As my way of celebrating Black History Month this year, I'm going to feature stories about nine artifacts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that speak to North Carolina's coastal history, beginning with this photograph of Golden Frinks and an amazing young woman from Williamston at the March on Washington.
Williamston N.C.
Portraits of Roanoke River Fisheries, 1870-1910 —Bow Nets, Slat Weirs, Fish Wheels, Slides & Seines
Today I’m looking at several historical photographs of fishermen, fishing boats and fishing gear on the Roanoke River. The photographs mostly date to the period from 1870 to 1910, though one that I'm especially fond of was taken in the late 1930s. That was an exciting period in the history of the river's fisheries. If you had launched a boat in Weldon, at the falls of the river, and drifted down those swift waters all the way to the river's mouth on the Albemarle Sound, you would have seen many fishermen and many different kinds of fishing gear, including weirs, bow nets, stake nets, drift nets, wheels, seines and slides.
Freedom Stories– Celebrating the Hyde County school boycott’s 50th anniversary, part 6
Before I went to Hyde County and wrote Along Freedom Road, I think I thought the civil rights movement happened some place besides eastern North Carolina.
Hamilton, Burnt and Pillaged
Today I am in Boston and by coincidence I stumbled onto two different accounts, in two different archives, that describe the same event in the history of North Carolina’s coastal counties: the sacking and burning of the town of Hamilton during the Civil War.
The Klan Last Time- Part 6: In the Night
While the Klan’s public rallies and cross burnings brought to mind a county fair or a church revival, the soul of the Ku Klux Klan revealed itself most plainly later in the night, after the children’s games had finished and the burning cross extinguished.
In Skewarkey Cemetery
At the reception after my lecture, several people told me what the gentleman in the back row had been referring to: in 1925 a mob of white men broke into the Martin County jail and removed a young Jewish man named Joseph Needleman, who had been accused of raping a local woman named Effie Griffin. They had carried him to the cemetery at the Skewarkey Primitive Baptist Church, where they castrated him and left him for dead.
Travels with Kingfish
I first met Bland Simpson at an oyster roast at the old hunting lodge at Lake Matttamuskeet. That was in the winter of 1997, and we were in the middle of a remote, swampy and unforgettably beautiful landscape. From the top of the lodge’s wildlife observation tower, the view took my breath away. In every direction, cane brakes, freshwater marshes, and juniper swamps stretched to the horizon, while thousands of Canada geese, snow geese, and tundra swans rested on the lake.
David Cecelski 