On the 30th of Sept. 1898, North Carolina newspaper publisher Richard Benbury Creecy wrote, “We are standing on the edge of a race conflict that will shock humanity.” He was not talking about Wilmington, N.C., though, as we might expect, but about another coastal town, Elizabeth City.
Month: May 2021
The Other Coup D’Etat: Remembering New Bern, N.C., in 1898
A friend in New Bern, N.C., recently sent me an issue of the Raleigh News & Observer that he found in his family's old papers. The newspaper's date was November 5, 1898. A front-page article was about a large white supremacy meeting at the Craven County Courthouse in New Bern.
On the Great Coharie River
When Dr. Linwood Watson and I visited last winter, he also told me about an extraordinary project that the Coharie Tribe in eastern North Carolina has undertaken to deepen their ancestral ties to the river and the land that has been their home for centuries.
Edenton and the Battle for White Supremacy
Eighteen months after the Wilmington massacre of 1898, the leading white citizens of Edenton, N.C., gathered at the Chowan County Courthouse to organize a "white supremacy club." Their goal was take away black voting rights forever.
The NC Native Ethnobotany Project
One of the great pleasures I had last winter was a visit from Dr. Linwood Watson, a Haliwa-Saponi family physician who has a passion both for growing native plants and for understanding more deeply how they were traditionally used for sustenance and healing in eastern North Carolina’s Indian communities.
David Cecelski 