Session 1:
Trouble in My Way: 1830–1900

Equal Rights before the law: the only equality we ask.

—Raleigh Freedmen’s Convention
An Era of New Opportunities

North Carolina had a taxable population of 737,987 in 1830. Of that number, 19,543 were free persons of color, 245,601 were slaves, and 472,843 were whites. The fear of slave insurrections, along with growing abolitionist sentiment in the North, led southern states to limit the liberties of their minority populations during the first half of the nineteenth century. North Carolina in 1835 approved an amendment to the state constitution that took away voting rights from free African Americans, mulattoes, and persons of mixed blood.

After a long and bloody Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended slavery. White conservatives, largely Democrats and former Whigs, battled white moderates and African Americans, mostly Republicans, for control of the poverty-stricken and exhausted former Confederate states. The Reconstruction years presented an opportunity for North Carolinians to shape the society they wanted for the state, and the role that newly freed African Americans and other minorities would play. A window of opportunity for people of color opened briefly, but once the federal government ended Reconstruction in 1877, the window quickly closed again.

North Carolina Rejoins the Union
In 1866 North Carolina politicians refused to support the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” and guaranteed equal protection under the law for all citizens. Legislators enacted “black codes” that restricted the activities of African Americans and in some cases seemed virtually to reintroduce a form of slavery. For example, these laws allowed officials to arrest unemployed blacks as vagrants and turn them over to plantation owners to work off their sentences.

Concerned about the treatment of the freedmen, Congress in 1867 passed a series of Reconstruction Acts to reorganize the state governments of the former Confederacy. The acts required the states to rewrite their constitutions to give all adult men the right to vote and to hold public office. They also required that each former Confederate state ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to return to the Union. North Carolina met the requirements in 1868 and reentered the United States.

African American men regained the right to vote, and they cast ballots in large numbers. Many blacks won election to local and state offices. Americans Indians also had the right to vote, but few went to the polls during Reconstruction.

In reaction to black participation in politics, some conservative white Democrats used intimidation to keep African American and white Republicans from voting, or to make them vote for Democratic candidates. In 1869 the Ku Klux Klan launched its campaign of terror, torturing and killing North Carolina African Americans and whites sympathetic to the Republican platform.

On February 26, 1870, a band of the Ku Klux Klan rode on horseback to the home of Wyatt Outlaw in Graham. Outlaw, a leader in the African American community, helped found the Republican Party in North Carolina and advocated establishing a school for African Americans. The robed group abducted and lynched Outlaw, hanging him from an oak tree near the Alamance County Courthouse. Dozens of Klansmen were arrested for the murders of Outlaw and other African Americans in Alamance and Caswell Counties. Many of the arrested men confessed, but, despite protests by Governor William W. Holden, a federal judge in Salisbury ordered most of them released.

On July 4, 1865, a group of African Americans marched through Raleigh carrying banners that read, “Equal Rights before the law: the only equality we ask.” That autumn 106 black delegates convened in the capital city “to express the sentiments of the Freedmen.” In appeals to state lawmakers, they asked for employment opportunities, education for their children, legal protection for black families and aid for orphans, and “to have all the oppressive laws which make unjust discriminations on account of race or color wiped from the statutes of the State.” The delegates were reinforcing goals that the federal Freedmen’s Bureau set for the newly freed slaves: educational opportunities and fair employment practices. These same aims would drive the struggle for civil rights in North Carolina well into the twentieth century.

Biography:
Henry Berry Lowry
by Jefferson Currie

On a hot June day in 1999, a young Lumbee Indian man, Randall Oxendine, stood on the banks of the old millpond at Bear Swamp and yelled, “I’m gonna get you, Henry Berry!”  Gabrial Cummings looked at him and asked what Randall would do if Henry Berry came floating down that swamp in his flat-bottomed boat with his rifle across his knee. Randall, Gabrial, and I all laughed nervously, wondering if or when Henry Berry Lowry would come paddling down that swamp. We all looked to see if he was there. . . .

Henry Berry Lowry was the legend of Robeson County even before he vanished in February 1872. He disappeared after he stole the safes from Pope and McLeod’s store and from the sheriff’s office in Lumberton. He broke open the sheriff’s safe and left it lying in the middle of a Lumberton street. In all, he stole $28,000. Three days later he vanished. The New York Herald published reports that Henry Berry Lowry had accidentally killed himself. An elderly Lumbee man, John Godwin, said that Henry Berry Lowry “had been trying to shoot the load off his gun for a long time. . . . The load went right up through here, my mother said, and blowed the top of his head off.” This and other local legends were recorded by Lumbee historian and teacher Adolph Dial in the 1960s and 1970s. The many legends differ in their account of Lowry’s disappearance. A ninety-six-year-old Lumbee man, Mabe Sampson, believed that Henry Berry Lowry escaped from the militia and the United States troops who were trying to track him down. Mr. Sampson said that “Henry Berry left here and was sent off by a white man, loaded right here at Moss Neck. He never was killed.” 

Henry Berry Lowry was one of twelve children in the family of Allen and Mary Lowry. The Lowrys struggled, as did other Indians in Robeson County, through the hard times that the Civil War brought them. During the war, the Confederacy forced Lumbees to work on building the earthen Fort Fisher near Wilmington. At home, the Home Guard accused Indians of harboring escaped Union prisoners and Confederate deserters, hiding guns, and stealing meat from smokehouses. The Home Guard supported the Confederacy and maintained law and order at home while the war was being fought. Indian men had to resort to “lying out”—or hiding—in the swamps to avoid being harassed and rounded up by the Home Guard. 

Henry Berry Lowry had had enough of being controlled and pushed around by the local Home Guard authority, so he struck back. He killed James P. Barnes on December 21, 1864, and James Brantley “Brant” Harris on January 15, 1865. The Lowry family had had ongoing disputes with both men. The Home Guard avenged the deaths of James Barnes and Brant Harris by accusing Henry Berry Lowry’s father, Allen, and brother William of various crimes. The Home Guard called an illegal court. They tried, convicted, and executed Allen and William in one day, March 3, 1865. Eighteen-year-old Henry Berry Lowry reportedly watched the executions from behind some bushes. He swore to take revenge for their deaths. 

Henry Berry Lowry was a wanted man. He lay out in the swamps but was arrested (with no warrant) for murder by the Home Guard on December 7, 1865, at his wedding to Rhoda Strong. Mary Norment, author of The Lowrie History, says that after his arrest “he filed his way out of the grated iron window bars, escaped to the woods with handcuffs on, and made his way back to his wife in Scuffletown [Pembroke].” 

Tin-type of members of the Henry Berry Lowry posse, c. 1870. Verso: left to right: Frank McKay, Archie McCallum, and William McCallum.
Henry Berry Lowry had gathered around him other Indian men who had tired of taking the mistreatment of whites. Along with this group, two African Americans and one white “buckskin” Scot joined what became known as the Lowry band. The band robbed rich white landowners, and Henry Berry Lowry became the “Robin Hood” of Robeson County. The governor outlawed Henry Berry Lowry and the band in 1869, offering large rewards for them, dead or alive. The band responded with violence. In one ten-month stretch, ten Police Guard and Lowry band members died. 

In 1871 Francis Marion Wishart became colonel of the Police Guard manhunt and had the wives of the Lowry band held hostage in prison. Henry Berry Lowry and other band members sent Wishart a letter demanding the release of their wives, or “the bloodiest times will be here than ever was before—the life of every man will be injeopardy.” The wives were released, and Colonel Wishart and the government began to work out an end to the conflict. The killing soon stopped, and in February 1872 Henry Berry Lowry vanished. Colonel Wishart called the reports of his death “ALL A HOAX.” No one ever collected the $12,000 reward for his life.

Many years after he vanished, Henry Berry Lowry reportedly was seen in a church at a funeral for someone he knew. No one talked to him, and he talked to no one, but Robeson County resident Charlie McBryde says that “They said had you looked at his eyes good, you would have known it was Henry Berry.” Today, reminders of Henry Berry Lowry are all around the area, with a road named after him and a play portraying his life. Henry Berry Lowry has lived on in the minds and hearts of the Lumbee. If you are ever in Robeson County, go down to the swamps and be still. You can feel him, and if you look real close, you might even see him. 

Jefferson Currie is Lumbee and an assistant curator at the North Carolina Museum of History.


Educating the Freedmen
Freed slaves eagerly sought education and flocked to free schools established by the Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress in 1865. Northern charitable and relief agencies helped by sending instructors. By the end of 1865, North Carolina had eighty-six freedmen schools teaching students who ranged in age from young children to senior adults.

Some black communities that had no freedmen schools, or where those schools were overcrowded, set up subscription schools. Students might pay twenty-five cents to a dollar per month as tuition or provide wood to heat the buildings. Although these self-supported schools provided a rudimentary education, many of them existed in poor conditions and lacked basic materials such as textbooks.

Leading religious denominations helped to educate African Americans. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, and the Moravians had opened schools prior to 1865. As the number of schools increased during Reconstruction, so did the need for teachers. Several religious groups founded private institutions known as normal schools to train black educators. The Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians started African American collegiate institutes, which later became colleges, in North Carolina.

The North Carolina General Assembly created the State Colored Normal School, a teacher training institution for African Americans, in February 1877. Legislation provided $2000 to start the school—the first of its kind in the South—which would share space with the Howard School in Fayetteville, established in 1867 to educate African American youth. Robert Harris, a native North Carolinian educated at Oberlin College in Ohio, was the school’s first principal. The school opened in September 1877 with forty students, most of whom were from the Fayetteville area. Females and males were admitted on equal terms. Students paid five to eight dollars board per month, depending on the quality of housing. The broad curriculum included reading, algebra, map drawing, oratory, and school management. In 1939 the State Colored Normal School was renamed Fayetteville State Teacher’s College, and in 1963 it was renamed Fayetteville State University.

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Issue:
Schools for Freed People

by Alex Sandifer and Betty Dishong Renfer

The Civil War (1861–1865) brought freedom to the slaves of the South. But freedom alone did not solve their problems. Instead, freedom introduced them to many problems that they had never had to face as slaves. Once free, most of them had nothing except the clothes on their backs—no livestock for draft animals, no seeds for food, no land to farm, no houses to live in, no money. And most of them did not know how to read or write.

As slaves, African Americans had not been allowed to attend schools. In fact, after Nat Turner’s slave revolt in 1831, North Carolina had an antiliteracy law that made teaching any black person, enslaved or free, to read and write a crime. Some continued to learn from various sources in secret, but they faced severe punishment if they were found out.

The first schools for freed people
During the Civil War, when enslaved persons heard that Union troops were approaching, many took any opportunity to escape. When Union forces led by General Ambrose Burnside captured the Outer Banks in 1862, hundreds of coastal slaves sought protection behind Union lines. Burnside put Vincent Colyer, an army chaplain, in charge of taking care of these escaped slaves. Camps were set up for them, and many were given jobs helping Union soldiers build forts.

Colyer knew that just helping the escaped slaves with their temporary daily needs was not enough. They needed preparation for lives as free citizens after the war—they needed educations. So, on July 23, 1863, Colyer established the first school for freed people in North Carolina. This school was on Roanoke Island. Another was soon opened in New Bern. Both were taught by soldiers who volunteered their free time.

Schooling assistance from the North
After the war, every former slave became a learner, every person a teacher, every place a school—or so it seemed. With torn spelling books and reading primers in hand, freed people gathered in homes, in cellars, in sheds, in corners of meetinghouses, even under shade trees during breaks from working their crops. African American children learned from teachers, and older family members learned from them. In one classroom, a six-year-old girl sat alongside her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, who was over seventy-five years old. All of them were learning to read for the first time.

For some, their goal was to read the Bible. Others wanted to protect themselves from scalawags and carpetbaggers and former masters by reading for themselves rather than having to trust others to read for them.

Schools were sponsored by private aid societies and benevolent societies from the North such as the American Missionary Association (AMA) and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. Sabbath schools, night schools, and privately sponsored schools also taught freed people.

In addition, many schools were established by the Freedmen’s Bureau, a United States government agency that tried to help freed people make the transition to life as free citizens, to assist the “industrial, social, intellectual, moral and religious improvement of persons released from slavery.” The bureau built schoolhouses for African Americans and helped pay for teachers and supplies.


Artist's rendition of James's Plantation School, a Freedmen's school, in Harper's Weekly, October 1868.

Challenges for Ashley
The Reverend Samuel S. Ashley had come to North Carolina from Massachusetts as a teacher sponsored by the AMA. He helped establish schools for freed people in Wilmington and, after the war, decided to stay in North Carolina. He was sent as a delegate to the state Constitutional Convention of 1868 and campaigned for a system of free schools for all. He believed that the people of North Carolina could not make wise decisions about their futures unless they became more educated—“An intelligent people constitute a powerful state.” Ashley later became the state’s first superintendent of public schools under the new constitution.

His job was to get the state’s new public school system up and running. He had to face shortages in money, teachers, schoolhouses, and textbooks. He also had to deal with the large number of children who were now in need of an education, both black and white.

Most whites did not want their children going to school with black children, and they demanded separate schools. Some whites fought the education of blacks with violence. A few schools were burned, and some white teachers who had come from the North to teach blacks were beaten. One white man was reported to have “attempted to set a savage dog” upon one female teacher from the North. Though the majority of white people in North Carolina were not violent, most of them resented northern teachers, thinking that they would disrupt southern society. They refused to associate with northern teachers, to give them board, or to lease them school space.

Assistance from Hood


Reverend James Walker Hood

Still, Ashley believed that African American children had just as much right to an education as white children. He decided to manage not one school system, but two—one for whites and one for blacks. He turned to the Reverend James Walker Hood for help, naming him assistant superintendent.

Hood, an African American preacher who had moved to Cumberland County from Pennsylvania, had also been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention on 1868. His first duty was to travel the state and gather information about its schools for blacks. While he discovered thousands of freed people in hundreds of schools, this was just a small fraction of the 330,000 former slaves in the state. Still, it was a good start. Freedom had brought many changes for blacks, and education was one key to making sure those changes were positive ones.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of Tar Heel Junior Historian.

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Democracy Deceived

By the dawn of the twentieth century, most people of color had again lost the right to vote, and they faced an unprecedented level of violence and discrimination. Why did North Carolina choose to shut the window of opportunity and keep it closed for the next fifty years?

When Reconstruction ended, white conservatives, or Democrats, regained control of the state’s government. But some African Americans still managed to win election to the General Assembly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At least 111 had held seats there by 1900. Four North Carolina blacks served in Congress during this period. The political influence of African Americans surged in 1894, when white sharecroppers and small farmers in the Populist Party joined with black Republicans, also mostly sharecroppers, small farmers, and laborers, to win an overwhelming victory in the state elections.

White Democrats realized that in order to rule in North Carolina, they would have to end the political power of blacks. In the state elections of 1898 and 1900, they used a campaign of intimidation, violence, and election fraud to eliminate African Americans from the political process and impose racial segregation.

White Supremacy Prevails
The white supremacy campaign and the elections of 1898 and 1900 ushered in an era of legally sanctioned civil rights violations. United States senator and Democratic Party leader Furnifold M. Simmons led the campaign, using racist political cartoons, ads, and newspaper articles to create fear of blacks among white North Carolinians. Armed militant whites known as Red Shirts threatened and assaulted African Americans. Democrats won most state contests as a result of the campaign.


Two Robeson County “Red Shirts”: George A. McKay and Mr. McCellum.

North Carolinian George Henry White served in the United States House of Representatives for two terms, from 1897 to 1901. There he represented African American interests, decrying the violent treatment of blacks in the South. He sponsored the first anti-lynching bill and fiercely opposed segregation, racial violence, and disfranchisement. The success of the white supremacy campaign convinced White not to seek election for a third time. He was the last African American from the South to sit in Congress until the 1970s.

The campaign effectively eliminated blacks as voters and public citizens. The South would not elect another African American to Congress until 1972, when Andrew Young of Georgia and Barbara Jordan of Texas won seats in the United States House of Representatives. Not until 1992 did North Carolina send another African American representative to Washington.
 
Event:
Wilmington Race Riot
by Beth Crist

Thirty-three years after North Carolina ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, the Wilmington Race Riot took place. This event was the bloody end to a vicious political campaign waged by whites bent on removing African Americans from political office. 

In 1898, Democrats in North Carolina campaigned to regain control of the legislature from the Republican Party, with which most African Americans were aligned, many holding office. Calling for an end to the “corruption and arrogance of the Republican-Negro rule,” Furnifold M. Simmons, North Carolina Democratic Party chairman, wrote a letter on July 27, 1898 urging whites to band together to support “White Supremacy.” Over one hundred thousand copies of this letter were printed and distributed around the state, with newspapers contributing to the proliferation of the message through heavy publicity.

As November 8, Election Day, approached, Democrats sent Red Shirts, bands of armed men wearing bright red shirts, to intimidate black voters. These bands had flourished in South Carolina until 1877, when they departed after federal troops were withdrawn from the state, but they first appeared in North Carolina in October 1898. The Red Shirts rode menacingly on horseback through African American neighborhoods and also appeared at political rallies.

Alexander Manly, 1890s
 Pre-election tensions were especially high in Wilmington, whose population had a two-thirds black majority and a flourishing African American middle class. In August 1898, Alexander Manly, editor of the city’s African American newspaper, the Daily Record, had printed an inflammatory editorial in response to a charge by Democrats that Republican rule had encouraged black men to rape white women. In defense of his race, Manly wrote: “Every negro lynched is called a Big Burly Black Brute when, in fact, many of these who have been thus dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is well known by all.”

The Democrats turned the editorial into a campaign issue, claiming it was proof that Republican rule was leading to black impudence. Red Shirts traveled throughout the city to scare African Americans away from the polls. On Election Day, Democrats allegedly stuffed ballot boxes and threatened African Americans trying to vote. Through these questionable means, the Democrats regained control of a majority of city offices.

Realizing that the newly elected Democrats would not take office until spring, local white businessmen gathered on November 9 to plan the overthrow of the city government. Seeing Manly as a symbol of Republican rule, they sent a letter to a group of African American leaders ordering Manly to leave Wilmington within twenty-four hours and to take his printing press with him. Knowing that he was in danger, Manly had already left the city but had not taken his press. The African American leaders confirmed Manly’s departure in a letter to the white businessmen, but the letter did not arrive within the twenty-four-hour deadline.

On November 10, an angry group of about four hundred white men went to Manly’s office, broke down the door, and destroyed the press. At some point the office caught fire, and blacks and whites began exchanging gunfire. The local militia was called in to halt the riot. Reports vary, but according to the Wilmington Morning Star, eleven blacks were killed and twenty-five wounded; three whites were also wounded. Soon after the riot, large numbers of African Americans, including Mayor Silas Wright, left Wilmington. Whites replaced the black officeholders who had fled.


Charred remains of the Daily Record's printing press.

After the election of November 1898, Democrats in the legislature drew up an amendment to the state constitution designed to strip African Americans of their right to vote. The amendment stopped short of violating the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. The carefully crafted amendment was narrowly ratified on August 2, 1900, following a Democratic campaign calling for white supremacy.

For African Americans, the Wilmington Race Riot had devastating long-term effects. In Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), coeditors David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson assert that the riot “was nothing less than a revolution against interracial democracy. Its aftermath brought the birth of the Jim Crow social order, the end of black voting rights, and the rise of a one-party political system in the South that strangled the aspirations of generations of blacks and whites.”
The Wilmington riot received national press. This drawing, which appeared on the cover of Collier's Weekly on November 26, 1898, incorrectly portrays Wilmington's black citizens as the instigators of the violence.


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Related Links

 

1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission
http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898-wrrc/
Web site of the commission established in 2000 by the N.C. General Assembly to develop a historical record of the Wilmington Race Riot; includes an excellent bibliography.

Fayetteville State University History
http://www.uncfsu.edu/pr/history.htm
A history of the State Colored Normal School.

For the Record: Representations of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898
http://www.mith.umd.edu/courses/amvirtual/wilmington/wilmington.html
Primary sources on the Wilmington Race Riot.

The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony
http://www.roanokefreedmenscolony.com/
The history of the colony, including documents, maps, and projects.

Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine articles (Adobe Acrobat files; may load slowly):

"The Two Black Classes of Antebellum North Carolina"
Antebellum Life issue (Fall 1996)

"George Henry White"
Turn of the Twentieth Century issue (Fall 1999)

"The African American State Fair"
Celebrating North Carolina's State Fair issue (Fall 2002)

"First Steps to Freedom: North Carolina's Emancipation Experience"
African American Life issue (Fall 1995)

"Conceived in Liberty: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights"
U.S. Constitution issue (Fall 1988)

"American Indians and the Civil War"
The Civil War at Home issue (Fall 2000)


Assignment 1

 

Complete one of the following:

Option 1 (If you are seeking reading credits for this course, choose this option.*)
Helping improve reading skills can go hand in hand with teaching about a historical topic like civil rights. Make a list of resources about civil rights appropriate for the grade level you teach and your curriculum and briefly discuss how you could use them to improve reading skills and boost students' interest in reading. Resources can include essays, fiction, articles from Tar Heel Junior Historian magazines (see the workshop's Student Resources section), Web sites, pamphlets, government documents, diaries, letters, music lyrics, posters, etc. (The resources do not need to be North Carolina related.)

Submit your assignment via e-mail to jessica.humphries@ncmail.net.

*Please contact your local education agency if you are interested in this option to ensure that you can earn reading credits for the workshop. If questions arise, contact Jessica Humphries at 919-807-7971 or jessica.humphries@ncmail.net. If your LEA does allow reading credits for this course and you complete Option 1 of the assignments in this session and in Session 2, your Certificate of Participation will confirm that you qualify for those credits.

Option 2
Develop a lesson plan/activity in which your students research a school or university in your community or county that originated as a school for African Americans or American Indians (it does not have to be a school that began during this time period). Have them document its history and speculate on what it was like to be a student in the school. If the school building still exists, include a field trip to the site.

Submit your assignment via e-mail to jessica.humphries@ncmail.net.

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