Civil rights attorney and activist James Williams began our tour of Plymouth, N.C., on the banks of the Roanoke River. He had come home, and he had invited me to accompany him on a tour of the small town in Eastern North Carolina where he was born and raised.

James graduated from Plymouth High School in 1969. The next fall he moved to Durham. He earned his undergraduate degree at Duke, then went on to graduate from Duke Law School.

He began his distinguished career as a public defender in Charlotte. From 1982 to 1988, he served first as an assistant public defender and then as the felony chief in the Mecklenburg County Public Defender’s Office.

After a brief stint in private practice, he moved to Chapel Hill to accept the position of chief public defender for Orange and Chatham counties. He served in that capacity for 27 years.

In addition to his career as a public defender, James has devoted himself heart and soul to reforming the state’s criminal justice system. Like few others, he dreams of a day when it serves all people equitably and humanely, regardless of their race, class or ethnic background.

Since his retirement in 2017, James has pursued that dream in many different ways.

Perhaps most notably, he founded and now chairs the North Carolina Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System, a non-profit organization focused on working for equity in the juvenile and criminal justice system.

Over the years of our friendship, James has told me many stories about his hometown’s history. His stories have long made me want to visit Plymouth with him.

We finally had the chance to visit Plymouth together when we were both invited to be part of a historical program sponsored by the Washington County African American Museum and Cultural Center in Roper, a few miles east of Plymouth.

Held at the Washington County Middle School in Roper, the Museum and Cultural Center’s event was a very special night.  And because the program did not start until evening, James and I had the chance to explore his hometown before we headed over there.

On the Banks of the Roanoke

James and I began our day in Plymouth by parking on East Main Street and walking down to the Roanoke River’s edge. From there, we looked north into the broad swamplands on the other side. It is the beginning of a great wilderness that runs all the way to the Albemarle Sound.

We just stood there awhile and talked about his family’s history, growing up in Plymouth, his high school football days, the town’s civil rights movement, and much else.

At one point, he pointed out an old smokestack on the other side of the Roanoke that, at least from where we were, seemed to be a solitary beacon in the swamps.

James told me that the smokestack brought back many memories. It was the last trace of a lumber mill, originally the Atlas Plywood Corp., that had once been a big part of life in Plymouth.

In the 1940s, James’ father had left a farm near Chocowinity, a small town in Beaufort County, and moved to Plymouth so that he could get a job at the Atlas Plywood Corp.

That was the story of Plymouth in the 20th century: farm people—many of them sharecroppers and tenant farmers such as his dad—moving there to work in lumber, pulp, and paper mills.

Jobs in Plymouth’s mills spared many of eastern North Carolina’s black residents from toiling on farms that often seemed only one step removed from slavery.

Northern lumber companies established many of the local mills, but they abided by the code of white supremacy that was universal in the South prior to the 1960s.

As we talked about his father’s career, James remembered how jobs at Atlas were always segregated by race. The hardest, most dangerous, and lowest paying jobs always fell to black men and women. No black person was ever allowed to supervise a white man or woman, regardless of their respective education, experience or other qualifications.

James recalled how the Atlas Plywood Corp.’s managers routinely hired white youths straight out of school and required his father to train them, then made them his supervisor.

Leaving those memories behind us, James and I got into his car and drove up Water Street, past an oyster bar that he is fond of and then by the Roanoke River Lighthouse and Maritime Museum.

As we approached an old section of Plymouth that, when he was a boy, people called Sugar Hill, we turned away from the river and drove into James’ childhood.

Wilson Street

We quickly passed by Walter Bell’s barbershop, one of the local African American businesses from the old days. Now shuttered and on an abandoned lot, the shop was where James got his first haircut.

We then drove by Melvin Cordon Park, named in honor of a local African American man who served on the U.S.S. Enterprise, the aircraft carrier that was the most highly decorated ship in the United States Navy during the Second World War.

Cordon later taught in the local schools for many years. He also became one of the town’s first African Americans to hold public office when he was elected to the Plymouth Town Council in 1983.

A short ways down the road, James made a righthand turn in front of another local landmark in Plymouth’s African American community— Gladys Pettiford’s hotel, also now long closed.

In its heyday, Ms. Pettiford’s hotel was a Green Book-style inn where black travelers could find a decent place to stay and a good meal at a time when they were not welcome at white establishments.

We drove slowly around the African American neighborhood centered on Wilson Street.

Along the way, James told stories about the vibrant and close-knit community that he knew in that part of Plymouth when he was young. (His family moved around a good deal, so he lived in the Wilson Street neighborhood, but also other parts of town.)

We passed Mert’s Cafe, where many of the community’s black mill workers used to eat lunch. We also rode by the former site of the Trailways Bus Station, now an empty lot.

Many of the town’s paper, lumber and pulp mill workers had first arrived in Plymouth at that bus station.

James reminded me that many black men and women had also left Plymouth on those Trailways buses.  Like so many black southerners during the “Great Migration,” they were bound for places that had more opportunities for black people in the urban North, Midwest or West.

James and I also passed the former site of the town’s “Colored Library,” an important place in his life story. It had been far from an imposing edifice though: it was a tiny building, hardly larger than a garage, and so prone to water leaks and flooding that the books sometimes grew moldy.

But the librarian, a Mrs. Maytoy, was refined and knowledgeable and did the best she could with the limited resources she had, James told me. “A lovely lady, a gentle soul,” he said.

And James loved being there. He dove deep into the little library’s books. “I think I read most of them,” he said, laughing a little, his eyes lit up by the memories.

The Railroad

Driving east, we came to another part of Plymouth where James had lived when he was young. He told me that people just referred to the neighborhood as “The Railroad.”

Our first stop there was the New Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, a historic African American congregation at the corner of 3^rd and Madison Street. James told me that it was founded in 1867, only two years after the Civil War ended slavery.

A Baptist minister named George Abraham Mebane founded the church. Rev. Mebane had been born into slavery near Merry Hill, 12 miles north of Plymouth, in Bertie County, in 1850. He had escaped from Confederate territory during the Civil War and made his way to Plymouth, as did many other black men and women of that time.

During the war, one Union soldier called Plymouth “a general rendezvous for fugitive slaves.”

Mebane, who was only 13 or 14 years old at the time, served as a mess boy in a Union army regiment after he reached Plymouth. Other fugitive slaves escaped to Plymouth and enlisted in the Union army and navy so that they could fight for their people’s freedom.

After passing New Chapel, James and I went by the former site of the Plymouth State Normal School. Beginning in 1881, the Normal School was one of only two state-supported institutions that trained teachers to work in North Carolina’s African American schools.

The Plymouth State Normal School later moved to Elizabeth City and became the Elizabeth City State Colored Normal School, which is now Elizabeth City State University.

James also took me by the Carthagena Lodge, the local chapter of the Prince Hall Masons. Founded by Prince Hall, an African American anti-slavery leader in Boston, in 1797, the Prince Hall Masons are the African American branch of Freemasonry.

While we were there, James showed me a copy of a photograph of a reunion of black Civil War soldiers. The black veterans had served in the Union army’s 35^th Regiment, United States Colored Infantry, many of whom had enlisted in and around Plymouth.

Taken in 1905, the photograph shows the black men posing in front of the Carthagena Lodge.

Peter V. Bell: Plymouth’s First Black Attorney

We continued our tour. A little farther down the road, James showed me the ruins of a house that had once been the home of an African American attorney named Peter H. Bell (1881-1967). After graduating from the Plymouth State Normal School and Shaw University’s law school, Bell had become Plymouth’s first black attorney.

Beginning in 1901, Peter Bell had a long and successful career in the law at a time when few black attorneys were practicing law anywhere in Eastern North Carolina.

Peter Bell’s sons Charles V. Bell and Peter Bell also become attorneys. They practiced law in Charlotte, but they returned to Plymouth to represent black parents in an important civil rights lawsuit in 1951. The lawsuit ultimately compelled the local school board to stop discriminating against the town’s black schoolchildren and to provide them with better schools and educational resources.

As James looked at Peter Bell’s abandoned, unmarked home, I could see from the look on his face that it hurt him that the pioneering black attorney’s legacy was remembered by so few.

Freedom House

A little farther down the road, James paused in front of another building, an old corner grocery that he told me was a big part of his young life when he and his family lived in that part of Plymouth.

The store had been owned by a black gentleman, a Mr. Fagen, for whom James had worked when he was a teenager. All the community’s life—its gossip, loves, joys and struggles—seemed to come through Fagen’s store back in those days.

Across the street, a popular pool hall and juke joint had stood. James remembered how the people in the neighborhood would gather in front of the building and hang out and visit.

He also told me that, in the 1960s, a local center for civil rights activists had occupied a lot behind the pool hall and juke joint. People had called it “Freedom House.”

I had seen references to Freedom House in historical documents. I recalled that, in 1965, Ku Klux Klansmen had fired shots and thrown firebombs into the building. At the time, James lived just down the street from Freedom House. He remembers that night.

The Fourth Street Elementary School

Going a little further to the east, we rode by the ruins of James’ old school, the Fourth Street Elementary School. Until 1965, all the local schools were still segregated by race and the Fourth Street Elementary School served the African American community.

James remembered the school fondly. “Mr. Lloyd, the principal, was a phenomenal person,” he told me. As we rode through the streets, he pointed out the homes of the school’s teachers. I could hear the great esteem and gratitude for them in his voice.

As we drove away from the school, James mentioned that he and his friend Alex Ghee had hidden a white civil rights worker behind the Fourth Street Elementary School in 1965.

While doing other historical research, I had seen references to that incident in a Congressional investigation into the Ku Klux Klan.

According to those documents, armed Klansmen from several counties had gathered in Plymouth that night with a plan to bomb Freedom House and to attack civil rights marchers.

Some of the Klansmen had been involved in a series of church bombings in and around New Bern, N.C. Law enforcement agencies also suspected them of bombing Georgetown High School, an African American school near Jacksonville, N.C., in the spring of 1965.

During the Klan’s assault in Plymouth, one of the civil rights workers that was staying at Freedom House had been desperately looking for a place to hide from Klansmen rampaging through the neighborhood.

At the time, James and Alex were only 14 or 15 years old. They must have been frightened, but they guided the young man to safety in a little vestibule at the back of the Fourth Street Elementary School.

The Plymouth Massacre of 1864

A little further down the road, James mentioned that he and his friends have speculated that the swamp behind the Fourth Street Elementary School was one of the places where black troops and civilians had tried to escape from Confederate troops during the Civil War.

After capturing Plymouth in April of 1864, Confederate troops had murdered dozens of black Union soldiers in Plymouth, as well, it seems, as quite a few black civilians, most of them fugitive slaves. Historians refer to the incident as the “Plymouth Massacre.”

At the time, eyewitness reports indicated that the Confederates had pursued the black soldiers and civilians into nearby swamps. One of the closest swamps was the one behind the Fourth Street Elementary School.

If that was the case, the swamp was a grave for many of them; though for some, maybe a sanctuary.

At the Brick School

James and I continued our tour of Plymouth. A few hundred yards down the road, we drove by the Guiding Star Freewill Baptist Church, his mother’s home church.

He told me that the people in his community often held civil rights meetings at the church in the 1960s. They began protest marches there as well, proceeding most often from there to the county courthouse.

As we drove through the neighborhood, I asked James which of Plymouth’s civil rights activists were most memorable to him.

He of course mentioned Golden Frinks, who was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC’s) field organizer in Eastern North Carolina at that time. Frinks was from Edenton, 15 miles northeast, and he had first gotten involved in the civil rights movement there.

Mostly though, James recalled local activists.

He first mentioned a pair of sisters who were youth leaders, Harriet and Phyllis Simpson. He also recalled Samuel Garrett and a woman named Chester Lee Small, as well as a local undertaker and juke joint proprietor named Cary Brown.

“Big guy, and he was fearless,” James said, speaking of Cary Brown.

“We’re Going to Live or Die”

I found an excerpt of an interview with Plymouth civil rights activist Samuel Garrett that was done by a sociologist named David Cunningham roughly a decade ago. Cunningham is the author of Klansville, U.S.A., a study of the Ku Klux Klan here in North Carolina in the 1960s.

In that interview, Samuel Garrett recalled what it was like in Plymouth when Klansmen were threatening to kill civil rights marchers and holding mass rallies.

“If you aren’t scared,” Garrett had said, “you have no sense. […] You had nerve enough to walk [in a civil rights march], but you had to be a little jittery on what they going to do because you know what the Klan would do to you…. I stayed up many nights with my window raised waiting for a cross and my shotgun pulled out. Because if they come at me, I was going to kill somebody with me. I wasn’t going by myself.”

Later in the interview, Garrett recalled what Golden Frinks told him and other civil rights activists when the Klan threatened to kill them if they marched for voting rights in Plymouth.

“I know that you don’t have the nerve that you want to have, but we got to let them know that we’re going to march. We’re going to live or die. So let’s get together and make up your mind what you’re going to do.”

And they did march.

As part of his own involvement in Plymouth’s civil rights movement, James had attended a workshop organized by the SCLC that was held at the Franklinton Center at Bricks (a.k.a., the “Brick School”), a church-based center for social justice activism in the rural community of Whitakers, 70 miles west of Plymouth.

(For more on the Brick School’s early history, see Willa Cofield’s marvelous documentary “The Brick School Legacy” below.)

A commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience was central to SCLC’s philosophy. At the workshop at the Brick School, seasoned civil rights activists shared their understanding of that philosophy and nonviolent strategies for challenging racial injustice.

James told me that the SCLC workshop had been especially memorable to him for two reasons.

First, Ku Klux Klansmen had burned a cross on the Brick School’s grounds while he was there.

But second, and more importantly, James had been profoundly moved by the workshop’s keynote speaker, Floyd McKissick, Sr., a noted civil rights attorney from Durham.

McKissick had been involved in challenging racial segregation on interstate transportation as early as 1948. He had helped lead the boycott of the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in Durham in 1957, one of the pivotal moments in the state’s civil rights history.

With the support of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, McKissick had also successfully sued the University of North Carolina to gain admission to its law school in 1951. He and three other young men were the first black students to attend UNC.

A noted advocate of Black Power, McKissick had opened a civil rights law firm in Durham and he had been very active in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the nation’s most important civil rights groups. (He became head of CORE in 1966.)

James told me that McKissick had made a deep impression on him that weekend at the Brick School. He had never met anyone who used a law degree with such passion and conviction to fight for racial justice and equality in American society.

That was, the young James Williams had said to himself, a noble calling. And for the first time in his life, he began to think that perhaps he might want to be that kind of attorney, too.

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