anniversary

On Black Wide-Awake’s 8th anniversary.

Eight years. 5,162 posts.

Yesterday, I received an email from Harold Finigan.

“I am the historian at the Darby PA Friends (Quaker) Meeting (est. 1682).  For the past several years, I have been researching our Meeting members’ roles in the abolitionist movement, especially the UGRR [Underground Railroad].  To date, I have confirmed 43 members that participated in this activity.

“In uncovering the members’ involvement, one can sometimes uncover the stories of the lives of the freedom seekers themselves. For obvious reasons, many of these stories were not published at the time, and most have been lost to history.

“As fugitive slave warrants may have been issued in their enslaved name, many [freedom seekers] changed identities without leaving any incriminating evidence.  Occasionally, some bits remain.

“Last week we were notified by the National Park Service that our NETWORK TO FREEDOM application had been approved.  This is an official designation that recognizes a particular person or place’s involvement in the UGRR.

“Amongst the members of our meeting were the famous abolitionists Isaac T. Hopper & Thomas Garrett, Jr. These men alone helped nearly 6,000 freedom seekers; but it was not a story associated with these two that I chose to represent the Meeting.

“Instead, I chose the story of Allen Ricketts. Allen was an eleven year-old boy in 1831 when he took his own freedom,  escaping with other family members from their enslaver near Baltimore, MD. His well-documented story chronicles the outcome of the values of the community as displayed in his finding safe harbor among them, his education at the Darby Friends School, and the support the Darby Quakers provided to rescue him from a later kidnapping [during which he] was taken to Baltimore to be sold on to the slave market in New Orleans. His Friends had 4 days to raise the equivalent of $30,000 to buy his freedom.

“You can read more about it here: https://www.swarthmore.edu/friends-historical-library/underground-railroad-and-sharon-female-academy-delaware-county

“The Darby Quaker community had a long tradition of advocacy, dating back to at least 1694,  for anti-slavery causes. They simply saw the idea of Equality & commitment to the Golden Rule as a core values of their beliefs.

“I have put a power point presentation together with the facts of the matter.  So far, I have shown it about a half a dozen times, with many descendants of Allen present. Before my contacting them, they knew nothing of the ordeal of their ancestor. I have found the experience healing and cathartic for many … to learn what their ancestor did, what he went through, and what the community sacrificed for of one of their members who wasn’t special, just a simple farmer. Nonetheless he was a member of the community and a person of dignity and worth.

“I think it is a lesson about what Equality truly means and how we should behave to one another today. Ms. Christina Sharpe is Allen’s 3rd great granddaughter.

“Your website was instrumental in helping me make that connection and reach out to her to tell her the deep history of her family. I wanted to let you know what a positive impact your labors have brought.”

Thank you, Mr. Finigan, for your kind words and, most importantly, for the vital work you do to research historic Darby Friends’ role in abolition and to link freedom seekers with their descendants.

Happy anniversary, Black Wide-Awake. May it continue to be a bridge.

Email reproduced with permission.

Lane Street Project: an anniversary and a promise.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my discovery in Odd Fellows cemetery of my great-grandmother Rachel Barnes Taylor‘s grave marker. I am again in Wilson unexpectedly, but that meant I was able to stop by to lend encouragement to the Senior Force and to meet two young men who stopped by out of curiosity.

Castonoble Hooks filled them in on the Lane Street Project and encouraged them to bring their friends to the next scheduled clean-up on February 12. I reeled off a few names of families buried in Odd Fellows. When I said “Artis,” the young man in the Rugrats sweatshirt looked up quickly. “I’m an Artis,” he said. I asked if he wanted to see the Artis headstones we’ve discovered, and he turned to his friend: “Cut the car off.”

I led the two back to the pile in which I found Rachel Taylor’s headstone, as well as those of Amelia Artis and her son Rufus Artis, who died in 1916 at age 16. Both agreed that more in the community should know about Lane Street Project’s work and promised to return next month.

Lane Street Project: an anniversary.

Look what popped up in my Facebook Memories today:

I’ll confess it, y’all. My expectations were pretty low. I’d issued hopeful calls like this before and had ended up poking around by myself for a frigid hour or two. Maybe, though, something about that first pandemic year we’d just been through made this appeal just hit different.

A dozen people showed up. (Even from out of town.) And a newspaper reporter. And before you knew it, Sam Vick‘s headstone emerged from the soil like a benediction, and Lane Street Project moved from wishful thinking to purposeful action.

A year later, and Vick Cemetery is on its way to re-recognition as a public cemetery. Odd Fellows has backslid a bit toward wilderness, but you can actually get in it without a machete. Rountree — well, we’ll get there. 

Most importantly, a beautiful, organic, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-generational coalition of Wilsonians and friends came together, bringing tools and time and energy to the reclamation of these sacred spaces. 

I’ve thanked you for this work, and I’ll thank you often and forever.

And in advance.

Lane Street Project Season 2 kicks off in January 2022 during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. If you or your church or your civic organization or your children or your co-workers or your cousins are looking for a way to be of service, a way to make a difference, please join us. Many hands make light work.

Black Wide-Awake turned 5.

… last week, on October 5.

I mentioned on last year’s anniversary that I’d originally intended to create “at least three location-specific sites into which I would pour all the ‘extra’ that I uncovered in the course of my genealogical research. All the court records and photographs and newspaper clippings that did not pertain directly to my people, but documented the lives of the people who built and nurtured (or disrupted) the communities in which they lived.”

It hasn’t happened. As of today, Black Wide-Awake is an astonishing 2880 posts deep, and I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. To honor my original intentions, though, over the next year, I will give over the blog, a week at time, to the three other North Carolina counties I know best, and maybe a fourth if I think I can do it justice. 

Stay tuned for Iredell County in November. In the meantime, as always, thanks so much for your boundless support and encouragement of Black Wide-Awake. Here’s to five more years of filling in the gaps!

Best regards,

Lisa Y. Henderson, a Mercy Baby.

The 102nd anniversary of the school boycott.

Today marks the 102nd anniversary of the resignation of 11 African-American teachers in Wilson, North Carolina, in rebuke of their “high-handed” black principal and the white school superintendent who slapped one of them. In their wake, black parents pulled their children out of the public school en masse and established a private alternative in a building owned by a prominent black businessman.  Financed with 25¢-a-week tuition payments and elaborate student musical performances, the Independent School operated for nearly ten years. The school boycott, sparked by African-American women standing at the very intersection of perceived powerless in the Jim Crow South, was an astonishing act of prolonged resistance that unified Wilson’s black toilers and strivers.

The school boycott is largely forgotten in Wilson, and its heroes go unsung. In their honor, today, and every April 9, I publish links to these Black Wide-Awake posts chronicling the walk-out and its aftermath. Please read and share and speak the names of Mary C. Euell and the revolutionary teachers of the Colored Graded School.

https://afamwilsonnc.com/2016/01/07/we-tender-our-resignation-and-east-wilson-followed/

https://afamwilsonnc.com/2018/03/30/the-heroic-teachers-of-principal-reids-school/

https://afamwilsonnc.com/2016/12/10/a-continuation-of-the-bad-feelings/

https://afamwilsonnc.com/2017/04/02/what-happened-when-white-perverts-threatened-to-slap-colored-school-teachers/

https://afamwilsonnc.com/2018/02/11/604-606-east-vance-street/

Mary Euell and Dr. Du Bois.

Minutes of the school board.

Attack on Prof. J.D. Reid.

http://afamwilsonnc.com/2019/07/30/lynching-going-o…-the-white-folks/

Black Wide-Awake turns 4.

Dear Reader,

Today marks the 4th anniversary — and 2216th post — of Black Wide-Awake.

This blog was to be the first of at least three location-specific sites into which I would pour all the “extra” that I uncovered in the course of my genealogical research. All the court records and photographs and newspaper clippings that did not pertain directly to my people, but documented the lives of the people who built and nurtured (or disrupted) the communities in which they lived.

I started with Wilson and, despite my best and oft-uttered intentions to curate similar blogs for Wayne and Iredell Counties, my grandmothers’ home counties, I’ve never moved beyond. Somewhere along the way I realized that though I’m no longer in Wilson, I’ve never been more of her, and my deep, deep knowledge of this people and this place are critical to making the most of the material I uncover. Gazing at the palimpsest that is African-American Wilson, I’m able to read both the smudged original text and the layers upon layers inscribed upon it over the last 150 years. Wilson is my wheelhouse, and I’ll continue to cast down my bucket here.

Thanks so much for your support and suggestions over these four years. So many of you have been generous with your time and tips and have shined lights in corners in which my ignorance lay thick. (By the way, if you’ve got pre-1950 photos or other artifacts that you’re willing to share, I’d love to research and feature them!)

Thanks also to those who’ve let me know when a post has touched them. Black Wide-Awake‘s raison d’etre is to connect us with rare material evidence of our ancestors’ lives. It’s an intervention. A ministry.

A couple of days ago I thought to ask Regina Carter Garcia, a fellow genealogist, via Facebook if Rev. Austin F. Flood is today remembered in Greenville, the city to which he returned after fighting the good fight in Wilson during and just after the Civil War. She assured me that he is and shared my post about Flood’s letter to the Freedmen’s Bureau with Shelton Tucker, another genealogist/history buff. Here’s what happened:

I grinned all day. I’d continue to curate Black Wide-Awake with no audience at all, but I am thrilled when my posts find their people. On to more.

Yours, Carolina Street’s own,

Lisa Y. Henderson