Photograph: Philo Gaither Harbison, (center), in his grocery and general merchandise store at 128 W. Union St. Morganton, NC. He was the first Black man to own a building in downtown when he purchased it in the 1890's.
He also owned and operated a carpentry shop at the corner of South Sterling and Erwin streets.
Photograph submitted by the late Nettie Macintosh .

Hardship, hard work mark journey into modern life - Burke County Notebook
By Tammie Gercken Jul 17, 2018

There’s nothing like taking a look back to make one appreciate what previous generations endured to survive from day to day. These hardships were even more pronounced for the African-American community.

During a presentation at Western Piedmont Community College for Black History Month, Dr. Leslie McKesson, now retired dean of business, public services and academic support, shared student videos created for various classes and projects, dating back to the 1970s and 80s, documenting the lives and history of local African-Americans.

Former WPCC student Sonia Shade spoke in one of the videos about what life was like for local people of color post-Emancipation. Most former slaves turned to farming. Others had skills they used to start their own businesses.

Shade said there is evidence of five black carpenters working in Morganton by 1870. African-American men also worked as barbers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, cabinet-makers, painters, shoe-makers, well-diggers, gold-miners, carriage drivers and employees of sawmills, dairies and tanneries. Black women were employed as laundresses, seamstresses, cooks and housekeepers in hotels and private homes.

In another video, Beverly Carlton talked to senior African-Americans at the Lake James Community Center in the early 1980s on behalf of the Burke Cultural Arts Coalition, formed in 1979 to “express the need for a fuller report about African-Americans’ contributions to America,” according to McKesson. The group planned Black History Month activities to present to the community.

The interviewees, one of which was born in 1890, shared how they had to walk 5 miles to get to a one-room school when they were students in the early 20th century. The room had a small wood stove that they had to collect wood for to have heat in the winter. One woman remarked that the room stayed intolerably cold throughout the winter, despite the nearly 50 students crammed into the small space.

The school only went through the seventh-grade. This was not necessarily just because they were black, McKesson explained.

“It was very common in that time in the early 1920s for children not to go beyond the third- or fourth-grade, because they had to go to work,” McKesson said. “They had to come out of school and go into the fields to work to help support their families. Even those who were able to go as far as school could take them went to about the seventh-grade, because that’s where it stopped.”

She said the first high school in North Carolina for people of color didn’t open until 1931.

“Less than 100 years ago, there was virtually little more education than literacy – basic reading and counting – for African-American children in this area, but, to be honest, I think that was pretty much the state of education for just about everybody at that time,” McKesson said.

Next, Carlton asked the seniors in the video about their experiences during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The residents said jobs were scarce. One woman got a job washing and ironing people’s clothes for 50 cents to $1 per day. Children were still leaving school in the early elementary grades to work the fields.

Residents recalled walking all the way from the Lake James area, formerly the Fonta Flora community, to downtown Morganton for periodic food distributions. They would spend an entire day walking and stand in long lines for flour, sugar, potatoes, beans and rice. They considered themselves lucky if they were able to hitch a ride on a horse-drawn wagon either to or back from town. Sometimes the food ran out before they had the opportunity to move up to the head of the line. I can’t imagine how intense their disappointment must have been at those times.

But through it all, the African-American community worked hard and sacrificed throughout the decades to make a better life for their children and grandchildren.

“To measure progress or forward mobility, we must remember some important factors,” said the video’s narrator. “The most important thing to do, which is often forgotten, is to look or to think about where we have been. As the old cliché goes, ‘How can we know where we’re going if we don’t know where we have been?’”

Tammie Gercken is a staff writer at The News Herald and a member of the Morganton Writers’ Group.

Source: https://www.morganton.com/.../article_86d1ca34-89fd-11e8...