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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In the years before Emancipation, Warren County ranked as one of the wealthiest counties in North Carolina. This wealth relied entirely on the forced labor of enslaved African Americans, who maintained the county’s thriving plantation economy. After Freedom, white residents did everything in their power to keep the structures of slavery alive, instituting a regime of Jim Crow governance that lasted for another century. That regime is still starkly evident across the region, manifested in persistent inequities in health care, education, law enforcement, child welfare, and wealth.

The Legacies of Enslavement panel will begin by drawing on the recorded testimonies of women and men who grew up enslaved in Warren County. From there, the conversation will step towards the present, exploring the systemic legacies of enslavement and how they continue to shape present-day experience. The discussion’s conclusion, in turn, will point decisively to the future, inviting participants to join the journey beyond enslavement and Jim Crow, and towards personal, social, and political transformation in Warren County.

Panel Moderator: Blair Kelley – Incoming Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Assoc. Professor of History, NCSU
Panelists:
• William Munn – Senior Policy Analyst, Health Advocacy Project, North Carolina Justice Center
• Michael Williams – Education Project Manager, National Humanities Center
• Carlton Wilson – Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, North Carolina Central University

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.

The discussion series begins this Saturday (May 14th) at 11am at the Warren County Memorial Library.
This event is free and open to the public.

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