Viewing entries posted in August 2017

Students help bring new light to the Wilmington riots of 1898

In July, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center was pleased to welcome a group of middle school students from Williston Middle School and Friends School Of Wilmington. With them were writers Joel Finsel and John Jeremiah Sullivan and staff from the Cape Fear Museum, all of whom worked with the students over the past semester.  This visit was the culmination of a project for the students who had studied the Wilmington riots of 1898 and worked specifically with original copies of the Daily Record, held by the Cape Fear Museum. 

Original issues of the Record, which was the Black-owned newspaper in Wilmington in the late 1890s, are incredibly hard to find: their offices were destroyed during the riots.  (Learn more about the riots on NCpedia.)  The museum staff brought along their copies of the paper, as well as original copies of the reaction to the riots as found in both Black-owned and white-owned papers across the country.  We scanned all of the materials on site with help from UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries’ Digital Production Center staff. Students watched and got to learn more about our work.  Now all of those materials are online not only for future students to work with, but for anyone from the general public to access.  

To learn more about the students’ work, read this great article from the Wilmington Star News . As the article states: “The project is still looking for any more copies of the Record that might turn up… Anyone who finds one is urged to email dailyrecordproject@gmail.com.”

And to view more newspapers on our site, visit our newspaper site here


New partner and new yearbooks – Winchester Avenue High School from Union County Public Library

Thanks to our new partner, Union County Public Library, DigitalNC now features 3 yearbooks [1956, 1958, and 1962] from Winchester Avenue High School, which was the Black high school in Monroe, North Carolina.  Winchester first opened as a K-12 school serving the Black community in the 1920s.  It was an important institution in Monroe’s Black community, serving as a community center and point of pride for the many students who graduated from the school.  That all changed in March 1966 when a fire heavily damaged the school.  The high school students and teachers were sent to Monroe High School for the remainder of the 1965-1966 school year, making it the first fully integrated high school in the state. Though plans were already in place for the students to attend Monroe in the 1966-1967 school year, the fire forced the time table for this to speed up. It was particularly hard on some of the seniors of Winchester, who thought that they would be the last graduating class of the historic school. The extra celebrations that were being organized for the “last” class never took place. The lower grades of Winchester were able to continue the school year in the building that was undamaged as well as the gymnasium. It is also believed that the community center and some area churches housed some students.*  

 

One of Winchester’s graduates is a trailblazer whose story has been highlighted very recently, Christine Darden. Darden is a retired engineer and executive from NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA, and her story is one of the one’s highlighted in the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.”  Darden [Christine Mann is her maiden name] attended Winchester School through sophomore year before transferring to the Allen School, a boarding school in Asheville in 1956.  She served as a sophomore class officer while at Winchester. 

To learn more about our new partner, Union County Public Library, visit their partner page here.  To see more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit here.

*Thanks to Patricia Poland for additional information related to the school fire and its aftermath.


Meeting minutes and newsletters from Raleigh’s Oakwood neighborhood now online

Newsletters and meeting minutes from our new partner, The Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood, are now available on DigitalNC. The Oakwood neighborhood is located in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, and is known for its historic Victorian era housing. The neighborhood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

The digitized meeting minutes cover 1972-2001, and document various board and committee meetings of the Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood. These minutes give insight into neighborhood initiatives through the years including event planning,  building preservation projects, board elections, and fundraising.

Part of a feature on how to attract bluebirds in the July 2002 newsletter.

The digitized newsletters cover 1973-2006, and were created to keep everyone in the neighborhood up to date with local happenings. Becoming longer and more elaborate over time, the newsletters include messages from the SPHO president, event calendars, club meetings, neighborhood awards, and short articles about municipal issues. Popular annual events that are covered include the candlelight and garden tours, the neighborhood jazz brunch, the July 4th picnic and parade, and an annual pig pickin’.

Event info in the October 2002 newsletter.

To browse the collection of meeting minutes and newsletters, click here.

To learn more about The Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood, take a look at their partner page or visit their website.

 


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