Robert Lee Vann

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.

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.

Williamston, NC

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.

Halifax County, NC

James E. O'Hara (1844–1905) was an African American political leader who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1883 to 1887 and practiced law in nearby Enfield. He was among the last generation of Black congressmen from the South before disenfranchisement closed that door for decades. He lived a short distance to the south.