Governor McCrory Proclaims February Black History Month in North Carolina | Eastern North Carolina Now

    News Release:

Announces Appointments to the African-American Heritage Commission

    Raleigh, N.C.     Governor Pat McCrory has proclaimed February Black History Month in North Carolina, encouraging citizens to learn about our state's rich heritage of black history and its profound place in the advancement of African American culture and life in the United States. The governor also announced his appointments to the African-American Heritage Commission.

    "The establishment of Shaw University, Bennett College, 'Black Wall Street' in Durham, the sit-ins at Woolworth's - these and many more were pivotal moments in the history of our nation, and they reveal our state's wealth of courage, ambition and resolve," Governor McCrory said. "The black history milestones achieved in North Carolina still resonate today."

    Governor McCrory announced appointments to the African-American Heritage Commission, which advises and assists the Secretary of Cultural Resources in the preservation, interpretation and promotion of African-American history, arts and culture. The term length is three years.

     •  Dr. Antoinette Toppin (Durham County) - Toppin is a professor and chair of the Music Department at East Carolina University.

     •  Walthea Yarbrough (Alamance County) - Yarbrough is the director of community college relations at N.C. A&T University.

    Black History Milestones in Our State

     •  July 1829: Raleigh printer Joseph Gales published George Moses Horton's The Hope of Liberty, the first book by an African American in the South. Horton was from Northampton County.

     •  September 1829: Wilmington native David Walker published his Appeal, an important early anti-slavery document.

     •  1835: Elizabeth Keckley came to Hillsborough. After purchasing her freedom in 1855, she moved to Washington, D.C., eventually working for the Lincolns at the White House as portrayed in the film Lincoln.

     •  1861: Edenton native and fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs published her memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which recounted how she hid in an attic for nearly seven years until she managed to escape north via Edenton's maritime Underground Railroad.

     •  1865: Shaw University was founded as the first African American institution of higher learning in the South.

     •  February 1870: Fayetteville native Hiram Revels took the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Confederate president Jefferson Davis, becoming the first black member of Congress.

     •  October 1896: the Pea Island Livesavers, the only all-black unit of the Coast Guard's forerunner, performed a dramatic rescue of survivors of the schooner E. S. Newman off the Outer Banks.

     •  Early 1900s: Parrish Street in downtown Durham was known nationally as "Black Wall Street" for its thriving African American businesses, including North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and Mechanics and Farmers Bank.

     •  April 1942: Montford Point Camp opened at Camp Lejeune to train African American recruits to the Marines. That branch had been all-white until 1941.

     •  February 1960: Sit-ins at a Woolworth's Department Store in Greensboro launch a national protest movement that helped built pressure to pass the major civil rights legislation of the early 1960s.

    April 1960: the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was formed by noted activists and Halifax County native Ella Baker at Shaw University in Raleigh.

     •  November 1962: Martin Luther King, Kr. delivered a speech in Rocky Mountain with a number of expressions that later became part of his "I Have a Dream" speech.

     •  All of the above were drawn from the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources' Stories from Black History and This Day in N.C. History series. Check them out to learn more.

    Click here for a copy of the governor's proclamation. Click here for a copy of the governor's proclamation.


    Contact: Crystal Feldman
       govpress@nc.gov