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North Carolina's African American heritage is rich and diverse. In slavery and
in freedom, black residents shaped state politics and institutions, literary
traditions, religious practice, and the lives of their fellow North Carolinians.
The African American struggle for civil rights and equality touched all regions
of the state, and the following is a listing, grouped by region, of some important
dates for African American history in North Carolina.
The Coast
1806 Thomas H. Jones was born on a plantation near Wilmington but was
eventually sold to a shopkeeper who taught him reading, writing, and basic
arithmetic. Jones escaped slavery in 1849 by hiding on a ship bound for New Y
ork. In the North, he worked for the abolitionist cause and published three
narratives: Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones; Who Was
for Forty Years a Slave. Also the Surprising Adventures of Wild Tom, of the
Island Retreat, a Fugitive Negro from South Carolina (1850s), The Experience
of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years (1862), and The
Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years.
Written by a Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones (1885).
1829 The fiery Appeal of Wilmington native David Walker was printed in
Boston and made its way to North Carolina, stirring the fears and suspicions
of white slaveholders and legislators. David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles;
Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in
Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America was
eventually banned in North Carolina and other Southern states, but two more
editions were printed before Walker's mysterious death in 1830.
1849 London R. Ferebee was born to enslaved parents in Currituck County.
His master, Edwin Cowles, took Ferebee away from his family to work with
his boating crew, and in 1861, Ferebee was living with his master's family in
Still Town, a village outside of Elizabeth City. In August of that year, Ferebee
ran away to Shiloh, North Carolina, to seek protection with the Northern army.
He records these events and other adventures in his 1882 narrative A Brief
History of the Slave Life of Rev. L. R. Ferebee, and the Battles of Life, and Four
Years of His Ministerial Life. Written from Memory.
1898 The Wilmington race riots erupted. On November 10 and 11 a white
militia headed by local Democratic leaders terrorized the black community,
killing and wounding dozens, banishing much of the city's black leadership,
and burning the offices of several black businesses, including Wilmington's
black newspaper, the Record. David Bryant Fulton's Hanover (1900) and
Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) are both thinly fictionalized
accounts of the massacre. J. Allen Kirk, a black minister in Wilmington,
details his experience in A Statement of Facts Concerning the Bloody Riot in
Wilmington, N.C. Of Interest to Every Citizen of the United States (1898).
The Coastal Plain
1790 Henry Evans, a Virginia-born shoemaker, organized Evans Chapel
(now The Evans Metropolitan AME Zion Church) in Fayetteville. Evans was
headed for Charleston when he stopped in Fayetteville and felt called by
God to stay and help reform the residents there. Rosser H. Taylor's The Free
Negro in North Carolina (1920) and Carter Godwin Woodson's The History of
the Negro Church (1921) both refer to Evans' work.
1813 Harriet Jacobs, America's most famous female slave narrator, was
born in Edenton. Jacobs escaped from her cruel master Dr. James Norcom
and hid in a tiny attic room for seven years before fleeing to the North. Her
1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, records her experiences
in both slavery and freedom.
1823 Joseph Baysmore, elder of the First Colored Baptist Church of Weldon,
was born in Bertie County. Baysmore become an ordained minister in 1866,
and in 1887, upon leaving Weldon to minister in Halifax County, he published
a brief autobiographical sketch accompanied by four of his sermons.
1880 The first patient was admitted to the North Carolina Asylum for the
Colored Insane (now Cherry Hospital) in Goldsboro. The state officially
established the hospital in 1877, more than two decades after opening the first
white asylum. By 1884, the hospital was serving more than 150 patients
according to its annual report from that year.
The Piedmont
1832 John Chavis, a Revolutionary War veteran and prominent Presbyterian
minister in Orange County and the surrounding areas, was forced to cease his
public sermons when the General Assembly forbade African American preaching
after Nat Turner's 1831 slave insurrection. Steven B. Weeks celebrates Chavis's
accomplishments in a 1914 profile published in The Southern Workman.
1868 The Colored Orphanage of North Carolina was mandated by the revised
state constitution. However, the facility was not established until the 1880s, over
a decade after the state created its first white orphanage. Though it was a
non-profit private institution, the orphanage was required to make an annual report
(such as this one from 1940) to the people of North Carolina since the children at
the home were wards of state sent to the facility by county welfare departments.
1883 Gaston County Commissioners suggested a vote on a proposition that would
tax black and white citizens at different rates for each race's segregated schools.
The court later ruled this proposition, and all race-based taxation for public schools,
unconstitutional, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Charles Harden reprinted
the court's opinions in his biennial report for 1898-1900.
1890 The General Assembly approved plans to create North Carolina Agricultural
and Mechanical College for Negroes (now North Carolina Agricultural and Technical
State University) in Greensboro. In the early 1900s, the college held farmers' institutes,
through which the university sought to aid North Carolina's agricultural development by
educating African American farmers on more efficient practices and other pertinent
issues. For more on the college's status in the early 20th century, see its 1903 and
1904 annual reports.
1898 John Merrick founded the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association in
Durham. The company grew to become the United States' largest and most successful
black-owned business, with over $1.6 million in revenues upon Merrick's death in 1919.
Robert McCants Andrews chronicles Merrick's life and the rise of North Carolina Mutual
in John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (1920), and W.E.B. DuBois briefly profiles the
company in his 1912 article "The Upbuilding of Black Durham: The Success of the
Negroes and their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City."
The Mountains
1875 A sketch of a Waynesville African American carpenter by J. Wells Champney
appeared as part of a series of illustrations depicting life in this small western North
Carolina town. The series of sketches accompanies Edward King's description of his
travels there and throughout the southern United States in The Great South; A Record
of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland.
1893 African American craftsmen working on Biltmore Estate gathered at the Asheville
Young Man's Institute, an organization commissioned by Biltmore owner George Vanderbilt.
Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted also worked on the Biltmore mansion and had
traveled throughout the South. Among other observations from his journey, Olmsted
recorded his impressions of race relations and the black community in A Journey in the
Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy (1856).
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