In 1909 Raleigh native Dr. James E. Shepard (1875-1947) founded the school that would become North Carolina Central University. Shepard, educated at Raleigh’s Shaw University as a pharmacist, originally envisioned a Bible school to train Sunday school teachers and missionaries. The mission of the school was expanded to include agricultural, horticultural, and domestic science courses—concessions […]
Durham attorney C. Jerry Gates argued at the North Carolina Central University Law School’s founding in 1939 that having black faculty “would have gone a long way in disabusing the average Negro’s mind of the popular notion that the Negro can’t serve in such capacity and to a great extent that he is prohibited from […]
The Eno River’s fate might have been very different had it not been for the actions of “the indomitable, articulate, and deceptively soft-spoken” Margaret Nygard (1925-1995), a transplanted Englishwoman teaching at Durham Technical Community College. In the late sixties and early seventies, the City of Durham had plans to use the Eno to make a […]
Louis Austin was editor and publisher of Durham’s historically black newspaper, The Carolina Times. He was a forceful spokesman for black rights decades before the Montgomery Bus Boycott or Brown v. Board of Education, and in a time when the Ku Klux Klan was an active threat. Originally sports editor for the Standard Advertiser in […]
Asheville native Floyd B. McKissick (1922-1991) was a lawyer, businessman, and civil rights leader. He was the first black student to be admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law and started his own law firm in 1955. Clients included the first black undergraduates to attend UNC-Chapel Hill in 1955, […]
Asheville native Floyd B. McKissick (1922-1991) was a lawyer, businessman, and national civil rights leader. He was in school at Morehouse College in Atlanta when World War II began. In 1942 he enlisted in the army and married another Asheville native, Evelyn Williams. Most of his army time was spent at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, […]
William A. Marsh, Jr., is a Durham attorney who used his legal skills to advance Durham’s movement for civil rights. Marsh was central to the school desegregation lawsuit proceedings when African-American families who had submitted 225 requests for reassignment to white schools and had only eight of these approved for the 1959-60 school year, turned […]
Philanthropist Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans (1920-2012) was born into a family known for its philanthropy. Her great-grandfather was tobacco manufacturer Washington Duke, a benefactor of Trinity College (now Duke University) and supporter of numerous other good causes. Her grandfather Benjamin Duke was looked to by his brother James B. and his father to direct […]
In 1951 Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans (1920-2012), philanthropist and granddaughter of Benjamin Duke, became one of the first two woman elected to the Durham City Council. She served two terms, stepping down in 1955. From 1953-55 she was mayor pro tempore. The Herald-Sun described Semans as an assertive, prudent, and empathetic councilwoman: As a […]
Tobacco merchant J. W. Cheek became Durham’s mayor in the town’s first elections in 1869. The post was then titled “magistrate of police.” The young town was plagued by a reputation as a “rough and brawling place,” a haven for “the shiftless of society,” so the first priority of Cheek and Durham’s inaugural government was […]
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