Tag Archive for: #blackhistory

TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Black History in Old Granville County pt. 2

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Historians tend to look at things in chronological order – after all, dates and timelines are an important tool that help put facts and events and people’s actions into context.

Events of long ago can have a ripple effect into the present-day, and WIZS’s Bill Harris and local historian Mark Pace zeroed in on a few of those events and people who are remembered for their accomplishments and for their place in this nation’s history.

In Part 2 of a discussion about African Americans from this area who went on to achieve great things or otherwise make a mark in society, Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment included folks who got their start locally and went on to greater things in the field of music, medicine and the military, among other aspects of society.

During the time of The Great Migration, Blacks left the South for the Midwest and the North in search of life beyond farming and sharecropping.

Pace said between 1900 and 1970, between 5 million and 7 million people left the South. During that seven-decade span was born the Chicago Blues-style of music and the Harlem Renaissance. Blacks were leaving Reconstruction and Jim Crow behind to find fortune and fame elsewhere.

Whatever their reason for leaving may have been, there are numerous notable musicians who call Henderson home.

Shirley Owens, a founding member of the Shirelles, hails from Henderson. So does Johnny Fields, one of the original members of The Blind Boys of Alabama, Pace said. They join other artists mentioned previously in Around Old Granville segments like Ben E. King and Gerald Alston, also from Henderson.

Military service was another avenue for African Americans, Pace said.

Lt. Col. Thomas J. Bullock was a member of the famous 367th Infantry known as the “Buffalo Soldiers” Bullock was killed on Sept. 2, 1918 in France. Of the 22 soldiers from the county who died in WWI, at least eight were African Americans.

Sixty-two service members from Vance County were killed in World War II, and Pace said 16 of them were African American.

He remembered the Christmas brothers – Simon and Walter, Jr. from Williamsboro. Simon, just 19, died of rheumatic fever in 1945; his older brother, Walter, Jr., died of appendicitis in Manila in 1944. He was just 21.

“So many African Americans that served in World War I and World War II didn’t serve in active combat,” Pace said. They were given more menial tasks stateside or keeping supplies moving.

“Nevertheless, they gave their lives for their country,” he said. “And Mr. and Mrs. Christmas sent their two boys off to serve their country and neither of them came back.”

The brothers are buried at Flat Creek Church Cemetery in Williamsboro.

More recently, Lunsford Brown, also of Henderson, was killed in a mortar attack in Abu Gareeb, Iraq on Sept. 20, 2003. He was 27.

His younger brother, Jason, created a park at his Franklin County First Fruits Farm in memory of his brother. The space overlooks a big pond and has a circle of 50 flags around a 30-foot flagpole.

As with the military, the field of medicine was an aspect of society that had to reassess widely-held notions about segregation as the Civil Rights era came into focus.

Granville County had Cheatham Memorial Hospital around 1940 and in Henderson, there was Jubilee Hospital. It was established in 1911 with heavy involvement from the Presbyterian Church, Jubilee was at the time, the only hospital in a 40-mile radius that would treat Black patients.

“It was actually a cutting-edge hospital for its time,” Pace said.

Dr. John Adams Cotton was instrumental in the hospital, as well as Henderson Institute and Cotton Memorial Church.

A new Jubilee Hospital was built in 1959 on Beckford Drive and it operated until 1966 – when LBJ’s Great Society created Medicaid and Medicare and any hospital who wanted to participate in the federally funded programs couldn’t have segregation policies.

“The first places integrated were hospitals,” Pace said. By 1966, Jubilee had merged with Maria Parham.

Well-known African American physicians in the area included Dr. Samuel Beckford, Dr. John Earl Baxter and Dr. James P. Green. Green was instrumental in establishing Toler Nursing Home and he later served three terms in the N.C. Senate.

People of a certain age may remember the name of Jake Gaither, who got his football coaching start at Henderson Institute and had an illustrious career at Florida A&M.

“He was one of the truly great, most famous football coaches ever,” Pace said. He coached from 1945-1969 and ended up with a record of 203 wins, 36 losses, and 4 ties. His FAMU Rattlers won 6 Negro Collegiate Football championships.

Elson Floyd made a name for himself at Washington State University, not as a winning football coach but as a university president who put his money where his mouth was.

Floyd was born in Henderson in 1956 and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. “E Flo” as he was known, had a stellar career in education and will be remembered for doing something unheard of – he voluntarily took a pay cut.

“There was a budget crisis at Washington State,” Pace explained, and Floyd said he’d take a pay cut to help out. Turns out, that pay cut was about $100,000.

Floyd died of complications of colon cancer in 2015 at the young age of 59.

Read more about noted African Americans in Ruth Anita Hawkins Hughes’s 1988 book titled Contributions of Vance County People of Color or Andre Vann’s 2000 book in the Black America Series by Arcadia Publishing.

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TownTalk: Around Old Granville – Black History in Old Granville County

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By the end of the American Revolution, the population of what was then known as Granville County was about 8,000 people. Of that number, 40 percent – or 3,200 – were enslaved.

The plantation system created by wealthy landowners was utterly dependent on that labor to get in tobacco and other crops.

But mostly, it was tobacco, said Mark Pace, local historian and North Carolina Room specialist at the Richard Thornton Library in Oxford.

In their tri-weekly discussion Around Old Granville, Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris reviewed the lives of numerous prominent Black Americans who made a mark in their communities and beyond.

Up until the time of the Civil War, farms were getting bigger and bigger so owners could produce more and more tobacco. That meant the number of enslaved people grew, too. This was a common practice particularly in the northern parts of present-day Vance, Granville and Warren counties, Pace said.

But there also were many free African Americans living in the area before 1865, Pace said. He attributes that to this area’s proximity to the Virginia border. Virginia had passed a law in 1807 that said emancipated persons had one year to leave the state or risk being re-enslaved

“They didn’t want a lot of free blacks,” Pace said of the folks in Virginia, “so a bunch just came across the line.”

Some enslaved people planted crops on land given to them by their owners. They’d work on Sundays – their only day off – to tend their crops. Some planted tobacco, and over time, they saved up enough money to buy their freedom, Pace explained. Until Granville County passed a law in 1800 banning the practice.

One of the most prominent and well-known Blacks in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s was John Chavis. Born in Virginia to parents who were free Blacks, Chavis graduated from Princeton and Washington & Lee University and became a Presbyterian minister and a noted tutor to many children of wealthy White families.

“He was a brilliant guy,” Pace said. “He was very urbane, he was well read, knew the Greek classics. He had a lot in common with prominent wealthy landowners and by all accounts, was an excellent speaker.”

The Presbyterian Church was dedicated to the idea of improving the lives of black people, particularly those who lived in the pre-Civil War South. As a Presbyterian minister, Chavis was a key player in that mission.

Other prominent men included Henry Plummer Cheatham, James Hunter Young and George Clayton Shaw, all born between 1857 and 1863. Cheatham and Young both had white fathers. They became state legislators and their rise to prominence was well known.

Shaw, meanwhile, established Mary Potter Academy in Oxford in 1889 to educate African Americans. He was the principal until 1936. The school later became a private boarding school until the 1950’s when it became a public high school and later a middle school.

At about the same time that Shaw was establishing Mary Potter Academy in Oxford, there were similar efforts in Vance County as Henderson Institute and Kittrell College were being established.

“In the 1880’s, education is starting to become important,” Pace said, and it’s where many local African Americans made their mark.

Founded and operated by the United Presbyterian Church, Henderson Institute was originally established by the Freedmen’s Board. It was a four-year school – the only high school in this part of the state for African Americans, Pace noted.

John Adams Cotton led the school for 30 years. He was a Presbyterian minister and the namesake of Cotton Memorial Presbyterian Church in Henderson.

“The school stayed in business in one form or another until 1971,” Pace said.

The N.C. Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church established Kittrell Junior College in 1885-86. The two-year school was housed in the old hotel building in Kittrell for the first few years before James B. Duke dismantled numerous buildings on the Trinity campus and sold the bricks to the Kittrell school as he made space for what would become Duke University.

Warren County native John R. Hawkins was a driving force behind Kittrell College, Pace said. Hawkins joined the faculty and later was elected president of the school.

“People from all over the world came to Kittrell College.”

Now the site of the Kittrell Job Corps, the campus had a series of fires in the early 1970’s that destroyed those structures that had their beginnings in Durham.

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TownTalk 02-25-21 with Mark Pace, Local Black History

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(The latest in the WIZS Tri-Weekly Thursday Local History Series. Next broadcast March 18.)

Alonzo “Jake” Gaither’s Florida A&M football teams only lost four games between 1959 and 1963. But when he was football coach for Henderson Institute in the early 1920’s his team was winless in its first season.

Gaither, whose overall record for the A&M Rattlers is 204-36-4, began his coaching career right here in Henderson, and Mark Pace and Bill Harris discussed Gaither and other notable African Americans with ties to this area during Thursday’s Town Talk.

Pace, North Carolina Room Specialist at Richard H. Thornton Library in Oxford, said the powers-that-be of Henderson Institute were so thrilled with Gaither’s football and baseball coaching that they decided he should also be the basketball coach. It was a small detail that Gaither had never seen a basketball game and didn’t know a thing about how the game was played. But he took home the rule book one weekend, learned all the rules and then started coaching.

Undeterred after a winless first season on the basketball court, Gaither persevered and three years later, Henderson Institute won the state championship, Pace said.

Flemmie Pansy Kittrell was born in Henderson on Christmas Day, 1904.  The first African American to get a Ph.D in nutrition, her research brought to light ways to combat malnutrition in many countries across the globe. She also was instrumental in the creation of the national Head Start preschool program.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown founded Palmer Institute, a day and boarding school for African Americans in 1902. The Sedalia school is now a state historic site. Brown was born in the Mobile area of Henderson.

And John Chavis was a free African American born in Vance County who fought in the American Revolution. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and returned to teach white children from local plantations, Pace said. One of those children was J.M. Horner, who became an educator himself, and later founded Horner College in Oxford.

Pace, who has extensive experience in genealogy research, noted that the African American community has strong roots in the area that now encompasses Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties. By the 1860’s, enslaved people were held by fewer families on large plantations. Pace said his research in various Census records showed that Granville County (what is now the four-county area) had the largest number of enslaved people in North Carolina. Of 23,396 people living in Granville County in 1860, he said 1,100 were enslaved. When the war ended and the slaves were freed, Pace said, they generally took the surname of their former owners.

In the decades after the Civil War ended, many African Americans moved away from the southern U.S. states. In 1910, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South; by 1960, Pace said, that number had dropped to 50 percent.

Matthew W. Bullock’s family moved to Massachusetts from their home in the Dabney community.   His parents had been enslaved in North Carolina, headed north. Bullock attended Dartmouth and then got a law degree from Harvard University. Bullock was the first Black to coach an all-white high school – in 1899 – and went on to coach football at the University of Massachusetts.

Charity Adams Earley was born in Kittrell in 1918. She was the first African American woman to be an officer  – a lieutenant colonel – in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (later WACS) and was the  commanding officer of the first battallion of African American women to serve overseas during World War II.

And then there’s Henry Plummer Cheatham, who was born in Henderson in 1863 to a white plantation owner and an enslaved house servant. Cheatham became the first register of deeds in Vance County, and later was elected to Congress. He was the only Black member of the 52nd Congress. Cheatham also was the recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C. around the turn of the 20th century. He returned to North Carolina and, for the last 30 years of his life, was head of the Oxford Colored Asylum (now Central Children’s Home). He died in 1935.

Cheatham was the next-to-the-last Black to represent North Carolina in Congress until the early 1990’s, when Eva Clayton of Warren County was elected. Clayton served for 20 years and was the first African American woman to represent North Carolina and the first Black since George White won a hotly contested race against his brother-in-law in 1896.

His brother-in-law? Henry Plummer Cheatham.

To hear the complete interview and learn more, listen to the podcast below.

 

TownTalk 2-1-21: Vance Granville’s Month-long Celebration of Black History

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Vance-Granville Community College has a bevy of activities scheduled for its celebration of Black History in the month of February. A team from VGCC has created the monthlong event – from book discussions to highlighting Black trailblazers – in a webpage VGCC calls “Against All Odds – Honoring Black Trailblazers.” Visit www.vgcc.edu/blackhistorymonth/ to learn more about how to participate in these events.

Dawn Michelle Tucker, dean of Continuing Education & College + Career Readiness at VGCC, was on Town Talk Monday to kick off the monthlong celebration. Tucker spoke to host John C. Rose about famous Blacks in history, as well as the struggles that still challenge African Americans today.

Tucker, along with co-chair Angela Thomas, dean of Health Sciences and other VGCC faculty and staff, put together a “celebration of all the accomplishments and the different opportunities that we’ve been able to take full advantage of,” she said. Webinars, lunch and learn sessions, in addition to the two book discussions are all activities that the community can take part in.

The first of two book discussions will take place on Feb. 23 at 6 p.m. The book that will be discussed is titled “Who Owns the Icehouse? Eight Life Lessons from an Unlikely Entrepreneur,” based on a true story written by the nephew of a man who owned an icehouse in 1950’s in the Mississippi Delta.

In conjunction with this event, VGCC President Dr. Rachel Demarais will sign the Presidents for Entrepreneurship Pledge to kick off the book discussion. This pledge has been, or will be, signed by community college presidents across the nation to show support for expanding entrepreneurship in the communities they serve and creating a positive culture on their campuses to foster entrepreneurism. VGCC has training and counseling services available for new business owners through its Small Business Center, Tucker said.

Promoting entrepreneurship, especially among African Americans, Tucker said, is one component of that pledge. “It’s our commitment to making sure that our community has the support system in place for new entrepreneurship opportunities,” she said. VGCC strives to provide a consistent message of support for those individuals who want to venture out on their own to create a new business. “The consistency will have an impact on what we’re doing,” she added. All this is to provide for the community the necessary resources to advance entrepreneurship.

Click Play to Listen to TownTalk with VGCC’s Dawn Michelle Tucker…

“We have to continue to push out the idea of entrepreneurship. If as a college we are pushing the idea and being consistent about our messaging about entrepreneurship, then we are hopeful that the consistency of what we’re doing will have an impact on our communities, Tucker said. College officials want to continue to pour in the idea of entrepreneurship, and the book “Who Owns the Icehouse?” provides insight into the mindset of not just being an entrepreneur, she said, but being a successful entrepreneur.

Challenges surrounding racism and inequality are barriers that Black people still face today, Tucker said. “It’s the challenge of being seen as a person of color first and not being seen by your character, your integrity and what you actually bring to the table outside of the color of your skin,” she said, adding that Blacks often are “not able to fully reach (their) potential because we are held up by skin color.” How Blacks move forward, in the face of these challenges, is part of the ongoing conversations that must take place, Tucker said.

The community college continues to look for new programs and opportunities, Tucker said, adding that newly minted entrepreneurs most likely will need a skilled work force to be successful in their endeavors. Vance-Granville Community College has long provided programs that allows workers to re-tool or learn new skills to make them more marketable employees.

As dean of Continuing Education and Career Readiness, Tucker takes seriously her responsibility to share her experience with young people entering the workforce. “That’s how I get to live in the younger person’s world, by sharing information and building relationships with them so that they have the benefit of older, more experienced people to share ideas and to gain momentum for moving forward,” she said.