister Russell Buxton Taylor filed this notice of application for parole of his son William G. Taylor, who had pled guilty four months before on a prostitution charge.

A prostitution charge? Was he charged with being a prostitute or a john?

As it turns out — neither.

William Taylor had originally been charged with raping an unnamed African-American girl. A judge agreed to accept his guilty plea on a prostitution charge, however, and sentenced him to 12 months in jail, to be served performing road work.

Wilson Daily Times, 13 May 1942.