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