ACKNOWLEDGING THE PAST TO BUILD
A BETTER FUTURE BY MARY NETTLES, CHATHAM COMMUNITY (EAST) BRANCH NAACP PRESIDENT
P
eople are often surprised to hear that there isn’t a written history of the Black community in Chatham County – at least, not a truthful one. There is a list of Black churches, graveyards and a resource for genealogical research at the library. Many of the African Americans in Chatham are blood related, and we share our family histories and pass them down to each new generation the African way. We know which of our ancestors were freed from bondage in 1865. The churches have their histories as well, guarded – for the most part – for protection and strength. A good deal, if not most, of our history has never been put on a printed page. Blacks had no outlets for the publishing of true histories during the period of Jim Crow white supremacy in Chatham County. Nothing published by a Black author that questioned white rule or white justice would be tolerated. Over the years, during which six Black citizens of Chatham 14
CHATHAM MAGAZINE
County – Harriet Finch, Jerry Finch, Lee Tyson, John Pattisall, Henry Jones and Eugene Daniel – were lynched, there were only white newspaper accounts of the events. No one was ever arrested, indicted or sentenced for those six murders. No Black witness would ever have been allowed to write the story from the viewpoint of the Black community. So much of this county’s history was the history of the white community, and my Black community safeguarded its history among us, the good and the bad. After freedom there was a flowering of stories, and there were excellent novels and accounts of national developments, but few of local developments. Here and there, and especially in recent years, stories have come out that throw light on the Black community’s history in the county. For Black North Carolinians, it has been a history hidden, now revealed and relevant to today’s racial challenges. In“Jim Crow in North Carolina: The Legislative Program from 1865 to 1920,” author Richard A. Paschal reminds us of the sad and often brutal history of that time
APRIL / MAY 2021
– roughly 100 years with consequences that are still with us today. “Jim Crow is still alive in North Carolina” is the subject of a column about the book by local journalist D.G. Martin, which ran in newspapers across the state. “A History of Chatham County, North Carolina, With Sketches of a Number of Its Prominent Citizens” by Walter D. Siler, written in 1931, reports the prevailing Jim Crow culture of the county in 1930s with no acknowledgement for African Americans except various references to slaves and slaveholders. The last victim of the six lynchings in Chatham County, Eugene Daniel, was kidnapped and murdered on Sept. 18, 1921, east of Pittsboro. Yet Mr. Siler quotes that North Carolina was settled by the “freest of the free; by men to whom the restraints of the other colonies were too severe.” The author pictures a white man’s world in Chatham County with no concern that the society ought to change. “Chatham County’s Inner Civil War” written by Jim Wiggins in November 2020 and published by the Chatham County Historical Association, is an excellent description of the conflict within the South