Image Credit: A photograph of Charles N. Hunter published in 1925, Internet Archive.
Charles N. Hunter (January 9 1852-September 4, 1931)
Founder of the North Carolina Industrial Association
Review of Negro life in North Carolina, with my recollections by 
Charles N. Hunter and Race Relations in North Carolina by
Charles N. Hunter, one of North Carolina's outstanding black reformers, was born a slave in Raleigh around 1851, and he lived there until his death in 1931. As public school teacher, journalist, and historian, Hunter devoted his long life to improving opportunities for blacks. A political activist, but never a radical, he skillfully used his journalistic abilities and his personal contacts with whites to publicize the problems and progress of his race. He urged blacks to ally themselves with the best of the white leaders, and he constantly reminded whites that their treatment of his race ran counter to their professed religious beliefs and the basic tenets of the American liberal tradition. By carefully balancing his efforts, Hunter helped to establish a spirit of passive protest against racial injustice. John Haley's compelling book, largely based on Hunter's voluminous papers, affords a unique opportunity to view race relations in North Carolina through the eyes of a black man. It also provides the first continuous survey of the black experience in the state from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression, an account that critiques the belief that race relations were better in North Carolina than in other southern states.
Image Credit: Photographs, Josephine Napolean Leary Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries
Josephine Napoleon Leary (1856-1923)
Entrepreneur and Real Estate Mogul
Image Credit: 2021 Legal Legends of Color: Judge Elreta Melton Alexander, NCbar.org
Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (March 21,1919- March 14 1998)
Attorney, District Court Judge
The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander by
This book explores the life and contributions of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (1919-98). In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. In 1947 she was the first African American woman to practice law in the state of North Carolina, and in 1968 she became the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge. Despite her accomplishments, Alexander is little known to scholars outside of her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. Her life and career deserve recognition, however, not just because of her impressive lists of "firsts," but also owing to her accomplishments during the civil rights movement in the U.S. South. While Alexander did not actively participate in civil rights marches and demonstrations, she used her professional achievements and middle-class status to advocate for individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system. Virginia L. Summey argues that Alexander was integral to the civil rights movement in North Carolina as she, and women like her, worked to change discriminatory laws while opening professional doors for other minority women. Using her professional status, Alexander combatted segregation by demonstrating that Black women were worthy and capable of achieving careers alongside white men, thereby creating environments in which other African Americans could succeed. Her legal expertise and ability to reach across racial boundaries made her an important figure in Greensboro history.
Image Credit: Julius L Chambers, Wikimedia Commons
Julius L Chambers (October 6, 1936- August 2, 2013)
Civil Rights Lawyer
Julius Chambers by
Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936-2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation's leading African American civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark. In this biography, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect the details of Chambers's life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel's lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, they reveal Chambers's singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.
Image Credit: George Simkins Jr., Dentist, and Community Leader, African American Registry
George Simkins (Aug. 23, 1924-Nov. 21, 2004)
Dentist, Civil Rights Activist
African American Hospitals in North Carolina by
Untold thousands of black North Carolinians suffered or died during the Jim Crow era because they were denied admittance to white-only hospitals. With little money, scant opportunities for professional education and few white allies, African American physicians, nurses and other community leaders created their own hospitals, schools of nursing and public health outreach efforts. The author chronicles the important but largely unknown histories of more than 35 hospitals, the Leonard Medical School and 11 hospital-based schools of nursing established in North Carolina, and recounts the decades-long struggle for equal access to care and equal opportunities for African American health care professionals.
Image Credit: Brigadier General Clara L Adams-Ender, National Archives and Records Administration
Brigadier General Clara Adams- Ender (July 11, 1939- )
18th Chief, Army Nurse Corps
Aaron Mcduffie Moore by
Aaron McDuffie Moore (1863-1923) was born in rural Columbus County in eastern North Carolina at the close of the Civil War. Defying the odds stacked against an African American of this era, he pursued an education, alternating between work on the family farm and attending school. Moore originally dreamed of becoming an educator and attended notable teacher training schools in the state. But later, while at Shaw University, he followed another passion and entered Leonard Medical School. Dr. Moore graduated with honors in 1888 and became the first practicing African American physician in the city of Durham, North Carolina. He went on to establish the Durham Drug Company and the Durham Colored Library; spearhead and run Lincoln Hospital, the city's first secular, freestanding African American hospital; cofound North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company; help launch Rosenwald schools for African American children statewide; and foster the development of Durham's Hayti community. Dr. Moore was one-third of the mighty "Triumvirate" alongside John Merrick and C. C. Spaulding, credited with establishing Durham as the capital of the African American middle class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and founding Durham's famed Black Wall Street. His legacy can still be seen on the city streets and country backroads today, and an examination of his life provides key insights into the history of Durham, the state, and the nation during Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow Era.
John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights by
WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD John Hervey Wheeler (1908-1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.
Voices: Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing, Durham, North Carolina 1903 by
The book captures the origin of a Black Diploma School of Nursing in the segregated South during the early twentieth century in Durham, NC. It describes the challenges of the school, the joys and struggles of the students, and offers a snapshot of the lives of some graduates.
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Juliet E. K. Walker. “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War.” The Business History Review 60, no. 3 (1986): 343-82. https://doi.org/10.2307/3115882.
Schweninger, Loren. “Black-Owned Businesses in the South, 1790-1880.” The Business History Review 63, no. 1 (1989): 22-60. https://doi.org/10.2307/3115425.
Thomas, Karen Kruse. “Dr. Jim Crow: The University of North Carolina, the Regional Medical School for Negroes, and the Desegregation of Southern Medical Education, 1945-1960.” The Journal of African American History 88, no. 3 (2003): 223-44. https://doi.org/10.2307/3559069.
Thomas, Karen Kruse. “The Hill-Burton Act and Civil Rights: Expanding Hospital Care for Black Southerners, 1939-1960.” The Journal of Southern History 72, no. 4 (2006): 823-70. https://doi.org/10.2307/27649234.
Lewis, Kenneth. "The History of Black Lawyers in North Carolina." Barnotes at 9. https://www.nclap.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/History-of-Black-Lawyers-in-NC.pdf.
Justesen, Benjamin R. “Black Tip, White Iceberg: Black Postmasters and the Rise of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1897-1901.” The North Carolina Historical Review 82, no. 2 (2005): 193-227. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23523507.
Winford, Brandon K. “‘The Bright Sunshine of a New Day’: John Hervey Wheeler, Black Business, and Civil Rights in North Carolina, 1929-1964.” The North Carolina Historical Review 93, no. 3 (2016): 235-78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44114520.