Freedom Hill / Princeville
Princeville, Edgecombe County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Freedom Hill. Community established here by freed blacks in 1865. Incorporated as Princeville in 1885.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
In 1865, as the Civil War ended, freed African Americans established a community here on low ground near the Tar River known as Freedom Hill. In 1885 it was incorporated as Princeville, recognized as one of the oldest towns chartered by African Americans in the United States. The settlement grew from the hopes of emancipation into a self-governing town.
Why it matters
Princeville stands as a landmark of Black self-governance and community-building in the aftermath of emancipation.
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Related events
- · Founding of Freedom Hill (1865)
- · Incorporation of Princeville (1885)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
George H. White 1852–1918
Tarboro, NC
George H. White represented North Carolina's majority-Black "Second District" in the U.S. House from 1897 to 1901, a seat carved out during Reconstruction that sent several Black congressmen to Washington. When White left office, no Black Southerner would sit in Congress again for 72 years, as disfranchisement and Jim Crow closed the door. He lived two blocks east of this spot.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Edgecombe County, NC
Long before his 1963 address at the Lincoln Memorial made the phrase immortal, Martin Luther King Jr. tried out the refrain "I have a dream" in a November 1962 speech delivered in a gymnasium just southeast of this marker. The moment captures the civil rights movement in its building years, when King crisscrossed the South refining the words that would define a generation. This eastern North Carolina stop is one of the places where that message took shape.
Operation Dixie
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In 1946 Black "leaf house" workers who graded and processed tobacco in eastern North Carolina organized to demand better pay and conditions, casting the region's first pro-union vote at a factory just west of here. The drive was part of Operation Dixie, the postwar labor campaign to unionize the South. Historians see these worker mobilizations as an early seedbed for the civil rights movement that followed.
James E. O'Hara
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