Ribbons of Color Along the Eno River
Contains first and second-hand stories telling the history of the Eno River Valley from the perspective of African Americans and people of color living along the Eno, from prehistory to modern day.
Named event or history
Freedpeople’s schools, the Quaker Freedmen’s School in Hillsborough, Black churches, mutual-aid societies, landownership, and the institutions that later carried Lincoln High and the civil-rights movement.
51 indexed records are connected with this event.
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Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Contains first and second-hand stories telling the history of the Eno River Valley from the perspective of African Americans and people of color living along the Eno, from prehistory to modern day.
Floyd McKissick -- Walter Jackson -- Brenda Stephens -- Nate Davis -- Jaki Shelton Green -- Jackie Wagstaff -- Diane Wright -- Michelle Johnson -- The Klan.
Ch. 1. A brief history of slavery in the United States -- ch. 2. Slavery and education in North Carolina -- ch. 3. Orange County North Carolina: formation of the county and the development of schools -- ch. 4. Free publ…
History of the Rogers Road neighborhood of Orange County, N.C., and discussion of the effects of a landfill built near the neighborhood.
Charlene Regester recounts her educational experience in Chapel Hill public schools during the early integration efforts. Her parents ardently advocated for integrated schools as a means to improve blacks' access to res…
Abstract: "Recent histories of the University of North Carolina trivialize the institution's support for white supremacy during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, while denying that this unjust past affects the univ…
Fred Battle recalls growing up and attending school in segregated Chapel Hill, NC, and taking his experiences to college in Greensboro, where he participated in civil rights protests. Battle describes the pre-integratio…
… In this interview, he discusses how neighbors in the black community interacted in various social, religious, and academic activities.
… She finished her schooling in all-black schools, so the bulk of her experience with white people in a segregated context took place in the work world.
Sheila Florence, among the first African Americans to desegregate Chapel Hill High School in Chapel Hill, NC, remembers growing up in the segregated South and working to end desegregation. She recalls the poor condition…
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 17, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 17 in the chronology →
A group that included William Thompson, Charles Craig, Jerry Hargraves, Kenny Brooks, Green Merritt and Green Cordal began meeting under a grape vine arbor, with Rev. Green Cordal preaching the first service. The congregation was received into the African Methodist Episcopal connection in 1870.
People: Green Cordal
About 6,000 enslaved people in Orange County were freed at the end of the Civil War. Many Black families left for Durham and other towns, while some stayed on the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own institutions. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865; Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse on June 5, 1866; Black residents bought land for a Chapel Hill school in 1866; and St. Paul AME bought its church lot in 1878.
The minute books of the church now called University Baptist record a unanimous vote on September 3, 1865 to let the colored patrons withdraw and organize a church of their own, and note that sixty-one colored members were dismissed that month for the purpose. The new congregation, later First Baptist Church of Chapel Hill, met at first in the old Quaker schoolhouse on Franklin Street under Rev. Eddie H. Cole.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
The AME congregation later known as Dickerson Chapel moved into the 1790 courthouse building on Queen Street in 1866, sharing it with the freedmen's school the Philadelphia Friends ran there. The Friends conveyed the building to the church's trustees in 1886.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
An 1866 state law declared formerly enslaved couples who had lived together as husband and wife legally married and required them to register their unions, most often with the county register of deeds. Orange County’s cohabitation records from that registration survive at the State Archives and are digitized in North Carolina Digital Collections.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
Twenty Black members withdrew from First Baptist Church of Hillsborough in 1866 and organized a congregation of their own, named for its first pastor, Rev. Alfred E. Bright. The widow of Governor William A. Graham gave the group the West Union Street site where the congregation still worships.
At an estate auction in January 1866 Benjamin Craig, a local farmer, and Green Cordal, a formerly enslaved minister, bought one acre opposite the northwest end of Franklin Street for fifty dollars, and by August 1867 had conveyed it to three Philadelphia Friends for the relief of colored freedmen. The Friends sent George Dixon and his family to run the school, which stood at what is now 100 Merritt Mill Road on the edge of Northside.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
People: Green Cordal · Benjamin Craig
Job Berry, who had advertised a fair in September 1865 to raise money for a school, worked with the Friends of Philadelphia to buy the former Orange County courthouse on Queen Street for twelve hundred dollars and open a freedmen's school in it on June 5, 1866. More than three hundred children and adults learned to read and cipher there.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's journal records that the Black residents of Chapel Hill marched in procession behind a banner, heard an address by Colonel J. J. Guthrie and a reading of part of the Declaration of Independence by Jurdon Swain, then sat down to a dinner they had provided themselves on the ground bought from the Craigs for their new school house. The banner mottoes were "Respect for Former Owners" and "Our Hope is in God".
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
People: Cornelia Phillips Spencer · Benjamin Craig
Under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, Black men registered and voted alongside white men in the November 19-20, 1867 election for a state constitutional convention. Orange County elected E. M. Holt and J. W. Graham as delegates.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
In 1868 Governor William W. Holden appointed Wilson Swain Caldwell a justice of the peace. Caldwell had been enslaved by university president David L. Swain and had worked at the university since boyhood; he taught school for a time before returning to the university in 1875.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
People: Wilson Swain Caldwell
By 1868 a private school for Black children, backed by Philadelphia Friends, was running on the lot near West Franklin Street and Merritt Mill Road that Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought in 1866. It merged into Orange County Training School in 1917.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
People: Green Cordal · Benjamin Craig
Six years after it began meeting under a grape arbor in 1864, the Chapel Hill Black Methodist congregation now known as St. Paul AME received word in 1870 that it had been accepted into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, headquartered in Philadelphia.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
The congregation paid fifty five dollars on April 15, 1878 for the land it still occupies, buying it from Benjamin and Dilsy Craig. A log meeting house stood there first, and the church building that replaced it went up in 1892.
People: Benjamin Craig
Rev. G. W. Offley, preacher in charge of the African Methodist Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, signed a circular dated January 5, 1880 asking the public to help the congregation complete its house of worship and naming Brother George Trice to solicit subscriptions. The Chapel Hill Ledger printed it in full on January 10, 1880.
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Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this event; they may not discuss the Orange County event directly.
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