Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn
This is what the world needs now: two free-thinking “seasoned” Black women speaking their truth and inspiring others to do the same. Shaped by 45 years of friendship that began at the prestigious Brooklyn Technical High School through the Ivy League, medical school, marriages, divorces, triumphs, parenting queer children, life-threatening illness and many many amazing adventures. Each week, besties Leslie Osei-Tutu and Angella Fraser will push against boundaries in love, culture, careers, faith, politics and out-dated assumptions about women of a certain age. Remember, you’re never too old to change your mind…or your hair! (but more on that later :-)All views are our own and do not reflect the views of our institution/company. Information provided is not intended to serve as medical advice.
Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn
Preserving Black History in Raleigh with Carmen Wimberley Cauthen
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What if the history of your neighborhood was being erased right before your eyes? Join Besties Angella and Leslie for an enlightening conversation with the remarkable Carmen Wimberley Cauthen, an esteemed author, historian, and activist who takes us on a journey through her personal experiences of segregation and desegregation in Raleigh, NC. While Carmen sheds light on the persistent impacts of gentrification in Raleigh, her commitment to preserving Black culture is evident in her book, "Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh," and in her extensive work with the NC General Assembly.
Discover how Carmen uses community engagement and social media to collect history and inform future progress. The episode confronts the harsh realities of gentrification and its effects on historically Black neighborhoods. She unpacks how systemic racism, Jim Crow laws, and restrictive covenants have shaped these communities resulting in limited mobility and perpetual segregation.
As Carmen continues her mission to honor Black family history and legacy, we celebrate these efforts and emphasize the need to ensure that progress does not erase the cultural and historical fabric of our communities. Join us for this powerful episode and be inspired by Carmen's dedication to historical preservation and activism.
Visit Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn website for behind-the-scenes extras.
Exploring Black History and Activism
Speaker 1Hey Ash , hey Les , how are you Trying to hold it all in trying to be professional here ? It's like we have a guest . And what a guest she is , and what a guest she is . We're going to talk about this lovely lady in a second , but I'm happy to be here , pal . Yeah , nice to see you . You look terrific .
Speaker 2I'm loving the hair , thank you . Thank you , I did it myself because I tried to give people money to braid my hair for me and they just wanted too much . They know , they , they , yeah , so I did it myself . Good , so good . Thank you , Looking nice and springy and all nice to see you .
Speaker 1Good Thank you , Looking nice and springy and all nice to see you . I'm looking a little moist . You know how I am . I'm not an air conditioned person . I turn the air condition off and I looked and it was 86 degrees here . I'm like wait a minute .
Speaker 2I got to dry up before I do this . You do have a drink , though , but that way you're still with your drink , don't they use that ?
Speaker 1They use that term for you got to get dry when you drink a lot .
Speaker 3Yeah , yeah yeah , that's true .
Speaker 1But anyway , who the heck are we ? Welcome to another episode of Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn .
Speaker 3Brooklyn .
Speaker 1And wait till you all hear who this lovely lady is . I'm going to read part of her bio , but it's long and she's done a whole lot of stuff , so we're going to get into it . But Carmen Wolverly Cawthorn's life's journey is deeply entwined with the history and evolution of her hometown , raleigh , north Carolina . Did I say it right ? You did . Finally , I say the name of that city all the time , every time , as well as with her own family's history . Born in 1959 , she experienced firsthand the transitions from segregation to desegregation and later to gentrification in Raleigh . Her educational path , from attending segregated schools like Washington Elementary to integrated institutions like Broughton High School reflects the changing landscapes of racial dynamics in the city . I'll skip .
Speaker 1Carmen delved deeper into her family history , recognizing the significance of preserving personal narratives and legacies . This exploration led her to become an author and historian , advocating for the documentation of individual stories as integral parts of collective history . Her book Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh serves as a testament to her commitment to unraveling the threads of systemic racism woven into society . Racism woven into society . There's so much more I want to read . Let me read this part . Through her experiences and advocacy , carmen Wimbley Coffin exemplifies the importance of acknowledging and understanding one's history , both personal and societal , as a means of confronting systemic injustices and fostering collective progress . Think about that for a moment .
Speaker 2Yeah , I love me an activist . I do , I do , I do .
Speaker 1And activism can look so differently in so many ways . So with all of that I bring to you Ms Carmen Wimbley Carthen .
Speaker 3Welcome . Thank you so much for having me . This is exciting . I've already loved in the background , just being with y'all . That's fun . Y'all are fun .
Speaker 2Thank you . Oh , that's so good it is . We have a lot to cover . You heard her bio . If you just take a moment to Google Carmen's name , she has at least one , I think , two pages before you see anyone else . So she is well well known . Her work is wide and deep and just someone that it would be to your benefit , beyond this conversation , for you to check out for those local folks . If you hear that she's going to be at an event , you really ought to be there Because not only her work as a researcher but her heart for Black culture , preserving Black culture , using knowledge about Black culture to change the future . Right To use that history to understand how we need to change the future . Right To use that history to understand how we need to change the future . Right , when you understand how , for example , some of these neighborhoods have changed , what led to the changes in these neighborhoods , then you have a sense of okay , these are things that I have to try to avoid as you move forward . So a part of the bio that you didn't mention is Carmen's long tenure working for the General Assembly , so it's almost like she was an infiltrator in the system .
Speaker 2I'm going to say really quickly that I have been . I'm going to say really quickly that I have been watching Carmen for years . I don't remember how I first got to know that you were someone that I absolutely admired . More recently , you put something we follow each other on Facebook . Well , I I let me say it more precisely I creep on you on on Facebook because your posts are so informative and I love that . They often don't really you don't lead with information . You're like what do you guys think about this ?
Speaker 1Yes , yes , I was looking at a LinkedIn entry and it was like a neighborhood chat .
Speaker 2I'm not always tapping in , always tapping in , and I think that's how you collect history . By the way , I don't know if that's something you do stealth , but you , you , there was something that some event that you had gone to and someone made a disparaging comment about Black folks in a certain neighborhood , and I don't know why gentrification is such an issue . It always makes the place look so much better . Why are they , you know ? Why do they want to live in filth ? Basically that , that sentiment .
Speaker 1And Carmen said huh .
Speaker 2And Carmen went in and Carmen went in . Do you remember that one and I know it's probably not something that is so uncommon for you , but like what gets you about the topic of gentrification especially ? Your book was released last year and it is all over the place historic black neighborhoods of Raleigh , so you've got
Legacy of Gentrification and Urban Renewal
Speaker 2this background . What does when someone kind of sees gentrification as something that is just this , you know , amazingly positive to me it's the new word for urban renewal . But like what ? What triggers you when you see that ? What are we missing ?
Speaker 3so , first of all , I think , um , if it wasn't white people saying it about the black neighborhoods that they've moved into , yes , it might not trick me as bad . You know , if somebody's just moving into the neighborhood and they're updating their house and they're you , you know making their yard look good , um , and they're not talking bad about their neighbors or the people who are on the street because they don't have anywhere else to go , um , it , it , it . It just pisses me off . I mean , I don't know any other way to say it and I , I can't be quiet . I can be quiet for a little while if I'm on a listserv , because I creep on some of the listservs in Raleigh that talk about you know the changes in the neighborhoods these white people have moved to , and it's like you have no idea where you have come . And not only do you come with this uppity attitude that you're bringing value to a community because of how the housing looks . You don't know what caused any of this . You don't understand the systems that were created in America . Slavery might have ended , but the systems that were there , they just figured out how to put them in the law . So it's important to me that whoever moves in whether they are people who have lived in the neighborhood for a long time , whether they're black or white , because sometimes we have black folks who are moving into black neighborhoods from out of town and they don't know . They don't know the truth about the place where they're coming , and so the maybe the white people that they are , you know , dealing with are perpetuating these untruths Got it .
Speaker 3And one thing that might have been one of the comments that I made that set me off was the city of Raleigh purchased the old DMV building , department of Motor Vehicles building . That is the last big piece of land in Southeast Raleigh and they're planning to do some things with it , and supposedly it's going to be affordable housing , but affordable housing doesn't look like what it used to . We think about affordable housing . We think about people who are at the lowest end of the economic scale who need help , but affordable housing these days is people who are making 80% of whatever the average median income in a community is , and so I'm a retired state employee . I was doing pretty good when I was working , but retirement shops that off . So I'm living off about $36,000 a year . If I just base it on my retirement salary , that's not enough to live on in Raleigh and and people who are making 80% of AMI are making 75 to $90,000 a year . Well , that's not most of us .
Speaker 3So the people who have lived in Raleigh for decades and generations , yes , On little or nothing , raised their families in these little houses , on these little lots . And even when I started doing the research for the book , I had to go all the way back to my childhood , because we moved to a white neighborhood when I was maybe 10 , between nine and 10 . And I asked my mom why did we move there ? And she said we would have had to buy two lots in Southeast Raleigh in order to get the kind of house we wanted . So what did that mean ? And when you're a kid you don't care , you just want the answer to your question . And so as I started researching the Black neighborhoods , I realized that after the Civil War ended , the real estate developers back then because they have always been here , the real estate developers back then because they have always been here they took land or sold land for people who owned estates and plantations and divided it into little , tiny , narrow lots to cram as many Black homes in as they could , or poor people's homes , because you came out of slavery . Some people had money , but it wasn't much and most didn't , so they were not necessarily buying land , they were leasing homes . So when we look at shotgun homes which are reminiscent of Yoruba houses in Hayti or West Africa . Those are the kind of houses that people were raising their whole families in three rooms , you know , one door , one door , one door . But that's how the land was platted . And I'm sure this is not just raleigh , this is other places .
Speaker 3So if the land was platted in little tiny narrow lots for the people who were poor or the people who had come out of slavery on one side of town , that's not what the white people had . They could buy whatever size lots they wanted , and they were generally a half an acre , a quarter of an acre , an acre , an acre and a half , I see . And and people were not necessarily segregated . When these neighborhoods first started , you lived where you could afford to live , but then by 1900 , we had Jim Crow laws that said you can't move out of this , you can't move into these nicer neighborhoods , because nicer neighborhoods would have subdivision covenants and the covenants would not allow black people to move in right . So you couldn't move out of these little tiny narrow lots . You were stuck . You were stuck . It didn't matter how much money you were making , you were still stuck , and so people don't understand that . So you .
Speaker 2You mentioned , carmen , people who did not have a lot of money , which included poor white folks , but now they could move . They could move , but they were white Right Got it yeah .
Speaker 3As they began to make money . Or , you know , grow , grow their businesses or whatever they were doing . They could move and blacks could not . And so , even though the federal law changed in 1948 , you still had these covenants that were written into subdivision creations and so they couldn't move . Or you had Fannie Mae . You had federal government housing loan programs that wouldn't allow for Blacks to move into these neighborhoods . And you can go and look . A lot of people have deeds that still have this information written into their deeds , because it wasn't taken out when the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968 . It just was made illegal .
Speaker 3So you know , that's why my parents ended up moving to a white neighborhood . The three black neighborhoods that had larger properties had all been sold by the time they got married , so they moved to this neighborhood and so then I ended up . You know the only one , my brother and I he was four or five and I was nine or 10 are in this white neighborhood , and my parents lived there for 40 years . So you know I grew up very much alone . Not that people were really nasty to me , not . You know , the kids in school were fine , but , like the first day of school , I go to school and there's four white girls sitting around me . And the second day I go to school and there's four empty desks because their parents pulled them , put them into private schools . So those were the kind of things that I this is living history .
Speaker 1This is very much living history . These are things written in the books that they're trying to take away from the libraries , that we're not supposed to see or talk about . Right , lest someone be offended .
Speaker 2Carmen is not 105 years old , right .
Speaker 3Carmen will be 65 next month .
Speaker 2You know what I mean . This is so , this idea of- .
Speaker 1This is right now , right now .
Speaker 2This is right now , exactly , exactly the effects of it . For sure , for sure . Carmen , your book is so well researched . I was watching it was one of the libraries that interviewed you during Women's History Month I'm imagining it was last year . I think it was a state library , yeah , and you have the receipts , like maps and deeds , and you know kind of the before and after , aerial views and things like that . Let let's ask this question first what led you to do this research and write this book ? And then , how , how did you decide what to you know kind of the narrative around it , how did that kind of form Well , I'm , I've been an affordable housing advocate for a long time .
Speaker 3I've been an affordable housing advocate for a long time and so in 2019 , I was asked . The city of Raleigh was planning . There was a housing bond an affordable housing bond on the ballot , and I was part of a group of people who were opposing it because there wasn't enough money in the bottom buckets for people who were at 30% of AMI or less .
Uncovering Raleigh's Freedmen's Villages
Speaker 3And we were doing a series of conversations and I was asked , because I was the elder , if I would talk about , you know , what I knew about Raleigh . And at some point I'm I'm I will admit to being a hoarder , an information hoarder , and I'm trying to break free of being a stuff hoarder , but I am an information hoarder . So if I find something that I think might be useful one day , I hide it in my computer somewhere , and I had found a couple of master's theses by two white men from the 1980s , one of which talked about the Black neighborhoods in Raleigh and I thought I mean they had names and he said that they were freedmen's villages , so these were places that were created after the Civil War ended , and I thought , well , it's interesting . So I stuffed it in the computer and the other one talked about politics and elections . So I went back and pulled the information that I had found and used that to talk about these freedmen's villages because they , you know , for the most part they don't exist . We don't know that those are those communities anymore . Some of the names have disappeared . And so when I did that , later on a young lady at one of the TV stations reached out to the organization that I was involved with and said she wanted to know more about these freedmen's villages because she does a history segment . So she did the history segment and the Museum of History asked her to speak and talk about it . And she called me and she said the only thing I know is what you told me , so will you speak with me ? And I was like sure .
Speaker 3And we did a presentation right at the beginning of COVID , and 30 minutes after the presentation I had an email from the editor that I worked with asking me to write a book . And I and that's you know , that's still on the back burner . But finally I thought , well , I guess somebody needs to tell this . So so I did , and then I had to really dig some of the information that makes the book so rich was a series of oral history interviews that were done by the Raleigh Historic Districts Commission in creating a book that was really about the architecture of the Black neighborhoods and it was called Culture Town . It came out in 1992 , and it's not ever been reprinted . But um transcripts , I thought they'd be digitized . You know we've gone over into this technology age and I found four . One of them was the oral history that was done for clarence leitner , who was our one and only Black mayor for the city of Raleigh from 1973 .
Speaker 3His transcript was 47 pages long . Just imagine how much information there was . And the other ones that I found were 30 to 35 pages long . And this book is a little skinny book and there may be three or four paragraphs out of each person's transcript talking about these neighborhoods . So I knew that the transcripts were supposed to be at the Black Library but they weren't . So I reached out to the former librarian and it took her about six months to find the transcripts .
Speaker 3Oh my goodness , and it's such a treasure trove of information . I mean down to one neighborhood . It talks about what trees and fruits and things were planted in people's backyards . It tells stories about , you know , different people in their lives and what was really neat for me was they had interviewed 74 elders , most of whom are deceased , and I knew almost all of them . So that was just a personal treasure trove for me . But then there was so much information for me to go in there and pull out the bibliographies from the two master theses . I was able to go back and find some of those books that go way back into the 1800s and I like to write . I like to write and I'm the old school you know . I learned back . You know , when you did the index cards , you wrote the information that you pull on the front . On the backside you put the name of the book and the page number you got it from and that , and then I would sit down and read or put the index cards in order to write the story Got you .
Speaker 2Wow . So were these homes built by ? Were they kind of constructed and people moved in ? Or did people get a lot and build their own homes ? There were both .
Speaker 3There were both . There are still some of those old homes surviving . When I do a tour , I tell people about a house that's on Edenton Street , going up to the origin , one of the original streets that was the city boundary , and I tell about the house and the lady who lives in . It is the granddaughter of the man who he and his wife , bought the lot and built the house . Seven dollars a month for the mortgage .
Speaker 3And there were , you know there were real estate companies that were black . There were trust companies and they would buy the land and then they would , people would buy shares in their trust company , and so that would be how they would be able to pay for financing . And so just there's so much . And then you can see how the systems were created the systems for neighborhoods , the systems for education , because I found out about schools that I didn't know had existed in the community , as I was University and St Augustine's University , and the Black middle class grew up in between those two , because people would build around where , or they would try to live around where they were , and so their schools would be there , their churches would be there , there'd be a whole community in , you know , in each area . So it was just fascinating to me , yeah .
Speaker 2Yeah area , so it was just fascinating to me .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , les , I'm going to let you in after this one .
Speaker 2So I've always been interested in Zora Neale Hurston and last night I was fortunate enough to find this amazing documentary about her , her work as an anthropologist .
Speaker 2I never connected her with cultural anthropology at all , it was more as a novelist . But and something that was quite controversial when she said it , but when the I think it was Brown v Board of Education , the separate but equal when that ruling came down that that was unconstitutional , she talked about just to kind of not even paraphrase , but the general idea of it was that desegregation didn't or wasn't going to , was going to be more negative than positive . Right , because for one you know why would I want to be around people who don't want to be around me ? And the way that I've kind of come to think about that statement . You just mentioned that there were Black real estate companies and things like that . When we lived in a segregated society , black people could have those types of that's where Black wealth was formed , because Black people spent money with Black people and we took care of ourselves Exactly and we took care of ourselves .
Speaker 1So that wasn't diluted . Or it was only until later that people looked in on these communities and societies and businesses and became threatened or jealous and said wait a minute , we can't have this , we they're . They're doing better than we are , or whatever the case may be .
Speaker 2Like in Tulsa , and then burn it down . Yeah .
Speaker 1Yeah ,
The Importance of Preserving Family History
Speaker 1yeah . So what I was going to ask about when you were speaking about the formation of these communities is the erasure of this information . Is the erasure of this information , and how much , how deep you had to go to first to find this information ? And these are people , lives and decades of whole communities . You know this is not some corner of some um , um little . You know area by the creek . You know um , so the question yeah yeah
Speaker 3the question that erasure is um , and , and it's just getting worse . You know it's just getting worse , and what I'm thankful about is that I found facts to back up what I had to say . So it's not my opinion . This is truth , and if it's whether your truth or not , these interviews were the truth of the lives of the people that were interviewed , and so that's important , because nobody can take your truth away from you .
Speaker 2Exactly , Exactly . You know they can .
Speaker 3They can take something that didn't happen to you . That didn't but I . And then I went back and was able to find these maps and I just stumbled on that too . I stumbled on the fact that the a previous register of deeds , someone had found old historical maps and they digitized them and that had not been done very long before I I started writing the book . So I can , you can go to the wake county register of deeds and put in . You just have to put in h before the the maps dates , and it will populate with these old maps . And then the h is what this ? What does the h ? The h means that they're historical because they they didn't have these original maps at one point . Wow , they had been lost , right .
Speaker 3And and when you think about how ? How does stuff get lost ? You know I've since heard about people who worked for a city or a county being part of being told to just throw that stuff away . It's not any good . And you know things are in storage in most places . They're not necessarily out and they're not all digitized . So you know who makes those decisions about what we're going to throw in the trash and what we're going to , you know , get rid . Of it's not always us .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's most often not us .
Speaker 2Right , like a quick segue around that , right , yeah , specifically where data is scrubbed , right ? So there's some person , some process designed by people , that determines what is useful and what is not useful , right ? I mean , just on the basic thing , um , uh , filler words may not be useful , you know , um , but to me , like that is a scientific way of erasing valuable stuff , depending on who is creating the systems to do that .
Speaker 2And they could just fell swoop say , oh , that's not important . Yeah , yeah , you know , if you say the engineer versus this engineer , that's a difference , right it ? Is a big difference . But those words like the say the engineer versus this engineer , that's a difference .
Speaker 1Right , but those , those words like that and make it lost . Sure . And then the significance of it . It's the saying when the hunter is speaking the lion story will never be told .
Speaker 2Yes , good one , that's a good one .
Speaker 3Yeah , you know , it's so important to me that , um , that we take care of our family history , because one of the things that really I don't know why this jumped out at me this past January , but our history in America has been compiled and told by people who could , number one , read and write , and , number two , people who were doing that reading and writing to take care of their economic means , and that means it was white men , and so everybody else . You know , there might have been a few women , there might have been a few black , there might have been a few Native Americans , but primarily our history was written by and from the point of view of white men .
Speaker 1So we all need to tell our stories , that's the point of the written , the spoken , the spoken history . That is a part of why this podcast exists .
Speaker 2I'm telling you that was intentional , that was a desire that I had to give voice to people who look like us , who think like us , who you know . Let's put it out there in the ether , just like everyone else's voice . Our voices and the things that matter to us are important too , like this topic that matter to us are important too , like this topic . This is stuff that we've seen oh so much gentrification in our hometown of Brooklyn , new York . My firstborn lives there and you go and it's like where Brooklyn at , it's like where Just this . And it's not against progress , but , as you're saying , carmen , it is understanding things in the context of history . Right , yeah , you may be fixing up dilapidated buildings , but if what is put in its place is no longer affordable by the people who used to live there , that's a problem .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2That's a problem . You know what I mean . It's not like we're against progress . Yeah , when do those people go ? I mean our new apartment complexes are hotels . Yeah .
Speaker 3Yeah , and because you can't afford to come up with 500 , I mean $5,000 before you move into an apartment . Yeah , that's crazy .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's crazy .
Speaker 3We sold our house in the Oberlin community . We had lived there for 30 years . We bought it for tax value 20 years ago and the tax value then was $65,000 . The tax value when it was revaluated in January was $507,000 . My mortgage went from $400 a month when we first bought the house to $1,200 a month , and when we sold the house and we didn't get the 500,000 for it , they flipped it and it's back on the market for $840,000 . Oberlin was a three-person village started in 1858 .
Speaker 3Wow , and there are less than 10 Black families that can afford to live there now and if nothing else , even if you can afford to keep it , you know , if you're an elder and you're on your retirement income or your social security income , you can't afford to pay the taxes .
Speaker 1It's the taxes yeah , house could be paid off . Yeah , but it's the taxes that get you , and we see that so much in brooklyn . Um , wow , yeah , you know , homes that have been in families for a generation or two then becomes lost .
Speaker 3Right . You know , for sure to value those things , to help take care of them or to help pay the taxes . It's a different mindset for a couple of generations now because they're struggling or they don't see the value of it . And I think about , you know , even to my grandparents down at the farm . I remember when my mom would tell me about how they went down there and they were cleaning up grandma's house so they burned clothes and papers and I'm like wonder what you got rid of .
Speaker 1Wonder what you got lost Wow .
Speaker 2Yes .
Speaker 1Wow , yes , but again these things wait . Yeah , thanks again . Speak to the importance of speaking about things and educating the people around you , your family members , and sharing these stories . I was fortunate enough to grow up with not only my grandparents but my great grandparents , so I grew up with family stories around me . But I was listening to a few programs on the radio recently in light of the awful decision from the Oklahoma Supreme Court about the Tulsa massacre victims , several of which are still alive and trying to and waiting for their Justice , justice , justice , and thus far it's failing , but the fight is not over .
Speaker 1A younger woman who describes how her now deceased great grandparent would frequently tell stories of what happened and over the years , as a child , she did what I've done many times . It's like oh Nana , you told me that already . Oh Nana , you told me that already , not really even knowing if the stories are true . You told me that already . Oh Nana , you told me that already , not really even knowing if the stories are true . You told me that already . And her great great grandmother once said to her I know it , but I I'm going to keep telling you so that you keep it in your head . And then this person went and did some research and found the papers , the proof of what her great grandmother had been telling her as she grew as a child and said wow , it was really true . And this is why Because not everybody's going to do the digging that you did , carmen Not many communities have lost
Honoring Black Family History and Legacy
Speaker 1. I mean , we can talk about Wilmington , we can talk about Tulsa , we can talk about all these things , but talked about their family .
Speaker 3They talked about the history . They talked about the fact that they had not been enslaved . The family had Indian in its background . On the other hand , my father's family didn't talk about it , and so I'm just beginning to find information about that side of the family . But it's so important when the elders start to speak , if they are still around , that we take out those little handy dandy computers that we walk around with in our pockets and record that stuff and then write it down . So I teach people to just dig back in the memories and write down . I have prompt cards that I have for people to write . So we will work together . And I have a couple of clients who have completed books one in Virginia , just about her great grandparents that she remembered you know living with , and so she wants to be sure that her great-grandchildren have the story . So she's done a really small little book that we're publishing , um just for them , so they'll have pictures and history um and another client
Speaker 3another client who actually has a historic home in the Oberlin community and found out that her family was enslaved at the Stagville plantation , which is in Durham , which encompassed 30,000 acres of land stretched from Durham all the way over to Raleigh , and the Oberlin community was created out of that . It was the largest plantation east of the Mississippi and and you know people don't know I mean people don't know that there's , there were , uh , during the depression , that some of the WPA funds went to pay people who were writers and they traveled around 17 states and wrote down the stories of people who had been enslaved . So there are 17 volumes of the WPA slave narratives . A lot of people don't know that their family was , some of their family members were interviewed and that is in the Library of Congress and those are printed and they find these things out .
Speaker 1I need to write that down .
Speaker 3Yes , so there are 17 states . North Carolina has two volumes of that .
Speaker 2Wow , Carmen .
Speaker 3this is one of so many things that you offer and how people can can reach you to get you all of this expertise and and just deep intellectual prowess around this . How could they work with you ? So I do have a website , it's researchandresourcecom . I teach , I do a series of workshops on creating your family history . If you want to just learn how to start to dig , I teach that . If you want to go as far as these young ladies that I mentioned earlier , who we did six months of workshops and they had a book printed by the time that was completed , I do consulting work . I will take , do oral histories for organizations and have those transcribed and figure out where where those can be placed . I speak , I'm working on the next book and still going to be fighting the powers to be still fighting the powers to be .
Speaker 3That one's coming . I'll tell you about mom , but the book that I'm working on next is based out of Mount Hope Cemetery , which is in Raleigh . It was a cemetery so when Raleigh was created and it was created by the state legislature to be the capital . So they bought land and created the capital in the middle and then a one mile boundary out from the capital was are the original boundaries of the city of Raleigh and as one of the things they created it was the city cemetery , which had four acres two acres that are specified in the law for white people , one acre for people who died here but were not from here , and then one acre for people of color that filled up . You could drive by that cemetery and you see the front of it on New Bern Avenue and it's full of headstones . That third acre has headstones , but that fourth acre only has about 20 headstones in it and there are probably 2,000 people buried there and they were people who were enslaved . It's where Anna Julia Cooper is buried , but so during that period of time , during Reconstruction , there were a number of Black state legislators and that book is on the back burner . I'm still researching on that , but one of them , stuart Ellison , authored a bill that would create Mount Hope Cemetery , which was a cemetery that was created and paid for by the city of Raleigh for Black people in 1872 . It's on the National Historic Register and when you walk through there it is a treasure trove of who built the city , whether they were teachers or architects or doctors or the Leitner family that was , you know , politicians and men and women . My elders or my grandparents are buried there . So this is going to be a story of who built the city that was Black .
Speaker 3I have a collaborator who takes those WPA slave narratives . He goes back and finds the plantations that these people , that they were enslaved on , and then he finds their history and brings it forward and then he will reach out and try to find someone from their family and share this history with them . He's probably done this with a couple of hundred people . So there will be a separate section of the book that tells the story that was in the slave narrative and then tells the history of those families as well , and I'm really excited it should be be out , I believe , january 2026 . So we are still doing some research and getting ready to write that story , but there is a story , there is a book coming about my mother , I , I am intending to honor her next April 25th , which would be her , I believe , 94th , 95th birthday , and I'm going to host a dinner honoring Black women in Raleigh from the 1800s forward , because we , our stories , have not been told .
Speaker 3We have done so much to hold up our communities , our men , our children , the white folks , children , and you know everybody , and we just haven't been honored , and so my goal is to honor women . This will be a big dinner . I don't know if you all remember Oprah's Legends legends , yes , yes , but that's . I've got a list of legends and a list of youngins about 150 names on the list . Oh , my goodness growing um .
Speaker 2You need to add our names on the youngins list I will add y'all do not like her , but the gift , but I would that would be such an honor to attend .
Speaker 3The gift for people who come to this dinner will be a book about these women .
Speaker 2I want it to be an interactive thing .
Speaker 3So I'll have some , you know , slides and all kinds , whatever I can find . And I'm also doing coloring books because it's important for our youth to know . So I finished one , um , that is also . It's a , it's really for like fifth grade , through adults , but it's a book of puzzles and coloring and history . Um , I'm getting ready uh I got some artwork coming in to do the second one and then I'm hoping to do some stuff on the revolutionary war and black soldiers .
Speaker 2Oh , my god the revolutionary war .
Speaker 3I am um .
Speaker 1I love your head must be like swirling , do you ?
Speaker 3it spins . Sometimes it looks like one of those creatures . And I'm a night owl on top of that because I'm retired , so trying to do things during the day is difficult , but that's when the library is open , so oh man you have to before we run out of time , because we're really running out of time .
Speaker 1But I have one other question . With all of the information that you disseminate , I mean I'm like soaking it in and I'm so appreciative and I'm just thinking of this wealth of information that you carry . Have you gotten any pushback about it ? Or people who said you know , this is history . Why are you bringing up all of this stuff ?
Speaker 3I have not gotten any pushback , or it could be because people know I will push back if you push back . So maybe they don't tell me anything to my face .
Speaker 3But I've been really pleased with the , especially with how people have reacted to the book . I didn't expect a lot . It sold out on Amazon in three days and I just I , I , every time I go and talk , I mean I will say you know , white people get overwhelmed because when I'm talking I'm telling all the systems , all the things that are different I talk about . You know even differences in terms of how our the bridges are built on the highway . You know what side , what side of town , gets the nice ones and what side of town has to ask to get one . You know these systems . For me that's the biggest thing .
Speaker 3We keep patching , we keep patching stuff and we really need to go back and dig all these systems up at the root and create them so that they are equitable , Because you can't fix something that you don't take the . You know , when you got an infection , you got to clean the infection out before you put the antibiotic on it .
Speaker 1That's right . Cut it out , yeah . So to say these people , they just don't take care of their things and they didn't .
Speaker 3They weren't making money , they were
Learning From Black Elders
Speaker 3doing the best they could .
Speaker 2People these people , girl .
Speaker 1That , just that just starts me up . I want to go two words together around you .
Speaker 3Yeah that's not a good one oh man Carmen , we appreciate you , Thank you .
Speaker 2Thank you for having me .
Speaker 3I enjoyed it . I feel like I got new besties .
Speaker 2Oh , yes , welcome to the club . Welcome to the club . Welcome to the club . This was amazing . I look forward to all the things that you're doing because , I am right , I did move to Durham , but you know I'm not far away , so I just anything that is going on , we will take action in letting our listeners know about them , and so please keep us in the loop .
Speaker 3I was just there last Sunday . Oh yeah , so North Star Church honored Virginia Williams who was one of the Royal Ice Cream protesters in 1957 , june 23rd 1957 . And there were six , seven young , young folk who walked into the royal ice cream parlor through the back door that said colored only , and they walked straight through to the front of the parlor and sat down and asked for ice cream and that was the whites only section and eventually were arrested and it went . They appealed from a $10 court cost and fines to $433 in court costs and fines , appealing all the way to the Supreme Court who denied to hear them because there was a law in place that was allowing for segregation . And this was before the Greensboro , the Woolworths sit in .
Speaker 2The Greensboro . So , yes , wow , wow , okay , les , I know , I know .
Speaker 1It's just more to learn , and I think it also informs us that we need to listen and appreciate when we hear stories from our elders and seek out information , even if others tell you it's not the right thing to do or if it's not important or things like that . This is our history and I think that we would walk a little bit differently through this world if we knew some of it , some more of it and , you know , let the elders take a role .
Speaker 2You know , I'm leaning into my eldership now and we can talk . We can talk before someone says say what , what tell us about ? We can do the telling without being being asked , right , I mean , we , we , we know what we know and so , um , I think , if both sides um take action , we'll be um well on our way , um . Thank you again , carmen , thank you .
Speaker 1Thank you for having me . We really really appreciate it . Wow , rich , rich . This has been another rich episode of Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn , brooklyn .
