segregation

No part of said premise may be conveyed unto any person of African descent.

As Wilson expanded west past Grabneck and other former African-American sections, deeds for lots and houses began to imbed restrictive covenants that, among other limitations, prohibited Black residents.

The language was standard:

(a) No part of said premises may be conveyed unto any person of African descent, nor any part thereof be occupied by any person of African descent other than such persons in the domestic employment of the owner. [In others words, onsite maids, cooks, yardmen, and drivers were fine.]

As shown in the referenced plat map below, this sale was for a large lot (#18) on Anderson Street between Moye Avenue and West End Avenue.

Plat Book 4, page 74, Wilson County Register of Deeds Office, Wilson.

200 Negro newspapermen expected for the A.&T. game!

Wilson Daily Times, 30 September 1939.

The Daily Times predicted hundreds of pressmen for a match-up between A.&T. and Virginia Union at Wilson’s Municipal (later Fleming) Stadium in October 1939. White fans were expected, too, and “the grandstand will be divided, the third base line half for white spectators and the first base section of the stands for colored fans.”

A first look at the Reid Street pool.

Every once in a while, we step outside Black Wide-Awake‘s period of focus to highlight an especially interesting document.

Reid Street Community Center opened in 1938 as, of course, a segregated facility. Long-time plans to build a state-of-the-art “community center building for the whites” (as it was called in a 11 August 1954 Daily Times editorial, and thus the moniker “White Rec,” as it was known for decades and maybe still is) screeched to a halt in early 1954 after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” standards of racial segregation were unconstitutional.

Opined the Daily Times editorialist:

The exhortations worked, and voters (who were largely white) elected to fund both community centers. Architectural sketches of the proposed new (or renewed) buildings dropped in March 1955, and here’s the proposed updated facility at Reid Street with its big new pool.

A few features were pared away before final construction, but anyone, like me, who learned to swim at Reid Street as late as the 1980s will immediately recognize the high and low diving boards and the lifeguard’s chair. The overhang shown shading the exit from the locker rooms, where you turned in your wire clothes basket and received an enormous numbered safety pin, didn’t make the final cut. Nor did the tennis courts, the large wading pool, or the landscaping.

Courtesy of Google Maps, here’s an aerial rear view of Reid Street Community Center shot when the pool was closed during the pandemic. It’s looking a little worse for the 68 years of wear since 1955, and the $1.9 million overhaul recently announced is long overdue.

White/Water.

Jerome De Perlinghi recently revealed this haunting photograph taken just before Farmers Warehouse’s partial collapse last month. Though such images shock us now, they were once as commonplace as dandelions and unremarkable even to those who had to bypass them to slake their thirst under the ‘Colored’ sign.

I was immediately reminded of a passage in William B. Clark Jr.’s Some Reflections On and Trivia of Wilson’s Tobacco Auction Warehouses 1890-1980, self-published in 1991, and excerpted here in 2018.

[The ninth edition of Eyes on Main Street, the incredible international outdoor photography festival De Perlinghi founded in Wilson, opens 1 June and runs through 10 September 2023. Don’t miss it, or his newly opened American Center for Photographers.]

An Open Letter to the Citizens of Wilson …

In May 1950, the Negro Citizens’ Committee paid to place an open letter in the Wilson Daily Times explaining the lawsuit it had filed against Wilson City Schools. Takeaways below.

Wilson Daily Times, 6 May 1950.

  1. The N.C.C. was comprised of African-Americans from every Wilson County township and across the economic spectrum. 
  2. The group neither solicited nor accepted aid from outside the county.
  3. Members represented 15 churches, eight social organizations, 13 fraternal orders, and nine unions. [Nine unions?? Who were these groups?]
  4. The group was founded to advocate for improved schools for African-American children in each of Wilson County’s three educational administrative units — Wilson City, Wilson County, and Elm City Public Schools. N.C.C. worked for the success of a bond referendum, believing it would result in improved schools for Black children.
  5. The committee visited each Black school and discovered “shocking conditions.” After compiling data detailing vast disparities in per-pupil investment and expenditures, N.C.C. appealed to the local school boards and the State to make improvements. None were made.
  6. In late 1949, after personal appeals went nowhere, N.C.C. retained counsel, who requested meetings with the three boards. N.C.C. was careful to emphasize that it was not seeking the same facilities as white students enjoyed, but “certain minimum essential needs.” Meetings with Wilson County and Elm City went well; Wilson City ignored the request.
  7. N.C.C. understood that if Wilson City did not budget for improvement of African-American schools in the proceeds from the current bond, there would not be another in the next ten years, which was too long to wait for upkeep already overdue, especially when Wilson City had “approved a several-hundred-thousand-dollar expenditure for a vocational building for white high school pupils while the Negro pupils are not provided with facilities that would earn accreditation ….” [Some of you may remember this vocational building as the Annex across the street from Coon Junior High School, the former all-white high school in Wilson. Despite its cost, it was poorly constructed and in bad shape by time I attended classes there in 1977.  It closed in the 1980s, lay vacant and festering for another 20+ years, and was finally demolished about 2006.]
  8. N.C.C. reassured white citizens that it was not seeking school desegregation. Rather, it sought to end discrimination against Black students in per-capita spending.
  9. A partial list of inequities in city schools: (a) none of the Black elementary schools had an auditorium, including the new one [Elvie Street School] under construction; (b) because there is no cafeteria in one elementary school [presumably Vick], lunch is prepared in a former janitor’s closet and served to children in their classrooms; (c) the elementary schools do not qualify for accreditation because of their physical plants; (d) two elementary schools [Vick and Sallie Barbour] employed double-shift scheduling to accommodate enrollment; (e) the only auditorium for Black children is at the high school and is a “fire-trap” that can only accommodate about a third of the high school students; (f) the Black schools have a “deplorable transportation system” for children living outside city limits but inside Wilson township [children inside were expected to walk], with only two buses to serve three schools and resulting in eleven-hour days for some children.
  10. Having tried for two years to avoid litigation, N.C.C. saw no other way. Chiding the Daily Times for suggesting Wilson Schools would settle their complaints if they withdrew their complaint, reminding readers they had already waited two years. 

Carolina Theatre, 1934.

This exceptionally detailed photograph was taken in August 1934, when Hollywood Party played at the Carolina Theatre. The Carolina (later called the Drake) admitted African-American patrons only through a balcony entrance, visible behind the awning at bottom left.

Photo taken for Wilson Chamber of Commerce; print in collection of Lisa Y. Henderson.

Recommended reading, no. 13: the long emancipation.

Priscilla Joyner was born in Nash County, not Wilson, but close enough for her life story — and the context in which it unfolded — to be of particular interest to Black Wide-Awake readers.

“Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

“Her life story—candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project—captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation—the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities ….

“… Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could.”

Priscilla Joyner’s family in the 1860 census of Dortches township, Nash County, N.C. She is believed to have been the daughter of Ann Liza Joyner and an unknown African-American man.

Review at www.wwnorton.com.