In March 1880, Wayne County farmer Napoleon Hagans testified before a Senate committee on the migration of African-American farmers out of North Carolina. It was not his last word on the subject. Nine months later, he — or someone writing for him, as he was unlettered — penned a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, recounting his agricultural success and exhorting his “race” to cast down their buckets where they were. His sentiments were echoed by Jonah Williams, his friend, neighbor, sometime pastor, and brother of Hagans’ brother-in-law Adam T. Artis.
Before Williams was setting up Primitive Baptist churches, he farmed 58 acres near Turner Swamp, just north of Eureka (formerly Sauls Cross Roads) in far northeast Wayne County. Though an intelligent man, Like Hagans, Williams was illiterate. Thus, he did not actually write the letter tacitly discouraging Black farmers from joining the exodus to Indiana and other points west and midwest, and we don’t know the circumstances under which he or Hagans agreed to lend their names to this propaganda.
Goldsboro Messenger, 30 December 1880.
