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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Today marks the 101st 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.
B.H. Edwards, 23, of Nash County, married Lucy Kearney, 17, of Wilson, on 9 November 1903 in Wilson. Missionary Baptist minister Fred M. Davis performed the ceremony in the presence of J.J. Murfree, J.H. Pulley and W.L. Hardy.
Lucy K. Edwards died 26 March 1966 in Wilson. Per her death certificate, she was born 8 November 1886 in Franklin County, North Carolina, to Anna Williams; resided in Elm City, Wilson County; was married to Buck H. Edwards; and was buried in William Chapel cemetery.
Buck H. Edwards died 12 December 1967 in Elm City, Taylors township, Wilson County. Per his death certificate, he was born 6 February 1891 in Nash County to Robert Edwards and Sallie Parker; was married to Bettie M. Edwards; was a minister; and was buried in William Chapel cemetery. Informant was Mrs. Mae Guzman, 1214 Queen Street, Wilson.
In late March 1959, the seven children of Wesley and Martha Taylor Jones — Mildred Jones Crittenden, Lucille Jones Peterson, Vernon Jones, Willia Jones Turner, John Wesley Jones, JamesJones and Elroy Jones — threw a party in East Elmhurst, Queens, New York, to celebrate their parents’ 50th anniversary.
Marriage license of Wesley Jones and Martha Taylor, who were married 26 March 1910 in Taylor township, Wilson County.
Martha and Wesley Jones with six of their children, circa late 1950s.
we’d just been through made this appeal just hit different.
