David Cecelski

Adam Scott, Barbecue Artist, in Wilson.

If you love the people and culture and history of eastern North Carolina, and you’re not reading David Cecelski‘s beautiful and richly textured essays about the Coastal Plain past, fix that. His most recent blogpost is a deep dive into the life of Barbecue King Adam Scott of Goldsboro, a small city about 25 miles south of Wilson, and draws upon photographs found in the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development Collection at the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh.

Among the images Cecelski selected is this one of Scott at a barbecue in Wilson in 1948.

A little hunting in the Wilson Daily Times and I found a 16 October 1948 piece about the convention of the North Carolina State Grange to be held in Wilson October 26-28. Ava Gardner, “Wilson’s contribution to Hollywood,” had been invited to attend a fashion show and guests were to be treated to “a special barbecue with Adam Scott, of Goldsboro, doing the cooking.”

Eastern North Carolina pitmasters like Wilson’s Ed Mitchell have expanded the legacy of Adam Scott, who cooked for governors and senators and presidents, as well as the every day folk who stepped through his back door on Brazil Street. Though Scott’s Famous Barbecue Restaurant is long-closed, you can order Scott’s vinegar and red pepper-based, sugar- and fat-free barbecue sauce right now.

Mary Euell and Dr. Du Bois.

To my astonished delight, historian David Cecelski cited to my recent post on Mary C. Euell and the school boycott — and shouted out Black Wide-Awake — today.  In a piece dedicated to Glenda Gilmore on the occasion of her retirement, Cecelski describes a letter from Euell to W.E.B. Du Bois he found among Du Bois’ papers, collected at and digitized by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Researching the letter’s context led him to Black Wide-Awake, and he penned a warm and gracious thanks for my research.

Euell wrote the letter from her home at 135 Pender Street on 22 April 1918, not two weeks after leading  her colleagues in a walkout. She made reference to Du Bois’ letter of the 18th and promised to send “full details of [her] trouble here in Wilson,” including newspaper clippings and photographs. Though no follow-up correspondence from Euell is found in the collection, there is a newspaper clipping sent April 12 by Dr. A.M. Rivera, a dentist and N.A.A.C.P. leader from Greensboro, North Carolina. (Coincidentally, Dr. Rivera’s office was in the Suggs Building.)

Greensboro Daily News, 12 April 1918.

(The collection also contains a brief letter from Mrs. O.N. Freeman [Willie Hendley Freeman] referring to an enclosed a 7 August 1920 Wilson Daily Times article and noting “this might interest you or be of some value to some one as I know your sentiments by reading the Crisis.” I have not been able to locate the article in online databases and do not know whether it related to the ongoing boycott.)