segregation

COL. WOMEN

In the early 1960s, uncomfortably aware of the optics, not to mention the illegality, of a segregated water fountain at the courthouse steps, Wilson County capped the fountain’s spigots and chiseled away the letters designating who drank where. By time I was born in 1964, local government had erased the public labels of Jim Crow. Most businesses followed suit, but some could not be bothered.

Wilson was deeply socially segregated for decades after civil rights legal rulings and legislation forbade legal enforcement. This meant, in practice, that while we could go into any public establishment and see a doctor or try on clothes or order a meal the same as any white person, the environment was not always inviting, nor the experience comfortable. This was the Wilson I grew up in. I never saw the old placards and partitions, but we bought chicken and barbecue from the back entrance of Parker’s, and I never played with, much less visited, my white friends away school. Still, we shopped freely at Belk’s and Barshay’s and Flower’s, guffawed at Disney movies in floor seats at the Colony and Wilson Theatres, and saw our white dentist and doctors at their West Nash and Tarboro Street offices.

Elsewhere, however, physical vestiges of codified segregation continued to leak radiation. I documented the ghosts of Jim Crow in a short-lived pandemic era Tumblr account. But the hand-painted White Water sign on a wall at Farmer’s Warehouse, starkly visible until the building’s demolition in 2023, confronted black workers and visitors well into the 1980s. The building’s owners never thought the sign’s poisonous message damaging enough to paint over. (Or maybe they understood precisely what it signaled.)

I have never believed that the Farmer’s Warehouse sign was the last of these signs. Downtown Wilson’s brick storefronts and former factories and warehouses are in the midst of a wave of redevelopment. Many old buildings, often long disused, have been demolished. Others have been renovated for exciting new uses. Surely, as investors and developers and contraction crews have scoured their interiors, they have encountered evidence of the rigid social structures that once locked black people  into (or out of) place.

Like this one.

That’s the door to the COLORED WOMEN TOILET. This five-panel door has been in storage since, it appears, about 1990. From about 1938 to at least the mid-1960s, it marked the restroom available for the few black female employees of the company that occupied this downtown building, all of whom likely all worked on the cleaning staff.

A different, unrelated company operated in the building in the 1970s and ’80s. I don’t know if they left the door where it originally hung or took it down and stored it, but they didn’t paint over its label or throw the door away.

This battered green door, still bearing stains from the oils of the countless hands that pushed through it, stands is an tangible, undeniable link to a past that many would now downplay. My deep thanks to those who shared this photograph with me and gave permission for me to publish it.

White girls wanted at the cigarette factory.

Daily News (Wilson, N.C.), 20 September 1900.

Tobacco processing work was divided by race and gender. Tobacco factories employed black men and women as redrying hands and stemmers, low-paying, hot, dusty jobs. Relatively cleaner manufacturing jobs, such as in cigarette factories, were reserved for white “girls.”

Hughes, the white barber.

Two ads placed by “Hughes, the white barber.” Barbering in this era — and well into the twentieth century — was a trade plied overwhelmingly by African-American men. White barbers like “Hughes” often emphasized their ethnicity in their advertising. Here, “white” signaled Hughes’ suitability for handling the hair of white women.

The Daily News (Wilson, N.C.), 20 September 1900.

Black History Month Throwback: honoring acts of resistance, no. 1.

Wilson’s Art Deco bus station stood from 1938 to the mid-1990s.

In 1943, a dozen years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks’ celebrated acts of resistance, at least four young African-American men and women refused to move to the back of Wilson buses. Read again of their direct challenges to Jim Crow  and discrimination and lift up their memory.

Parker sentenced for refusing to go to back of the bus.

News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), 7 April 1943.

Raleigh’s major newspaper followed up on the sentence levied on James Parker, who refused to move to the back of a Wilson bus twelve years before Rosa Parks. All things considered, Parker’s punishment was surprisingly light — perhaps, none yet perceived a real threat to the Jim Crow system.

B.W.A. Historical Marker Series, no. 33: Lincoln Theatre.

In this series, which will post on occasional Wednesdays, I populate the landscape of Wilson County with imaginary “historical markers” commemorating people, places, and events significant to African-American history or culture.

We been here.

LINCOLN THEATRE

Opened 1928 by Greek immigrant George C. Woller for an African-American audience. Featured motion pictures, musical and theatrical acts; hosted fundraisers for black schools and hospital. Badly damaged in fire in December 1932; did not reopen.

Photo by Lisa Y. Henderson, October 2025.

An appeal to support your own (and spy on those who don’t.)

Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Va.), 4 February 1928.

What in the East Germany is this?

In 1928, the Negro Business League suggested that “members of the race” become “a committee of one” and carry little notebooks to jot down their neighbors’ patronage habits. Beyond the bizarre and chilling embrace of citizen spies, this brief bit, which appeared as part of an otherwise breezy column of Wilson society news, raises some interesting implications.

Readers were counseled to “see whether” others “are having a white or Negro physician, a white or Negro undertaker.” An examination of death certificates discloses that up until about World War I, white undertakers like A.D. McGowan and Amerson-Boswell handled a significant amount of black custom. There’s less evidence of this practice by 1920, however.

It’s more difficult to assess the degree to which black residents patronized white doctors instead of black physicians like Drs. Frank S. Hargrave Michael E. DuBissette, Matthew S. Gilliam, or William A. Mitchner. Major surgeries, especially in emergency situations, were often performed by white doctors at one of the two white hospitals — black patients returned to Mercy to recuperate — and some white doctors, most notably A.D. Williams, routinely delivered black babies. However, death certificates of the era were signed overwhelmingly by black doctors.

Finally, there was concern about who was “patronizing the white theatre for Negroes and who is patronizing the Negro theatre.” The Negro theatre, of course, was Samuel H. Vick‘s Globe, housed in an upper floor of the Odd Fellows building he constructed on East Nash Street. The “white theatre for Negroes” was the Lincoln, opened by a Greek-American in the Nash Street block just east of the railroad. Vick was an early member of the Negro Business League and no doubt was stung by the financial hit the Lincoln created.

Adventures in Race Relations: the Wilson ABC Store.

Chicago Defender, 6 September 1947.

Among other things, segregation created daily absurdities like the picket fence separating white and “colored” customers in Wilson’s Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) store on Nash Street.

Photo courtesy of https://wilson.ncabcboards.com/history/