Wilson Daily Times, 20 November 1945.
residential segregation
Colored lot sale!
Wilson Daily Times, 20 October 1948.
Wilson city limits at East Nash Street at that time ran approximately with Highway 301.
Before East Wilson.
Before East Wilson began to take shape as the historic heart of Wilson’s African-American community, the land just east of the railroad held small farms and, essentially, country estates like the one Rufus W. Edmundson offered for rent in November 1881. The seven-acre parcel at the east corner of Vance and Pender Streets contained a large six-room house with a well, fruit trees, and “all necessary” outbuildings. Only seven years before, the land had been “original forest.”
As we have seen, into the second half of twentieth century, Vance Street was a boundary between black and white neighborhoods. When Edmundson’s parcel was eventually sold and subdivided, the houses built on streets like Academy and Crowell were for white owners and tenants. These segregation patterns held into the 1960s.
Wilson Advance, 25 November 1881.
Historic African-American neighborhoods.
Well into the twentieth century, pockets of African-American residents were scattered across the western side of Wilson. This map will help you visualize the locations of these communities should you see their names.
A good bargain for some thrifty colored person.
Wilson Daily Times, 4 November 1944.
Residential segregation did not happen organically. By the early 1900s, specific areas of Wilson were designated colored (white was default), and realtors like George A. Barfoot sold the houses within them accordingly. (Barfoot, C.C. Powell, and other white realtors came to own large swaths of housing in East Wilson as a result of wide-scale loan defaults by Black property owners during the Depression.) By the 1920s, several pockets of African-American settlement west of the A.C.L. railroad and north of Hines Street were deliberately cleared to make way for upscale white neighborhoods, creating strict residential segregation patterns that held for much of the rest of the 20th century.