RESEARCH AND RESOURCE

Raleigh Black Church History…

is fascinating.  It would be too long for a blog post, so I am going to tease you with some of the article that I wrote for the Black Oak Society’s Church edition, due to come out in the next couple of weeks.

Raleigh has a formidable history in terms of the Black church.

The roots of the Black church go back into the times of slavery. While some plantation owners didn't want their slaves to know anything about religion, others wanted slaves to hear those passengers requiring slaves to obey their masters to keep fear and obedience hand in hand. Still other slave owners encouraged religious knowledge and brought it to their slaves and their slaves to the church.

In some instances, plantation owners held services on Sunday mornings at home with a traveling preacher or bits of bible reading and prayer. Other owners ventured to church services and allowed slaves to come worship and become members of an organized institution.

Many of...

Jessie Highsmith Copeland

Jessie Copeland was a woman with community spirit who fought for the rights of tenants in housing communities.  A single mother of three, she moved into Chavis Heights in 1951, remembering it as a place where residents banded together and tended beautiful gardens.  It was a safe place to raise children and families looked out for one another. 

Considered “The Mother of Chavis Heights”, she was always looking out for children and young mothers, remembering when she had been one herself.  She raised many children other than her three, in the neighborhood as well as those she nurtured as a domestic worker.

Mrs. Copeland’s community activism helped to raise awareness in Raleigh of the issues of those living in public housing who seemed to have been forgotten.  She was on the Raleigh Housing Authority’s Board of Directors for eight years, after being the first public housing resident appointed in 1974 and rising...

Blacks were interspersed among whites throughout the city, free Blacks tended to live in small enclaves reflecting segregation along racial and economic lines. Slaves were often hired out to others and could "live out" in areas of the city with families of free Blacks as well as white laborers.

Free Blacks were clustered around the city, generally occupying the cheaper tracts of land beyond the city limits, "the less desirable bottomland closer to downtown, and especially the narrow streets that bordered the railroad related industries." In areas where there was economic advancement, black leaders and middle class grew and so would churches, schools, and substantial homes. "By the 1890's, 50% of the population was Black and mature and solidly segregated neighborhoods nearly encircled the city. White attitudes were considered 'racial claustrophobia', feeling that the city was under siege by displaced Blacks.

The institutions that grew depended on the Black community for their...

Post is 2 years old (2019) and that makes it Black History!!  It went with an article from MSNBC about Gentrification.
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Listen and learn.

Yes this happens about every 50 years. My grandparents purchased a house on Bloodworth street from a white couple when they moved in the 1940's...when many African Americans were living in the county or Oberlin or Smoky Hollow. I came home from St. Agnes to Washington Terrace apartments about 8 years after they were built. Madonna Acres and Golden Acres, Biltmore Hills and Rochester Heights were built for middle class African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Desegregation of the Raleigh communities wasn't an easy thing. There were streets that became dividing lines of race and class. Streets like New Bern Avenue and Person Street. There were areas that the white middle class didn't want to live in and that the African American middle class didn't want to live in.

In the 1960s, when "Urban Renewal"...