In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post-Civil War liberation community into the "capital of the black middle class." African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, narratives, and family stories, Leslie Brown animates the history of this remarkable city from emancipation to the civil rights era, as freedpeople and their descendants struggled among themselves and with whites to give meaning to black freedom. Brown paints Durham in the Jim Crow era as a place of dynamic change where despite common aspirations, gender and class conflicts emerged. Placing African American women at the center of the story, Brown describes how black Durham's multiple constituencies experienced a range of social conditions. Shifting the historical perspective away from seeing solidarity as essential to effective struggle or viewing dissent as a measure of weakness, Brown demonstrates that friction among African Americans generated rather than depleted energy, sparking many activist initiatives on behalf of the black community.
Ella Baker, a fellow North Carolinian and Shaw graduate, was director of branches during the extraordinary expansion of the NAACP in the South during World War II, and her contacts throughout the region proved invaluable to civil rights ...
The council ordered an investigation, which was carried out by Dr. J. F. Steiner of Chapel Hill. After reviewing every organization concerned with charity, his report cleared certain agencies and condemned others.
Aaron McDuffie Moore (1863–1923) was born in rural Columbus County in eastern North Carolina at the close of the Civil War.
Restoring this story to its proper place in the history of the black freedom struggle, Jeffrey D. Gonda's groundbreaking study provides a critical vantage point to the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal ...
For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the black Mecca." Atlanta's...
C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan.
Using first-person narratives collected through oral history interviews, this groundbreaking book collects black women's memories of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South.
On pre–New Deal African American homeownership, see Woofter, Negro Problems, 137–51; and Charles S. Johnson, prep., Negro Housing: Report of the Committee ...
In examining Austin's life, Gershenhorn narrates the story of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a new vantage point, shedding new light on the vitality of black protest and the black press in the twentieth century.
The essential writings of Du Bois have been selected and edited by David Levering Lewis, his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer.