We are excited to announce that the final issues of The Carolina Timesare now available on the DigitalNC website! Our site now hosts 3,811 total issues of the Durham-based African-American newspaper spanning from 1937 to 2020. With the publication of its final issue in 2020, The Carolina Times cemented its long legacy of promoting the interests of the Black community in Durham and across the nation. Thanks to funding from UNC Libraries’ IDEA grants over the past 3 years, we have been able to complete this work and expand access to this important piece of North Carolina history.
The paper shuttered after the death of its longtime publisher Kenneth Edmonds at the age of 66. Edmonds was the grandson of founder Louis Austin. Described as “the most important voice for freedom in Durham and in North Carolina” from the 1920s through the 1970s, Austin was a staunch advocate for Durham’s Black community and a powerful force behind local voter registration and school integration efforts. His descendants continued his work, as Edmonds and his mother Vivian “didn’t miss an edition” in the 1970s, even after a fire believed to be a result of arson destroyed the Carolina Times‘s building. Read more about Louis Austin, Kenneth Edmonds, and the family’s powerful legacy here.
In its final years, The Carolina Times continued to be a voice for social justice, especially through the fraught presidency of Donald Trump and the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Below is one example of the Carolina Times’s reporting that focuses in on the experience of the Black Americans.
One exciting find in these final issues is a shoutout to none other than DigitalNC! As the below article suggests in what can only be described as a full circle moment, these uploads of The Carolina Times are invaluable to researchers, genealogists, and anyone interested in exploring local issues in Durham’s Black community.
While the closure of The Carolina Times is a loss for North Carolina and the larger Black press landscape, we are honored to make these issues available digitally and contribute to the paper’s preservation. To explore all available issues of The Carolina Times on our website, click here. For a look at other local North Carolina newspapers, click here.
One of the biggest moments of the decade? President Obama’s historic election win in 2008. Click here to revisit this incredible moment in United States’ history.
These volumes also offer commentary on a myriad of issues affecting the Black community, both in Durham and nationwide. Prominent topics range from civil rights, societal and political inequality, and police brutality. This newspaper is a rich resource for any researcher and historian.
While the paper reports on national news, it also zooms in on local culture, celebrating joy in the Durham community. Below are selected images from parades, graduations, and other community-wide events.
To explore TheCarolina Times further, click here! And to search through other North Carolina newspapers, click here.
The 1994-1999 volumes of The Carolina Times (Durham, N.C.) are now available, thanks to our partner UNC Chapel Hill. With this batch, volumes from 1937-1943 and 1949 through the rest of the 20th century are now searchable on Digital NC. Researchers can trace the evolution of this powerful voice for Durham’s Black community, which continued its tradition of advocating for accountability and equity into the 1990s.
The paper’s major concerns from the second half of the decade include police brutality, hate crimes and burnings of Black churches, and education issues — including charter schools, affirmative action, funding of HBCUs, and inequities in standardized testing. Many of the volumes reflect anxiety about the displacement of and underinvestment in Durham’s Black community in the post-“urban renewal” era. These issues and the manner in which they were addressed continues to reverberate in our present day. National news from this era includes the development of effective treatment for HIV/AIDS, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and the death of Betty Shabazz, Malcom X’s widow.
While the potential disaster of Y2K was avoided, the new millennium would bring many changes and challenges for The Carolina Times, including the retirement of its publisher Vivian Edmonds in 2002 and its ultimate closure in 2020. Future batches will document these changes and the continued prominence of The Carolina Times in North Carolina’s Black press landscape.
New issues of The Carolina Times are now available on Digital NC thanks to our partner, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The Carolina Times, based in Durham, was North Carolina’s preeminent Black newspaper from its inception in 1921 to its final publication 2020.
Recently uploaded issues cover major events of the early 1990s. These events include Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the fight to end apartheid, the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and the ensuing protests over police brutality, the AIDS crisis, the death of Thurgood Marshall and contested confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and Mae Jemison’s historic mission into space. Additionally, these issues provide insight into the concerns, local news, leaders, and social events of Durham’s Black community.
The Carolina Times‘ dedication to Black empowerment and civil rights is evident in these pages, as it has been in previous years. The many op-eds speak to the social issues of the time and are evidence of the ongoing struggle for equality in 1990s America. These newspapers are a rich resource for researchers and historians, and can be accessed here.
Digital NC has new issues of The Carolina Times thanks to our partner, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Included among the new issues is a special editorial to highlight “unique Black women.” The Carolina Times demonstrated a commitment to celebrating Black history through its frequent educational articles.
The “Unique Black Women” feature covers recognizable names, including journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), activist Rosa Parks (1913-2005), and politician Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005). The editorial also celebrates local Durham heroes, such as West End neighborhood elder and activist Constance Walker (1942-).
The editorial includes the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910-1985), a priest, scholar, lawyer, and poet who grew up in Durham, North Carolina. Dr. Murray was the first Black person to earn a Doctor of the Science of Law degree from Yale. Murray’s legal arguments were utilized to end public school segregation and advance women’s rights in the workplace.
While Dr. Murray’s impact extends around the world, their legacy is especially honored in Durham. Murray attended Hillside, a historically Black and segregated high school. They later wrote Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family about their family and the history and legacy of segregation in Durham. Today, there are now murals across the city with Murray’s image. Work like this 1983 article helps preserve Durham’s memory and honor its local leaders, making future initiatives possible.
In these recently uploaded issues, it’s clear that the paper is committed to voicing some of the experiences of Black citizens of Durham in the late ’70s and early ’80s. One way that the paper celebrates Black history is through the “Things You Should Know” Continental Features, which briefly note the accomplishments of important historic figures.
One such figure is Mary Fields, apparently the first Black woman to be a star route mail carrier on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service. As her feature suggests, she was sometimes known as “Stagecoach Mary” due to her usual mode of transportation. But Fields didn’t set up her own mail route until she was 60 years old; before that, she worked on board the first Robert E. Lee steamboat (made famous by its race on the Mississippi) and served as the forewoman at St. Peter’s, a Catholic mission in Montana. Other sources confirm that she was incredibly strong and stood around six feet tall.
Though she encountered conflicts in her life and work, Fields was beloved in the community of Cascade, Montana; the town apparently closed schools each year to celebrate her birthday, and she was sometimes exempt from rules governing women. She passed away in 1914 and was celebrated with one of the largest funerals in the town’s history.
Another, even more mysterious figure is Beatrice Johnson Trammell. This blurb has pretty much all the information available about her that can be found with cursory internet searches, and the same is true for the others connected to her in the article. But apparently, she was known well enough in 1982 for someone to include her in the series.
Thanks to funding from an IDEA grant from UNC Libraries, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is pleased to now have the full run of 1951 issues of the Carolina Times digitized. The issues from 1951 were never microfilmed, so they were not included in previous projects to digitize the newspaper which were done from film.
The Carolina Times, edited by Louis Austin from 1927 to 1971, was a paper of national significance. Targeted primarily to the African American community in Durham, the Times covered the long struggle for equal rights for all Americans. The newspaper’s motto was “The Truth Unbridled,” an accurate description of Austin’s honest and forthright depiction of racial injustice in North Carolina and beyond. It ceased publication in 2020, after just over a century of being the voice of the African American community in Durham and the wider state and South.
1951 was an pivotal year in many ways for the Civil Rights movement. It was in June 1951 that UNC finally allowed Black students admission to the school, with admission of Harvey Beech, J. Kenneth Lee, and Floyd McKissick into the law school. Headlines from the paper throughout the year speak to other efforts to integrate other institutions of higher education, the fight for better funding for Black educational institutions, and early efforts at integration of primary education institutions. Other topics, including the presence of the Ku Klux Klan across North Carolina and the violence of white supremacy, Jim Crow’s impact on all aspects of Black life, and the work of so many Black North Carolinians to fight the system are all covered throughout the year. Regular columns on education, religion, and other topics are also included in the paper, as well as Society pages, and regular news about the children of Durham that shows the moments of Black joy to be found in the community as well.
To view more Black newspapers on DigitalNC, visit our African American Newspapers exhibit. To learn more about the IDEA grant that funds diversity, equity, and inclusion work at UNC Libraries, visit here.
50 years ago on July 19, 1969 , the Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit and hours later on July 20, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module the Eagle on the surface of the moon. It was there Armstrong famously said “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” The moon landing was watched with bated breath by the entire nation, which had been engaged throughout the 1960s in an intense “space race” with the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The landing also fulfilled the promise President John F. Kennedy had made in a famous speech in 1962 that before the decade was out, America would go to the moon.
Many resources on DigitalNC show how North Carolinians celebrated the moon landing and how they viewed it in relation to the space race.
Poem written by the editor of the New Bern Mirror commemorating the moon landing
The front page of the New Bern Mirror published the Friday after the landing described how many of New Bern’s citizens were glued to their televisions to watch the grainy footage come back to Earth of Aldrin and Armstrong, starting off with “Like us, you’ll find it hard to believe, but there were New Bernians who didn’t have their television sets turned on Sunday afternoon and night.” and later referring to the event as the biggest thing since “Christ rose from the dead.” The front page spread also included a poem by the editor of the paper about the landing.
Frank Count, a well known local columnist for the Franklin Times’ take on the moon landing.
The Franklin Times had a full page spread about the landing in their July 22, 1969 issue, pulling in not only national press materials but also including a short Frank Count column stating “Me and them…we’re mighty proud of the Ask-her-naughts and we’re mighty proud to be Americans.”
Headline from the Carolina Times published after the moon landing.
Some publications took a slightly different tone; while being inspired by the scientific feat of getting to the moon, the Carolina Times, the African-American paper in Durham, noted that while it was great the United States got to the moon, on Earth there were still wars being fought, people in extreme poverty, and many other unresolved problems. The editor closed the editorial wishing for Americans to be inspired to think differently and broader now that they knew they could reach the moon. “The moon landing undoubtedly dramatized the rapidity of change in the world and may therefore encourage new approaches, new attitudes, and new policies toward contemporary problems. In a way, this great achievement focused the mind of the entire race on a single event and said to the world what Lincoln said to the American people in 1862. ‘As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must dis-enthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.'”
Introduction of the 1970 Junius Rose High School yearbook.
Showing the landing still had an impact a year later, a 1970 yearbook from Junius Rose High School in Greenville, NC compared the graduates of Rose High School to the astronauts who landed on the moon and commented on their next move to make “a giant leap” into adulthood as they leave high school behind.
This is just a small sampling of the many reactions in the newspapers in communities across the state, as well as other materials on our site related to interest in the space race and Cold War, which you can look at here. The overwhelming feeling from almost all of them is a strong pride in being American and thus a part of this great scientific achievement and a sense that now anything was possible for the country.
We love being sent or just stumbling upon, projects on the web that utilize materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.
1 Adams Alley, a house torn down during Urban Renewal in Durham. Adams Alley no longer exists as an address.
Today’s focus is on a website that’s associated with larger project at Duke called Bull City 150. Durham celebrates it’s 150th anniversary this month, so it feels appropriate to highlight this project in April. According to the website, “the mission of Bull City 150 is to invite Durhamites to reckon with the racial and economic injustices of the past 150 years and commit to building a more equitable future.” The project does this through a variety of public history methods, including the associated website that features several videos put together by students in Documentary Studies classes at Duke. Two of those videos, one on the important role of the Carolina Times and its’ long time editor, Louis Austin in Durham’s Black community, and one on the destruction of Hayti in Durham when the Durham Freeway, Hwy 147, was built, feature materials digitized by DigitalNC. We have the full run of the Carolina Times available here and many photographs and property surveys digitized for the Durham Urban Renewal Collection from our partner Durham County Library, are featured in the Hayti video.
If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it! Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out. To see past highlighted projects, visit past posts here.
The only issue we have (so far) of a Carver High School newspaper. Mount Olive, NC, May 1950.
From our estimation, DigitalNC shares more digitized historical North Carolina African American newspapers than any other source. Contributors range from our state’s HBCUs to local libraries and museums. To help pull these titles together, we created an exhibit page through which you can search and browse eleven community papers and nine student papers. There are also links to more available on other sites.
Below we’ve re-posted the essay from the exhibit, giving you a brief history of these papers. We hope that we’ll hear from others who may be interested in sharing more of these rare resources online.
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Since the publication of Freedom’s Journal in 1827 in New York City, African American newspapers have had a long and impactful history in the United States. Begun as a platform to decry the treatment of enslaved people, the earliest African American newspapers appealed to whites, who were politically enfranchised. After the Civil War, as newly freed African Americans claimed the right to literacy, the number of African American newspapers around the country grew exponentially and the editors began addressing Black people instead of whites. Papers turned their focus from slavery to a variety of subjects: religion, politics, art, literature, and news as viewed through the eyes of African American reporters and readers. Communication about Black political and social struggles through Reconstruction and, later, the Civil Rights movement, cemented newspapers as integral to African American life.
In North Carolina, the first African American papers were religious publications. The North Carolina Christian Advocate, which appears to be the earliest, was published from 1855-1861 by the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, followed by the Episcopal Methodist, a shorter-lived publication produced during the Civil War by the same organization. After the Civil War, the number of African American newspapers continued to grow in North Carolina, reaching a peak during the 1880s and 1890s with more than 30 known titles beginning during that time.
The longest running African American paper established in North Carolina is the Star of Zion, originating in Charlotte in 1876 and still being produced today. Other long-running papers in the state include the Charlotte Post (begun 1890), The Carolina Times (Durham, begun 1919), the Carolinian (Raleigh, begun 1940), Carolina Peacemaker (Greensboro, begun 1967), and the Winston-Salem Chronicle (begun 1974). Many of these long running papers powerfully documented Black culture and opinion in North Carolina during the 1960s-1970s, with numerous editorials and original reporting of local and national civil rights news.
Occasionally overlooked sources for African American newspapers are North Carolina’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and, before integration, African American high schools. You’ll find links on DigitalNC to newspapers from eight of North Carolina’s twelve current and historical HBCUs as well as two African American high schools.
While many African American newspapers have found their way into archives and libraries, it’s common to see broken runs and missing issues. You can find a great inventory of known papers from the UNC Libraries. If you work for a library, archive, or museum in North Carolina holding additional issues and would like to inquire about digitizing them and making them available online, please let us know.
This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
