My N.C. from A to Z Companion Guide: C-D

Emerging from the darkness of the slave era and Reconstruction, black activist women Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs founded schools aimed at liberating African-American youth from disadvantaged futures in the segregated and decidedly unequal South. From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other's successes and learned from each other's struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women's own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood's legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.

In the fall of 1901, Charlotte Hawkins Brown (1883-1961) jumped off a Southern Railway train in the unfamiliar backwoods of Guilford County, North Carolina. She was black, single, and barely eighteen years old and had come alone from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin her first real job as a teacher at a small, struggling school for African Americans. She stayed for over half a century. When the failing school was closed at the end of her first year, Brown remained to carry on. With virtually no resources save her own energy and determination, she founded Palmer Memorial Institute, which she would lead for fifty years. As other black private schools across the state vanished, Brown built Palmer up to become one of the premier academies for African American children in the nation. A remarkable example of achievement in the face of segregation and discrimination, the story of Charlotte Hawkins Brown and her school continues to provide a model of educational success born of dedication and hard work.

In Two Captains from Carolina, Bland Simpson twines together the lives of two accomplished nineteenth-century mariners from North Carolina--one African American, one Irish American. Though Moses Grandy (ca. 1791- ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819-1886) never met, their stories bring to vivid life the saga of race and maritime culture in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. With his lyrical prose and inimitable voice, Bland Simpson offers readers a grand tale of the striving human spirit and the great divide that nearly sundered the nation. Grandy, born a slave, captained freight boats on the Dismal Swamp Canal and bought his freedom three times before he finally gained it. He became involved in Boston abolitionism and ultimately appeared before the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1843. As a child, Maffitt was sent from his North Carolina home to a northern boarding school, and at thirteen he was appointed midshipman in the U.S. Navy, where he had a distinguished career. After North Carolina seceded from the Union, he enlisted in the Confederate navy and became a legendary blockade runner and raider. Both Grandy and Maffitt made names for themselves as they navigated very different routes through the turbulent waters of antebellum America.

"Shows how colonialism and slavery created sustained critiques of American capitalism and created the conditions for chronic resistance. These communities represent a largely unrecognized, alternative declaration of independence. They are a part of world history that is truly revolutionary."--Mark P. Leone, author of The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital   "Addresses key historical and theoretical debates of the archaeology of the African diaspora. Theoretically complex and methodologically rigorous, it is the first serious study to locate maroon groups in the Chesapeake."--Frederick H. Smith, author of The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking   "Sayers uses archaeology to tell a compelling story of how alienated people found refuge in the alien landscape of the Great Dismal Swamp. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation that they escaped. His work helps us to better understand the history of defiance in the Antebellum South and raises important theoretical issues for all archaeologists studying diasporic communities."--Randall H. McGuire, author of Archaeology as Political Action   In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape--2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized individuals, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. In the first thorough archaeological examination of this unique region, Daniel Sayers exposes and unravels the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism. 

The autobiographies of former slaves contributed powerfully to the abolitionist movement in the United States, fanning national--even international--indignation against the evils of slavery. The four texts gathered here are all from North Carolina slaves and are among the most memorable and influential slave narratives published in the nineteenth century. The writings of Moses Roper (1838), Lunsford Lane (1842), Moses Grandy (1843), and the Reverend Thomas H. Jones (1854) provide a moving testament to the struggles of enslaved people to affirm their human dignity and ultimately seize their liberty. Introductions to each narrative provide biographical and historical information as well as explanatory notes. Andrews's general introduction to the collection reveals that these narratives not only helped energize the abolitionist movement but also laid the groundwork for an African American literary tradition that inspired such novelists as Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson.