It feels strange to look back into the past and feel heartbreak for people's suffering, and all they did without, when they are long gone and there is nothing left to be done about their want or need. But I cannot always help myself, and that is how I felt when I read these words from a tenant farmer in Martin County, N.C. in 1887.
Nash County N.C.
Tobacco Harvest, Braswell Plantation, Battleboro, N.C., 1944
In this-- my 17th photo-essay in this series-- we meet scores of tenant farmers harvesting tobacco on the Braswell Plantation in Battleboro, N.C., in August 1944. The 15 photographs speak to North Carolina's agricultural history, but also to the enduring legacy of Gov. Charles B. Aycock's brand of white supremacy.
Learning Instructions for Everyone … in prison and out (by Phillip Vance Smith II)
Phillip Vance Smith II, an inmate at the Nash Correctional Institution, has just published a remarkable book of poetry called "Life: Learning Instructions for Everyone … in prison and out." His poems are a primer in survival without hope, or perhaps in how to find hope, and how to make a life with meaning, in a hopeless world.
The Exodusters and the Burning of the Hackney Carriage Factory
I recently re-visited Dr. Frenise A. Logan's groundbreaking article on the Exodusters because I wanted to understand better why black insurgents had burned down the Hackney carriage factory in Rocky Mount, N.C., in February of 1890.
David Cecelski 