My little Black History Month lecture circuit capped Saturday with a conversation at Raleigh’s Mount Pleasant Baptist Church about the importance of preserving church and cemetery histories. A snippet of my intro:

“Three years after starting my personal genealogy blog, I created another in which I chronicle the African American history and families of Wilson County. This blog, called Black Wide-Awake, speaks names all but forgotten in my home community. As I researched for the blog, I gained a deeper understanding of the need to look for evidence of the past outside the readily available archival sources. We were not the registers of deeds, clerks of court, newspaper reporters, archivists, or librarians who determined whose lives were worth recording. But the spaces we did control are often rich repositories, and we find two such spaces in multiple forms in every community. They are the church and the cemetery. As archival sources, however, both are in peril.

“Mount Pleasant is blessed to be the steward of both church and cemetery. You are a living museum. Throughout African-American history, our faith institutions have supplied so much more than spiritual sustenance. They have been community centers, promoters and providers of education, financial safety nets, healthcare centers, and guides for civic engagement. They have been everything … and the church.

“How do we protect these living archives? How do we ensure that future generations can access detailed evidence not only of individual lives, such as that I found for my great-grandmother [in church records], but of the institutions that have played such fundamental roles in building and sustaining our communities?”

——

On top of the warm welcome I received from all attendees, yesterday was practically Old Home Week. My mother and I met a cousin of my father’s faithful friend and mechanic, Robert Shackleford, as well as a Gill related to my cousin’s former wife. We just missed meeting — she had to step out early — a woman who worked with my father in Rocky Mount. As I began recounting Lane Street Project’s work, I spotted dear Dr. Judy Wellington Rashid and Rev. A. Kim Rieves in the back. Dr. Michael Barnes, who was also at my Rosenwald talk Thursday, was there — and saw Dr. Judy for the first time in 50 years! To top it off, I got to hug Adrienne Silvey’s neck for the first time in a decade.

Thank you to Angela Allen (who has Wilson roots!) for reaching out to me with this opportunity and to Rev. Dr. Anthony Bailey for embracing the idea so fully. Best wishes to Mount Pleasant as the church embarks on its preservation journey.