Wading through so much area history: Oral histories, documents, vintage images, has given me a strange kind of double vision. Now as I drive around Southeastern NC I see what is in front of me, but with an overlay from the past. I can't drive down Market Street in Wilmington without thinking about the fact that this beautiful street, with its graceful canopy of trees, led to a center of human misery, the slave market. I can't see the elegant historical homes without thinking about the many African Americans, both enslaved and free, who crafted them. When I drive past fields of tobacco in western Pender County I think of my elderly friends who worked from the time they were toddlers, first picking bugs off tobacco and corn by hand, then toiling with a hoe in the summer sun in an endless battle against weeds. 

As one woman who grew up in a sharecropping family said to me, "It was hot, so hot, but you could not stop. You had to work and work and work." Her father died when she was young, leaving her mother to look after ten children and continue the family's sharecropping agreements. This woman has her own double vision, because even today she sees the descendants of the landowners living a comfortable life, but often the landowner would come to her mother after the crops were sold and say "You didn't make nothing, I didn't make nothing...." And, as she told me, the family "had worked all the year and had nothing to show for it. We knew the man lied..."

When I drive past one of the many surviving Rosenwald school buildings in Pender County, I think about the sacrifice the communities made to build and maintain schools. How laborers and sharecroppers who might have made 50 cents per day, on average, gathered hundreds of dollars for school building and also gave freely of their time. How families took turns putting the teachers up in their homes, and how the whole community would turn out for spelling bees, concerts, and plays. Against a backdrop of unjust laws, thousands of black students took their first steps toward a better life in our local Rosenwald schools. I think about the legacy of the commitment to service that is alive and well today-- you can see it in the volunteers at the hospitals, in the schools, at the polls and in the churches.

The regional impact of the African American school building movement, which began during Reconstruction and included many types of schools in addition to Rosenwald schools, was enormous and still echoes today. Preserving Rosenwald school buildings is an important way to acknowledge local African American communities' commitment to education, as well as their huge contributions to our region.