gratitude

Lane Street Project: season 4, workday 2.

The bitter wind and cold got the better of us Saturday morning, and the Senior Force made the sound decision to cancel the workday. Today, then, was all the sweeter.

Jen Kehrer and the “Junior Force” arrived early to remove trash from the roadside and to beautify the chainlink fence between Odd Fellows and Vick Cemeteries. These children chose to spend their Martin Luther King Jr. day off as a day on, and we deeply appreciate their care and contribution.

Wright Brothers arrived with the equipment and expertise needed to demolish the last big thicket in the mid-section of Odd Fellows Cemetery and to remove numerous trees. Castonoble Hooks opined that the tonnage taken out today was greater than the total of prior seasons. Briggs Sherwood also noted the day’s excellent progress and lauded Wright Brothers for their careful work amid difficult, delicate terrain.

Our next workday, in partnership with Scarborough House Resort, is January 27. Please come see our progress and help advance our reclamation of Odd Fellows Cemetery.

Please consider Wright Brothers Lawncare and Landscaping, 919-252-9130, for your professional needs. Thank you, John Kirk Barnes (of The Kirk’s Flowers, 252-299-0903) and Josiah Wright. Photos courtesy of Castonoble Hooks and R. Briggs Sherwood.

2023: year-end gratitude.

In a year of extraordinary — and intertwined — highs and lows, I am thankful for so many and so much, including:

The Senior Force, led by Castonoble Hooks and R. Briggs Sherwood, and each and every person who volunteered in any capacity during Lane Street Project cleanup work days, including those who could not be present to labor, but who prayed for the success and safety of those who could. Special thanks to organizations and corporations like Preservation of Wilson, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and AgBiome, who saw our work days as a way to build community and engage in public service.

All who have donated money, time, or talent to Lane Street Project outside the cleanups. Donations have paid for materials, supplies, equipment, and headstone repair and resetting.

All who have worked, whether openly or behind the scenes, to demand dialogue and change from the City of Wilson’s leaders and a place at the decision-making table for Vick’s descendant community.

Rev. H. Maurice Barnes, Rev. Carlton Barnes, and all the faith leaders who blessed Vick Cemetery during its Reconsecration, as well as those who worked to make the day successful and safe and those who came to lift voices and bear witness. A special thanks to Bishop Ernestine McGee and Mayor Carlton Stevens and City of Wilson police and departments for set-up and logistical support.

Cameron Homes of Homes Landscaping Inc. of Wilson, who offered professional guidance for removing wisteria, privet, and briars and who donated his services for defoliation of invasive plants.

Billy and Christina Foster of Foster’s Stone and Cemetery Care for their expert care in cleaning, repairing, and resetting grave markers at Odd Fellows Cemetery.

Brother David Speight and historic Mount Hebron Lodge #42, P.H.A., for inviting Lane Street Project to participate in this year’s Juneteenth festival.

Jen Kehrer and Scarborough House Resort for extra care of Odd Fellows Cemetery, including honoring veterans at Memorial Day, co-sponsoring a Juneteenth clean-up, creating handouts for our Juneteenth booth, and mowing before Reconsecration so that the cemetery was at its best.

John Kirk Barnes of The Kirk’s Flowers for engaging Wright Brothers Landscaping to clear the interior of Odd Fellows Cemetery in January 2024.

Thomas Ramirez, Regional Training Coordinator at Bojangles’ Restaurants, for donating biscuits and other filling fare for our Season 4 cleanup kickoff in December.

The benefactor, who wishes to remain anonymous, who cleaned and repainted the fire hydrant that marks Chief Ben Mincey‘s grave.

Mrs. Henrietta Hines McIntosh for sharing both the beauty and the sadness of her family’s Vick Cemetery experience.

Members of historic Calvary Presbyterian Church, who signed letters in support of justice for Vick Cemetery. Samuel H. Vick was the driving force behind Calvary’s founding in 1889.

The Wilson Times for persistent, in-depth coverage of Vick Cemetery issues, and WRAL and WNCT9 for timely features on the ongoing tragedy involving Vick’s headstones.

Heather Goff and staff for transforming the landscape of Vick Cemetery by cutting back overgrowth and mulching the monument area, addressing drainage issues, and regular maintenance.

Dr. Lydia Walker and Barton College for the honor of delivering the 2024 Fall Heritage Lecture, and the Barton College students who volunteered at Odd Fellows during the college’s Day of Service.

Jennifer Johnson and Greenfield School for inviting Lane Street Project to the school’s Community Service Fair to speak with students about the significance of our cemeteries and volunteer opportunities with us.

Wilson County Public Library for its steadfast inclusion of African-American history in its programming.

J. Robert Boykin III for clipping and donating to BWA hundreds of articles and photos related to Wilson’s African-American history and families from thousands of disintegrating early 20th-century newspapers.

North Carolina Public Records Law, G.S. Section 132.1.

The science of ground-penetrating radar.

The readers of Black Wide-Awake, for your unstinting support, likes, comments, questions, suggestions, corrections, and shares of photographs and other documents.

And strength for the fight.

Standing in the Gap for the Ancestors: Sankofa and the Why of Black Wide-Awake.

The text of a talk I delivered 19 October 2023 at Barton College, Wilson, North Carolina.

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My thanks to Dr. Lydia Walker for the invitation to speak tonight. A special shout-out to the School of Arts and Humanities, as well. I have an undergraduate degree in English and a graduate degree in History. STEM is important, but God bless those intrepid humanities majors! And, of course, thank you to the BB&T endowment that supports the Heritage Lecture series and to Wilson County Historical Association.

I’m a big science fiction/fantasy fan, and I’m currently working through R. Scott Bakker’s Aspect-Emperor quartet. As I was finalizing my remarks for tonight, a bit of dialogue from the second book of the series jumped out at me – “You need to glimpse more to know that you see less.” You need to glimpse more to know that you see less. Less, that is, than there is to see.

I’m intrigued by palimpsests as a metaphor. There is the surface of things, that which we see, the plane in which we exist. For example, the 500 block of East Nash Street as I drove its length today. But below this plane, there are layer upon layer of 500 blocks, each as fully actualized in its own time as this one is in ours. That’s what Black Wide Awake is about. Understanding that what we see is not all there is or was, and peeling back those layers to recover what is missing.

I have not lived in Wilson for more than two-thirds of my life. Nonetheless, wherever I am, however far away I go — Wilson remains my home, and each passing year both reminds me and reveals to me this fundamental truth. For eighteen years, I walked the same dusty streets that my father walked, along paths trod by my grandfather, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My life crossed theirs, in space, if not time, a dozen times a day. When my grandmother told me stories of her youth, I didn’t have to imagine Green Street or Five Points or Export Leaf or Cherry Hotel. I’d seen them. If I didn’t know the men and women that peopled her memories, I knew their children or grandchildren. I knew their homes.

The house on Elba Street that my grandmother grew up in and my father and his siblings were born in.

On dew-bright summer mornings — in swimsuits and flip-flops, towels slung over our heads — my cousin and I would set off for the Reid Street Community Center pool. We’d walk up Carolina Street and cut through a path to Queen Street, where her mother and my father once lived in a row of endway houses – that’s the local name for shotguns. We’d turn up Queen to Reid Street (where they also lived for a time), then turn north. At Green Street, we peered west toward the tiny cottage on Elba Street in which my grandmother had grown up and my father was born. Looking east, through frothy crepe myrtles, we gazed into the portals of Charles H. Darden High School, alma mater of nearly every adult we knew. Skirting Sam Vick Elementary, the all-black school at which two generations of my family had learned to conjugate and multiply, we exchanged our belongings for numbered safety pins and locked our toes over the edge of the pool.

My genealogical and historical research at Black Wide-Awake strengthens and preserves my link to the vast web of connections — floating deeper than memory — that roots me. With it, through it, I remember and pay homage to the Miss Edie Bells and Miz Speights and Mr. Kennys and Ma Keits, men and women who sheltered us in a cocoon spun from folk wisdom, good country sense, and a deep familiarity with the ways of white folks.

This was a liminal space – Old South fading, New South emerging. I was nurtured by the children and grandchildren of the enslaved so as to make my way among the children and grandchildren of enslavers. This, as much as anything, fueled my love of history and genealogy and stoked my quest to know whose shoulders I stand upon.

The blog Black Wide-Awake began as a repository into which I piled all the “extra” I uncovered while digging in archives and databases for my own family’s history. All the court records and photographs and newspaper clippings that did not pertain directly to my people, but captured the lives of those who created or disrupted the community in which my people lived.

My original idea was to create blogs for each of the three counties in which most of my North Carolina ancestors lived. I started with Wilson County, and I’ve never moved beyond it. Somewhere along the way, I realized that though I’m no longer in Wilson, I’ve never been more of her, and my bone-deep familiarity with these people and this place are essential to making the most of the material I uncover. Of catching the glimpses that lead to seeing more. Studying the pentimento that is African-American Wilson, I am able to read both the smudged original text and the layers upon layers inscribed upon it over the last 200 years. Wilson is my wheelhouse, and – to borrow a phrase from Booker T. Washington, one of the city’s most famous visitors – I have determined to cast down my buckets here.

The received history of Wilson is anchored in admiring tales of immigrant English younger sons, Mexican War soldiers, county fathers, Civil War generals, and money-minting tobacconists. Though we have been here from the beginning, dragged behind the colonizers, African Americans have largely been omitted from historical records, which inevitably has led to our erasure from both memory and place. Wilson County was built on the backs of black people, but neither we nor our works are remembered or celebrated.

Black History in general is often siloed – boxed into a single month that hyperfocuses on a small set of big names and grand feats. We all know Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman – as we absolutely should. But what of our own heroes? Our own freedom fighters? Our own revolutionaries? What great minds and deeds sprang from our own sandy soil?

For hundreds of years, the Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast have used symbols, called adinkra, as visual representations of concepts and aphorisms. Sankofa, which means, literally, “go back and get it,” is often illustrated as a bird looking over its back.  Black Wide Awake exists to snatch back that which was forgotten. I spoke of being born in a liminal age. A dawn. But also a twilight. I grew up accustomed to squinting into half-light, and I am among the last of Wilson’s children who can see both the dim shapes of the past and describe them for the future.

In researching for the blog, I have been astonished by what I’ve uncovered. How did I not know of these people? How have the aspirations and achievements, the trials and triumphs, the resistance and the resilience of so many black people been so quickly rendered invisible? How much taller would we stand if we knew these stories? As singer and social activist Bernice Johnson Reagon has counseled, “when you are in touch with your history, you can see yourself as evidence of the success of your ancestors.”

And how much richer would our whole community be for this knowledge? As historian Andi Cumbo-Floyd assured her white audience: “You will only be enriched by connecting with the black people who built the places you love. You will find people who love these places, too, differently but just as strongly. You will find stories about your home places that help you understand and appreciate them more. You will make friends. You will understand history. You will know – first-hand and real – the way history has been unfair and unkind to people of color, and you will be better people for that.”

Let me tell you just a few stories.

In 1918, Mary C. Euell — my personal hero — and 10 other African-American teachers resigned from Wilson’s Colored Graded School after white superintendent Charles L. Coon slapped Euell. In their wake, black parents pulled their children out of the public school en masse and opened a private alternative school in a building owned by Samuel H. Vick.  Financed with 25¢-a-week tuition payments and elaborate student musical performances, the Wilson Normal & Industrial School operated for nearly ten years. 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, African-American women, go unsung.

Speaking of Sam Vick. There’s a whole school named for him, and a contested public cemetery, but who here really knows who this one-man Black Wall Street was? There is no arena of social and civic life in which Vick did not blaze trails, knock down walls, or burst through ceilings. Every day we follow paths he literally mapped across Wilson. He laid out streets; bought, rented, and sold hundreds of houses; and founded or co-founded Presbyterian churches, a hotel, a cemetery, a hospital, a school, an insurance company, a movie theatre, and a bank. He was a founding or early member of the local lodges of the Knights of Labor; the Knights of Pythias; Mount Hebron Lodge #42 of Prince Hall Masons; Hannibal Lodge #1552 of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows; and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. In 1910, when Booker T. Washington scheduled a stop in Wilson during his Educational Tour of the South, Samuel and Annie Vick played host to the guest of honor, sponsoring a reception for Washington’s entourage on their East Green Street lawn.

Sam Vick rose quickly to the upper echelon of eastern North Carolina’s black power brokers, eventually becoming a close ally of future Congressman George H. White. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Vick postmaster of Wilson. Postmaster positions were highly sought after as among the few patronage jobs available in rural North Carolina, and Vick’s appointment was bitterly resented. He held the position until 1894, then was reappointed by President William McKinley in 1898. In 1903, Vick’s fight to keep the postmaster job became national news when Jeter Pritchard, the only Republican Senator from the South and a leader of the so-called Lily White movement, demanded that Teddy Roosevelt replace Vick with a white man. Roosevelt acquiesced. Even after his removal from office, Vick remained active in national politics and, when Vick Elementary was dedicated in 1936, he was alive to receive the honor.

And what of Wilson’s own Rosa Parkses? In 1943, Irene Barron and James Parker were arrested weeks apart for sitting in the white section of Wilson city buses and refusing to move to the back. The driver of Parker’s bus abandoned the route and drove straight to the police station. Parker received a suspended sentence, but Barron was hit with 60 days in jail. Were these acts of protest so close in time a mere coincidence? Or did Barron and Parker plan this assault on Jim Crow together? As a practice, the local press was frustratingly reticent about challenges to the apparatus of segregation – another way of erasing history even as it is made.

I had never heard of teenager Marie Everett until I read Charles W. McKinney’s excellent Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina. I’m not sure how it is possible that her struggle was so quickly forgotten, but the fight for justice for Everett was a small victory that sent a big message to Wilson’s Black community and likely a shudder of premonition through its white one:

On 6 October 1945, 15 year-old Everett took in a movie at downtown Wilson’s Carolina Theatre, which admitted black patrons to its balcony only. As Everett stood beside a friend near the concession stand, a cashier yelled at her to get in line. Everett responded that she was not in line and, on the way back to her seat, stuck out her tongue. The cashier grabbed Everett, slapped her, and began to choke her. Everett fought back. Somebody called the police, and Everett was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The next day in court, Everett’s charge was upgraded to simple assault. Though this misdemeanor carried a maximum thirty-day sentence and fifty-dollar fine, the judge upped Everett’s time to three months in county jail. Wilson’s tiny NAACP chapter swung into action, securing a white lawyer from Tarboro. In the meantime, Everett sat in jail four months awaiting a hearing on her appeal – long past the length of her 30-day original sentence. Wilson County assigned two prosecutors to the matter, and one opened with a statement to the jury that the case would “show the n*ggers that the war is over.” Everett was convicted anew, and this judge, astonishingly, increased her sentence from three to six months to be served — even more astonishingly — at the women’s prison in Raleigh. Hard time. Everett was a minor, though, and the prison refused to admit her.  Wilson’s NAACP jumped in again to send word to Thurgood Marshall, head of the organization’s Legal Defense Fund. Marshall engaged a black lawyer in Durham, who alerted state officials to Wilson’s shenanigans. After intervention by the Commissioner of Paroles and the Governor, Everett walked out of jail on March 18. She had missed nearly five months of her freshman year of high school.

And then there’s Dr. George K. Butterfield Sr., the dentist whose road to election to Wilson’s board of aldermen was a primer in voter suppression.

Here’s the bullet-point version of events:

  • In 1928, Dr. Butterfield was one of only 46 black registered voters in Wilson.
  • In the 1930s and ’40s, several organizations formed to support African-American political engagement, including voter registration.
  • By the early 1950s, about 500 black voters were registered, almost all of whom lived in the city’s Third Ward, a long narrow precinct that crossed Wilson east to west.
  • In early 1953, Dr. Butterfield announced his candidacy for a seat on Wilson’s Board of Aldermen, the precursor to today’s city council. He drew immediate widespread support from unionized tobacco leafhouse workers, churches, and the city’s small African-American professional class.
  • A few days before the election, ward incumbent Herbert Harriss challenged the eligibility of 185 registered voters. Of the 150 voters struck from the rolls, 147 were black.
  • On election night, Dr. Butterfield and Harriss each received 382 votes. Butterfield objected that the registrar had violated rules requiring that votes be counted at the site where ballot boxes are opened. City Attorney W.A. Lucas conceded the count was irregular, but declared the point moot, as there were tie-breaker provisions. Over Dr. Butterfield’s objections, the City Clerk placed the two candidates’ names in a hat, blindfolded a three year-old girl, and asked her to draw a name.
  • Dr. Butterfield won!
  • In 1955, the City of Wilson acted decisively to get in front of Dr. Butterfield’s re-election. First, it threw out all the registration books, ostensibly to clear the rolls of dead or otherwise ineligible voters – STOP ME IF THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR. Citizens had one month to re-register at their ward registrar’s house on weekdays, a difficult and daunting task for factory workers and domestics working long hours across town. Next, the city expanded Ward 3 on its western end to pull in hundreds more white voters. The Wilson Daily Times stoked fears by publishing running tallies of new registrations by race.
  • Notwithstanding, on election day, 93% of all eligible black voters voted, and Dr. Butterfield won again!
  • In 1957, faced with another Butterfield campaign, the City went for the nuclear option and chucked the whole ward system for “new and fair” city-wide, at-large seats. Further, to thwart bloc voting, voters would not be able to vote for just one candidate. Rather, they had to select six candidates or their ballots would be invalidated. Jim Crow protocols prevented Dr. Butterfield from campaigning directly to white voters, and he was unable to parry when his opponents sneered at his ties to “special interest groups” like the NAACP and cast him as a candidate solely interested in advancing Black issues.
  • Unsurprisingly, Dr. Butterfield placed eighth of 16 candidates and was the sole incumbent to lose his seat.

The story didn’t end there, of course. Dr. Butterfield’s defeat coincided with the emergence of new grassroots civil rights organizing efforts to attack segregation and racism in every corner of Wilson life.

In June 1964, James Costen, the young Black pastor of Elm City’s tiny First Presbyterian Church, invited an interracial group of students from Pennsylvania and New York to paint the church. When they arrived in Elm City, Robert Jones, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, told him he could not guarantee their safety if they tried to paint the church alongside Negroes. The students packed up and went home. On the evening of July 9, Grand Dragon Jones called Rev. Costen to tell him that he had gathered about two hundred fifty Klan members from Wilson and Nash Counties who were ready to paint the church. They had forty floodlights and forty gallons of paint and would work all night. Understandably, Rev. Costen passed on the offer, and Jones accused him of “not wanting to get the church painted, but of desiring to make a racial issue by bringing in outsiders.” Jones then threatened that an “integrated brush” would not touch the walls of the church, and another attempt toward that end could get somebody killed. Elm City Mayor George Tyson called the sheriff’s office in Wilson, who contacted the governor’s office, who mobilized the state highway patrol. Authorities broke up the Klan assembly around eleven that evening. “I feel safe in saying,” Rev. Costen later told a reporter, “at this point we will refuse their help.” A few days later, two Rocky Mount men were arrested after fleeing warning shots fired as they splashed gasoline on the church steps. Order restored, painting began on July 14 with an integrated group of workers under the watch of state troopers.

And on and on. I’ve told some of the good stories, but there are so many more – stories of families and foodways and forgotten Wilson neighborhoods like Grabneck, Little Washington, Happy Hill, and Sunshine Alley. I have not shared them tonight, but there are terrible stories, too, of the cruelties of slavery, of lynchings, of racism both casual and deliberate.

I founded Black Wide-Awake in 2015. It turned 8 years old this month and as of today is 5192 posts strong. It birthed Lane Street Project, a multiethnic, multigenerational community collective devoted to the reclamation of three historic African-American cemeteries — including private Odd Fellows, where Barton students cleared brush yesterday morning during their Day of Service, and public Vick, which bears the scars of the City of Wilson’s alternating abuse and misguided attention. The removal of headstones from that cemetery and the complete erasure of its burial records are an object lesson in the critical importance of documenting Black Lives, of calling our people’s names, resurrecting their memory, and ensuring they are never again forgotten.

I have not done this work alone, and I deeply appreciate the many who have shared images and artifacts and access — that’s critical, access — to help me shout these stories. I would build this archive even if no one wanted to read it, but am profoundly grateful that so many do.

Black Wide-Awake is a mission. It’s a ministry. It’s a love letter. It’s the currency with which I repay my debt to the community that made me.

Thank you.

Lane Street Project: an affirmation.

I am with my mother in the line at Whole Truth Restaurant. A woman waiting for her fried fish suddenly exclaims: “Mrs. Henderson! My son’s favorite teacher! Oh, my son loved him some Mrs. Henderson!” They chat a bit about the student, who has retired from the military and a second career since he was in my mother’s classroom at Adams Elementary. She suddenly turns to me: “Ain’t you that one be in the paper all the time? About the cemetery?” I laugh. “Yes.” She appraises me for a silent second, then: “You doing good.”

Bone-deep thanks to my community for well wishes, prayers, amplification, quiet assistance, action, and the innumerable other ways you’ve supported Lane Street Project.

Lane Street Project: the Reconsecration of Vick Cemetery, part 1.

I am so FULL. I don’t even know where to start. Just gon and get ready to be sick of me, because this is going to go post after post.

This first post is thanks and acknowledgment.

To Rev. H. Maurice Barnes and Rev. Carlton Best, who answered my call for Reconsecration with a full-throated “yes!,” planned the order of service and called in the faith community to carry out our vision for this day;

To Rev. Debbie Hayes, who hosted planning meetings at Rountree Missionary Baptist Church;

To Bishop Ernestine McGee of Faith Temple United Holy Church for use of the bus that ferried guests from street parking around the corner to the site of the ceremony;

To the ecumenical team of Rev. A. Kim Reives (who led the prayers of Reconsecration), Rev. Dr. Christopher Wyckoff (who gave the benediction), Rev. Jose Daniel Pinell (who delivered Scripture), Rev. Torase L. Barnes, Rev. Carnela R. Hill, Rev. Lindsey Ardrey, Rev. Tim Davis, Rev. Edwin Ferguson, and others whose names I did not catch, who walked the grounds, anointing the earth during Reconsecration;

To Mayor Carlton L. Stevens, who arranged for support from the Parks and Recreation Department, Wilson Police Department, Wilson Energy, and other city employees;

To the Honorable G.K. Butterfield Jr., retired member of Congress, whose incisive remarks at today’s ceremony were a call to action for the City’s leaders;

To Sister Faye Winstead, who stepped in at the very last moment to lead us in song (“We Will Work Till Jesus Comes”);

To City Councilmembers Derrick D. Creech, Gillettia Morgan, Rev. Michael S. Bell, and James Johnson and County Commissioner JoAnne Daniels for their attendance and attention;

To Henrietta Hines McIntosh, for the gift of her memories;

To Jen Kehrer of Scarborough House Resort, who arranged for Odd Fellows Cemetery to be cut back yesterday and who showed up early to help hand out programs and buttons;

To Lane Street Project’s everyday volunteers, who are always there when needed;

To the Wilson Times, for recognizing the importance of Vick Cemetery and affording close coverage of our fight;

To each of you in attendance at this beautiful ceremony, in body or spirit;

And to the ancestors — may you be pleased with our work.

Happy New Year, part 2!

My deep appreciation to all who supported Black Wide-Awake in 2022 through likes, comments, contributions, corrections, shout-outs, and shares. It was another tough year; this time because we lost my beloved father, my most immediate link to the world I chronicle here. I leaned heavily into the blog as a distraction at times, and as ever drew comfort and encouragement from the ancestors I met.

For more than 50 years, Wilson’s African-American community celebrated Emancipation Day on January 1st, the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863. People gathered to hear speeches, poetry and musical performances and to enjoy communal meals, celebrations that perhaps wiped away bitter memories of slavery-time hiring days.

In honor of all whose journey to freedom began 160 years ago today, Black Wide-Awake wishes you a happy New Year!

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Some 2022 stats:

  785 posts

 209,498 views (an increase of 16% from 2021)

87,227 visitors (an increase of 15% and hailing from 142 countries and territories)

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Top 5 most popular posts:

Registered nurses (posted 2018).

Studio shots, no. 90: Edna E. Gaston (2018).

Groom killed an hour after marriage.

William Barnes plantation (2017).

Strung from a tree and shot to death (2016).

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Some of my faves (in no order):

Ed Mitchell’s barbeque.

Railroad section crew in Stantonsburg.

The 100 and 200 blocks of South Pender Street.

The murder of Brother Carey C. Hill.

Stone workers strike near Sims.

Peaceful Valley Lodge No. 272, Knights of Pythias.

The pitmasters of Dixie Inn.

Studio shot, no. 197: The Henderson-Taylor family.

Parker refuses to give up his seat on the bus.

Lane Street Project: seek and ye shall find.

Honored. Humbled.

The mystery of Julia Boyette Bailey’s grave.

Cancelled stamp in collection of Lisa Y. Henderson.

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.

The why of Black Wide-Awake, no. 2.

Carolyn Maye, a generous contributor of photographs to Black Wide-Awake, made it to Imagination Station on closing day to see Say Their Names. The exhibit included among its displayed documents a copy of the obituary of her formerly enslaved great-great-grandmother, Jane Rountree Mobley.

She brought with her Skylar, the youngest of Jane Mobley’s great-great-great-great-granddaughters.

Thank you, Carolyn, for affirming the purpose of Black Wide-Awake. Your determination to get to Wilson, despite a pandemic, and to introduce Skylar to Jane Mobley, both humbles and inspires me. She will never believe, as so many of us have, that the lives of her ancestors passed unknown and unknowable.

Lane Street Project: three months in.

On 13 December 2020, I posted this:

Frankly, I didn’t expect much. I’d made similar appeals before and then spent hours tangled up in briers by myself. December 15, 2020, though, was different. Despite cold weather and Covid-19, a dozen people (and, critically, a newspaper reporter) came with pruners and rakes and surgical masks — and Lane Street Project stepped into its purpose. We’re still feeling our way to long-range plans, but short-term we’re exceeding my wildest dreams.

What Lane Street Project has done in three months:

  • Developed a fantastic core team of volunteers responsible for planning, promoting, supplying, and managing bimonthly clean-ups at Odd Fellows Cemetery, as well as strategizing about ways to encourage community engagement in the reclamation of these historic African-American spaces
  • Conducted two informal and five planned clean-ups at Odd Fellows Cemetery with a multi-ethnic, multi-generational crew of enthusiastic, hardworking volunteers
  • Built a tool bank for volunteer use during clean-ups
  • Recovered the gravesite of educator, businessman and community leader Samuel H. Vick; cleared the grave of Red Hot Hose Company chief Benjamin Mincey; and named and reclaimed the gravesites of 22 more individuals (bringing the total at Odd Fellows to 76), for which we maintain a detailed spreadsheet 
  • Developed relationships with established organizations doing similar work in African-American cemeteries across the Southeast 
  • Developed relationships with allies in local government, business, and the faith community, as well as individuals willing to invest time and talent to our efforts to preserve and protect the historic burial grounds of thousands of Wilson’s African-Americans
  • Begun to map the locations of graves at the site
  • Developed a plan for responsible defoliation of invasive plant species in Odd Fellows cemetery 

We’ve accomplished a lot in three months, but there is so much more to be done. Thanks so much to those who have supported us with gifts of labor, tools, coins, cheerleading, signal-boosting, and prayer. Please continue to do so! Follow us on Instagram at @lanestreetproject; join us on Facebook at Lane Street Project; reach out to us at lanestreetproject@gmail.com. In the coming months, we’ll be broadening our focus from clean-up to documentation and restoration, and we will need your help at every step. 

Photo of Corp. Willie Gay’s headstone courtesy of Drew C. Wilson.

Lane Street Project: a conversation (and a word.)

In conversation with Brittany Daniel about what the Lane Street Project is and what to expect at this weekend’s clean-up kick-off:

And, on the eve of the kick-off, a heartfelt shout-out to my Lane Street Project team, my boots on the ground. In less than a month, they’ve adopted this project as their own and are literally making my dreams for the LSP come true. This multigenerational crew is pouring into the project critical new perspectives and talents, and I’m so grateful to and for Joyah Bulluck, Portia Newman, Craig Barnes Jr., Brittany Daniel, Castonoble Hooks, LaMonique Hamilton, John Woodard, Charles Jones, and Raven Farmer. (Look at all those good “Wilson names” in the bunch!)