The final Liberating Series discussion is Saturday, June 11 at the Warren County Memorial Library and focuses on the descendants of the 1921 lynchings.

When the young Plummer Bullock and his older cousin Alfred Williams were lynched in Warren County in 1921, regional newspapers were quick to paint them as violent lawbreakers who were “brought to justice” by a mob of enraged white townspeople. The story that the papers told was both simple and familiar, wholly erasing the humanity of the murdered men while dwelling on the gruesome circumstances of their lynching. And within the flash of a news cycle, their stories had vanished from the public eye. To most white readers, they were just two more Black men killed in what, at the time, was a more-than-weekly happening somewhere in the South.

But in the Black communities of Warren County, the stories of Mr. Bullock’s and Mr. Williams’ murders were wrenchingly real and not easily forgotten. Folks knew Plummer Bullock for his forward-looking vision for Black possibilities in the county; many saw him as a future leader, not unlike his father, Reverend William Bullock. Dozens of local Black couples had been married by his father; even more had been touched by the impassioned eloquence of the reverend’s sermons. And everyone around the town of Norlina knew the outgoing spirit of Alfred Williams, a gregarious and much-liked railroad worker whose home had long been a community meeting-place. Suddenly, both were gone. And their killers were all still free—in many cases, overseeing the paychecks and workplaces of the bereaved kin and neighbors of the murdered men.

The stories of Mr. Bullock and Mr. Williams are but two in the long litany of stories of racial violence in Warren County. At the same time and for the same reason that those two were murdered, sixteen of their neighbors had been imprisoned, consigned to grueling labor on chain gangs and at the state Penitentiary. That’s sixteen more Black families torn apart. And that was only in 1921. The “unexplained” murders of Black men and deaths at the hands of local whites, including police officers, continued for decades thereafter in Warren County. Each act of violence marked another tear in the fabric of the African American community. And each was kept alive in the stories of community members, while the “authorized” sources of local history did their best to erase them from the historical record.

The “Descendants Stories” panel challenges this erasure, by bringing together a group of family members who have kept these stories alive. Members of both the Bullock and Williams families will be joined by descendants of those other 16 men, and of other victims of racial violence in the county. Together, they’ll discuss the ongoing impact of the trauma in their families’ lives, and offer their thoughts about the possibility of reckoning and repair.

PANELISTS:
JAMES ANDREWS
Family of Henry Andrews

REV. DR. MACEO FREEMAN
Family of Alfred Williams

OCTAVIO JONES
Family of Plummer Bullock

DIANA OWENS
Family of Plummer Bullock

SANDRA WILLIAMS
Family of James and Jerome Hunter; also Alfred Williams

MODERATOR:
TAMMY EVANS
Assistant Professor of English, Louisburg College and long-time Warren County resident

The “Liberating Futures” series is a collaborative project of The 1921 Project, the Warren County Branch of the NAACP, the Warren County African American Historical Collective, UNC’s Descendants Project, and UNC’s Humanities for the Public Good Initiative.

This event is free and open to the public.

Cover: A 1874 map of Warren County. (Image provided by the N.C. Collection at UNC)

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The fourth panel in the “Liberating Futures: Erasures, Reckonings, and Transformations” series of public discussions continues on Saturday, June 4 at 11am in the Warren County Memorial Library community room.

The “Ties to the Land: Sharecropping, Black Land Ownership, and Black Land Loss” panel brings together a group of policy analysts, activists, attorneys, and farmers to reflect on the systems that have simultaneously connected Black farm families with the land and challenged their ability to own the fields in which they’ve labored for so many generations.

Panelists will discuss the legacy of sharecropping and Jim Crow farm practices, address the organized challenges being mounted against government policies that discourage and decimate Black farm ownership, review the relationship between land ownership and generational wealth, and offer strategies for reclaiming a future for Black farming.

PANELISTS:
• Patrick Brown – Fourth generation Black farmer, using conservation and regenerative agricultural practices and promoting Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs

• Phyllis Craig-Taylor – Professor of Law and former Dean of the NCCU School of Law; a member of the Heirs Property Retention Coalition, and a board member of Land Loss Prevention, Inc.

• Mary Somerville – Minister, lifetime farmer, community activist, and North Carolina’s first Black female jailer

MODERATOR:
• Tracy McCurty – Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Black Belt Justice Center, a legal and advocacy nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and regeneration of African American farmlands and land-based livelihood

The “Liberating Futures” series is a collaborative project of The 1921 Project, the Warren County Branch of the NAACP, the Warren County African American Historical Collective, UNC’s Descendants Project, and UNC’s Humanities for the Public Good Initiative.

This event is free and open to the public.

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When strangers travel the rural roadways of Warren County, few would imagine that this land was once the site of a remarkable experiment in city-building.

In the late 1960s, Soul City—a visionary project spearheaded by the Civil Rights activist Floyd McKissick—began to emerge from the farmlands of an old antebellum plantation. McKissick and his partners marshaled federal and private funds to begin building a new town from the ground up, believing that the best way to realize the potential of communities whose futures had been consistently denied by racist systems was to give those communities a chance to collaborate, create, and thrive. And so Soul City was born.

The dream blossomed with the early building of infrastructure, homes, businesses, a health clinic, and more, laying the foundation for a vibrant new community, and drawing many who shared McKissick’s vision to Warren County. The ambitious project, though, eventually fell victim to the very forces that Soul City’s planners had so hoped to avoid. White supremacy claimed another victory in Warren County. But only over the actual construction. The dream of progressive possibility—of self-realization and community empowerment—stayed very much alive.

Warren County has long served as a home for such dreams among its Black communities. Tales told from the days of enslavement recount the stories of Black women and men who challenged their status and claimed (by force when necessary) their personhood and their futures. The post-Emancipation years witnessed an explosion of school building and commercial creativity, charting a legacy of progressive community building that stretched well into the 20th century. It should come as no surprise that the state’s first Black representative to the United States Congress came from Warren County, or that that one of the region’s most widely applauded teacher-training schools for African Americans began in Warrenton. Civil Rights pioneer Ella Baker—who is widely credited as a key founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—hailed from Warren County, as did Eva Clayton, who in 1992 became the first Black congressional representative from North Carolina since 1901. The dream has deep roots here.

The desegregation struggles of the 1960s, the founding of the community radio station WVSP, the birth of the environmental justice movement with the PCB protests—Warren County has long been a site of progressive political thinking and pointedly anti-racist community action. The “Black Progressive Thought” panel addresses this legacy, bringing together a group of activists, community developers, educators and policy analysts to reflect on the past and imagine a new future, demonstrating the vibrant connections between today’s Black Lives Matter struggles and a proud local history that’s often been underappreciated, in large part because it’s been so carefully erased.

Panel Moderator:
Crystal Myrick – Founder, publisher, and editor of The Warrenist

Panelists:
Eva Clayton – 5-term Congresswoman representing N.C.’s 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives, and head of the consulting firm, Eva Clayton Associates International
Jennie Ann Johnson Franklin – Community historian, and longtime public school educator
Valeria Lee – Former president of the Golden Leaf Foundation, former Program Officer of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and General Manager and Co-founder of the public radio station WVSP
Lew Myers – Former Senior Executive of the Soul City Company, and Former Partner and Director of Business Development for the Freelon Group

The “Black Progressive Thought” discussion takes place on Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 11am at the Warren County Memorial Library (119 S. Front Street, Warrenton, NC).

The “Liberating Futures” series is a collaborative project of The 1921 Project, the Warren County Branch of the NAACP, the Warren County African American Historical Collective, UNC’s Descendants Project, and UNC’s Humanities for the Public Good Initiative.

This event is free and open to the public.

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Freedom and education walk hand-in-hand throughout the African American experience. The legacy of state laws that prohibited enslaved Africans from reading and writing—laws that took effect in North Carolina as early as 1818—continues to cast a shadow on our current educational system.

Even now, this legacy forces us to ask the questions, “What is the purpose of education?” and “How has public education been used as a means of social and political control?”

Answering these questions forces us to examine the “rise and fall” of public education in Warren County for its Black, white, Native American, Latinx, and other residents.

Warren County has long presented itself as a center of educational excellence, with a history of elite white private academies that stretches back to the early 1800s. These academies, however, served only the children of wealthy merchants and plantation owners; enslaved African Americans were punished for even showing an interest in learning how to read.

Black elder Henry Bobbitt, who grew up enslaved in Warren County, testified to this fact in a 1937 interview: “Now talking about something that we’d get a whipping for—that was for having a pencil and a piece of paper or a slate. If you just looked like you wanted to learn to read or write, you got a licking.” Immediately after Emancipation, however, African Americans in Warren County initiated a remarkable, decades-long campaign to create their own schools. In the late 1800s, a church association founded the county’s first Black institute of higher learning, the Shiloh Institute; within a few decades, every Black community in the county hosted its own schoolhouse, with much of the support coming directly from the community. Insuring quality education for their children—often in the face of white resistance—was always a priority for the county’s Black residents.

The “Histories and Futures of Public Education” panel brings together a group of distinguished educators and policy analysts to reflect on the history of education in Warren County and, more importantly, to share thoughts about transforming future educational policies and practices. Panelists will address the purpose of education in the 21st century, discuss the importance of including expansive and inclusive histories in school curricula, offer an update on the Leandro Case funding, and address the potentials of education from a parent’s perspective.

MODERATOR:
Doris Terry Williams – Rural Education Leader, and Principal Consultant for the Rural School and Community Trust

PANELISTS:
Sarah Montgomery – Senior Policy Analyst, North Carolina Justice Center
Carla Norwood – Warren County parent, and Executive Director of Working Landscapes
Rodney D. Pierce – Educator, historian, and writer based in eastern North Carolina
Jennifer Sims – Chairwoman, Warren County School Board

The “Histories and Futures of Public Education” discussion takes place on Saturday, May 21, 2022 at 11am at the Warren County Memorial Library (119 S. Front Street, Warrenton, NC).

The “Liberating Futures” series is a collaborative project of The 1921 Project, the Warren County Branch of the NAACP, the Warren County African American Historical Collective, UNC’s Descendants Project, and UNC’s Humanities for the Public Good Initiative.

This event is free and open to the public.

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