HistoricSiteMarkers
Postwar & Contemporary

Freedom Rallies

Williamston, Martin County, North Carolina

Marker Inscription

Freedom Rallies. Mass meetings at Green Memorial Church for 32 days, June-July 1963, & nonviolent marches, led to the desegregation of local public facilities.

Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The Story

For 32 days in June and July of 1963, Green Memorial Church in Williamston rang with mass meetings as the local Black community organized for their rights. Out of those gatherings came waves of nonviolent marches that pressed against segregation in the town's public life. The sustained campaign forced the desegregation of local public facilities.

Why it matters

The Williamston freedom rallies were part of the grassroots backbone of the civil rights movement, where ordinary people in small Southern towns risked everything to claim full citizenship.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related events

  • ยท Williamston Freedom Movement

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Harriet Jacobs

Edenton, NC

Born into slavery around 1813 in Edenton, Harriet Jacobs endured years of abuse before escaping north, where she became a writer and abolitionist. Her 1861 memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, gave a rare first-person account of enslavement from a woman's point of view and became one of the era's most important slave narratives. She drew on her early life in this Chowan County town for the book.

Rosenwald Schools

Edenton, NC

In 1912, businessman Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington created a fund that provided matching grants to help African American communities build better schools across the segregated South. In North Carolina alone the fund aided 817 projects in 93 counties, beginning with the two-teacher Warren Grove School, completed in October 1915 about five miles northeast. Local Black families raised much of the money and labor themselves.