North Carolina in 20^th Century

By Nan Mead, M.A. and Dr. Rhianna C. Rogers

Geography, Industry and Architecture

Columbus County is in a rural region of North Carolina that sits very close the South Carolina border. It is Today, the county is approximately 63% White, 31% Black, 4% Native American, and the remainder Asian or mixed race. Approximately 5% identifies as Hispanic or Latino (United States Census) . Columbus County comprises a mix of farms, densely wooded and swamp areas During the first half of the 20^th Century the main crop was tobacco. Newspapers of the day are full of articles and advertisements of tobacco farmers and merchants bringing their crops to seasonal markets; much of the wealth of Whiteville, the county seat, was tied to tobacco farming. There are several plantation-style homes that survive the Antebellum era that have been designated to the National Register of Historic Places. (Columbus County (NC) Architectural Survey, 1998) (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, various).

The Jim Crow Era

During the Jim Crow era there were a number of laws that restricted life for Black people in North Carolina. Below are examples (ANCHOR, n.d.):

· Books could not be shared or transferred between white and colored schools

· Public libraries were segregated with a separate section for “Colored”

· The military units in the state also were segregated, and Black soldiers were mandatorily under the command of White officers.

· Transportation hubs required separate waiting areas for Black and White residents

Because many public spaces were segregated, Black people had to navigate them at their own peril to access goods and services. The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, a directory of black-owned businesses for Black travelers during the Jim Crow era, featured two listings in Columbus County during the 1950’s: Mrs. Fannie Jeffries Tourist Home in Whiteville, and Leigh’s Beauty Parlor on Route 1 (Green Book Project, n.d.).

In the early 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan became active in Columbus County. There were several reports of kidnappings and floggings. The two local newspapers, Whiteville News Reporter and Tabor City Tribune followed the stories until the FBI was brought in to investigate. The resulting trials and convictions also were covered by the two papers, and both won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Their recognition reads: “For their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities” (The Pulitzer Prizes, n.d.)

The significance of this recognition cannot be underscored, assault on the press is embedded in North Carolina’s history. During Reconstruction, Wilmington, a city 60 miles to the east of Nakina, was a bustling integrated city. There was a Black-run newspaper, The Daily Record, whose editor, Alex Manly, wrote about the hypocrisy of the criminalization of Black men while White men continued to perpetrate crimes against Black women. He also espoused what would be considered progressive, if not radical, ideas about the commingling of the races. In November 1898, a number of progressive leaders, White and Black, were elected to the local government. Two days after the election an angry armed White mob of 2,000 men appeared in Wilmington and proceeded to wreak havoc, burning down the newspaper and destroying other Black-owned businesses. Led by former Confederate Colonel and Congressman Albert Waddell, they proceeded to evict the newly elected representatives and installed new men handpicked by Waddell. Waddell himself took the position of Mayor. Approximately sixty people were killed. Many Black residents were marched to the train station at gunpoint and told never to return. Not long after, voting rights for Blacks in North Carolina were rolled back under the grandfather clause. The event was long dubbed The Wilmington Race Riot; the narrative was whitewashed over time and recrafted to implicate the Black community as having instigated it. In 1998 the descendants of victims of the massacre began to lobby for recognition of what really happened. It is only within the past several years that the North Carolina state government has begun to consider acknowledging the truth of this ugly event, now called the Wilmington Massacre (Zinn Education Project, n.d.) (LaFrance & Newkirk, 2017).

It should be noted that The Klan continue to be active elsewhere in North Carolina to the present day.

Other state efforts were designed to disenfranchise citizens of their reproductive rights. The North Carolina Department of Public Welfare was the agency that oversaw the state’s eugenics program. From 1929 to 1974, approximately 7,600 individuals were sterilized in North Carolina, some by choice, some by mandate and/or coercion. What began as a program to sterilize institutionalized individuals, the program later expanded to include those considered to have a low level of intelligence, as well as the very poor; 40 percent of those sterilized were people of color. During the height of the program, between 1946 and 1968, 46 individuals were sterilized in Richmond County. In Columbus County, the total was 48 (WECT News 6, 2012) (North Carolina Justice for Sterilization for Victims Foundation, 2014).

Finally, efforts by the state to stall desegregation of school after the Brown decision in 1954 took the form a blue-ribbon commission called the Pearsall Plan. After Brown the state legislature passed a number of measures decentralizing control of schools to the local level, and then created additional “school choice” measures that either allowed for the exclusion of Black students from certain schools or excused White students from having to attend school with Black students. Although one such measure would have reimbursed families for private school tuition – an early version of a voucher system – the other measures were sufficient to keep schools from integrating until the early 1960’s (Thueson, 2006).

Sharecropper Narrative – Larry V. Capel

Unlike tenant farming, sharecroppers existed on a credit-based system that was tilted in favor of the landowners. Supplies could be purchased on credit, often eating into whatever meager profit could be gained. Very few families were able to get ahead. There were both Black and White sharecroppers in North Carolina.

My father was born in a log cabin to a sharecropping family in Ellerbe, Richmond County, NC. Ellerbe is about 110 miles northwest of Nakina and its topography, demographics, economy and culture are very similar. In that region of North Carolina, the main crop also was (and is) tobacco.

Although the town of Ellerbe is about 50% white, it is widely understood that we are related in some form or fashion to virtually every other Black family in Ellerbe and neighboring Capelsie. Indeed, my genealogical studies have pointed to maybe a dozen surnames in Richmond County that are not only connected to my family tree but go back in Richmond County to at least the early 1800’s. At least one ancestor appears as deeded property on the last will and testament of a farmer of English descent. At least one other ancestor appears on the Baker Roll, the official roll of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.

My father grew up in a large, multi-generational household with his parents and seven siblings. His grandmother also lived with them and my father had a role in taking care of her in her later years. The immediate family belonged to the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Zion Church, though some branches of the family are Baptists. The church his family attended, Sneed Grove AME Zion, is named for one branch of the family. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there; my aunts and uncles who live in Ellerbe continue to worship there, and at least one cousin is a deacon.

Life on the farm consisted of long days of backbreaking 12-hour days, six days a week, without much opportunity to rest. The work could be tedious. My father spoke of working in humid, over 90-degree heat in the summer, tilling the land on a mule plow. There were many animals that needed to be tended to as well as several varieties of crops. Among the animals there were usually were chickens, pigs, cows, horses, dogs and cats. The crops included tobacco, cotton, strawberries, pecans, watermelons and beans. Because of the easy accessibility of tobacco, my father estimates he started smoking at the age of 8 or 9. Sometimes the family supplemented their diet by foraging for wild edibles such as yellow root, and by fishing in one of several nearby lakes where catfish was plentiful. Years later when I visited Ellerbe as a teenager, I learned his technique of finding bug nests and using the larvae as bait.

Pay on the farm was between 30 and 50 cents per hour. In today’s dollars that’s between $3.26 and $5.44 (retirementsimulation.com). Even if several members of the family were working, that was barely enough to cover the cost of maintaining a large family after paying for supplies.

My grandfather knew how to operate farm equipment yet his whole life never had a driver’s license. The family didn’t own a car and a had to walk several miles to church. According to my father, my grandfather father never owned a suit. When he died in 1980, he was buried in one of my father’s suits.

From a young age, my father knew that the farming life was not for him (and family folklure suggests that he was not the most intuitive farmer). At around this time, my father started collecting cans and bottles on the side of the road and cashing them in to get the deposit back. When he saved up enough money he went into town and bought a guitar “from a guy named Clarence.” No one else in the family knew how to play the guitar and lessons weren’t offered at school. When I asked him how he learned to play, he said simply, “I just messed with it ‘til I got a sound of it.”

As soon as my father’s two eldest brothers came of age in the late 1950’s, they headed to New York City as part of the Second Great Migration in search of other opportunities. After my uncles left North Carolina, their mother - my grandmother and the family matriarch - died during the stillbirth of her tenth child. Several years prior, her ninth child was born prematurely and survived only a few days. After the ninth pregnancy, the doctors had advised my grandmother not to have any more children.

While childbirth can be a risky business even under the best of circumstances, I have wondered whether this advice originated from representatives of the eugenics program doing outreach in the community. Although my father was among the siblings born at home, my grandmother headed to the hospital this last time with the intention of giving birth there. According to my father, her last words to him before she left were: “Promise me you’ll finish high school.”

After my grandmother’s death, my grandfather’s drinking and philandering worsened, often leaving the children to largely fend for themselves. My father, who was still a teenager yet the eldest of the siblings still living in the house, became responsible for caring for the four youngest children. Although he was tempted to drop out, he persevered to fulfill his promise to his mother. At the same time, my father’s brother two years his junior took primary responsibility of tending to the farm. The family moved a number of times within Richmond County yet never left, and only as adults did some of the siblings come to own their own homes.

My father says he did well at his segregated high school, graduating with more than the required credits. As part of his vocational training, he learned how to drive and maintain the school bus. Immediately after graduation, he was employed by the school district as a bus driver for a time.

After a few years when the youngest children were old enough to fend for themselves, my father had a brief and volatile marriage with his high school sweetheart. One day he took his guitar, bought an old car from someone in town and drove to New York to join his brothers, seeking not only opportunity but also fame. Both would be elusive. Later on, two of his sisters moved to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills. Despite the fact that the family was scattered they always held an annual reunion that drew what seemed like a hundred people. 2020 was the first year they didn’t have it due to the pandemic.