Ammie McRae Jenkins, the first Black student to attend High Point University, spent much of her life protecting the rights of Black landowners. She Worked to Preserve Black History in the Sandhills. Now Her Legacy Continues.

by Trey Nemec / CityView News - February 8, 2026

Ammie McRae Jenkins, the first Black student to attend High Point University and an activist who dedicated much of her life to preserving land owned by Black families in the North Carolina Sandhills, died on October 25. She was 84.

“She was a genius,” Larry Dobbins, a member of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association, said of Jenkins, who founded the organization in 2001. Dobbins’ hand rested on a cane as he spoke about Jenkins, who was a few grades ahead of him at Anne Chesnutt High School, which served Black students during segregation.

After high school, Jenkins in 1962 became the first Black student admitted to High Point, a private university in Guilford County. In a 2023 short documentary, Jenkins recalled how people pelted her with spitballs and called her racial slurs as she walked through campus. But she kept going. “You’re not going to bother me by just calling me a name,” Jenkins said. “So I wasn’t afraid.”

But things changed for her when President John F. Kennedy, a strong advocate for the Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated in 1963.
“We were in the classroom, and an announcement had come through that Kennedy had been shot,” Jenkins recalled. She said some students cheered, and she was shocked that anyone would “rejoice in the death” of a president.

“That is the first time I felt fear,” Jenkins said.

She left school and built a successful career as a computer programmer and businesswoman.

But her High Point University story wasn’t over yet. The school awarded Jenkins an honorary degree in 2019, five decades after she first enrolled.

STOLEN LAND
Jenkins, whose great-grandfather was an enslaved person, grew up on a farm in Harnett County, just outside of Spring Lake on land now enveloped by Fort Bragg.

“Everything grew wild. Everything grew in abundance,” Jenkins recalled of her family home in a 2008 interview with The News & Observer.

Following the death of her father in 1954, Jenkins’ family endured intimidation and fear tactics from local white people—a story all too familiar during that time.

Following the end of the Civil War, Black Americans quickly began acquiring land. By 1910, Black farmers owned more than 16 million acres, according to the American Bar Association. But 90% of that land was lost by 1997, taken from families through violence and discriminatory practices by banks and the government.

“We didn’t leave because we wanted to,” Jenkins said in a 2007 interview with Under-told Stories, an international journalism project. “My mother didn’t know that people were working behind the scenes to take the land. So, we lost all of that.”

Jenkins said her family was never paid for the property.
“Lost by whatever means,” Dobbins said. “By hook or by crook, as we say in the country.”

The loss of her family’s property spurred Jenkins’ mission to protect Black-owned land.

The nonprofit Sandhills Family Heritage Association runs on a mission of H.O.P.E.—heritage, outreach, preservation of land, and economic empowerment. The group has worked with local law students in the past to host estate planning clinics, and it has expanded programming to include historical tourism opportunities, financial literacy, and health and wellness programs, and a theater group called the Sankofa Players.

PRESERVING THE PAST
The organization also operates the Spring Lake Farmers Market, a key part of its mission to promote entrepreneurship in the area, board member Janet Brower told CityView.

The organization acquired the Spring Lake Civic Center—a once-dilapidated building on Chapel Hill Road that once served as a key meeting place for Civil Rights activists in the 1960s—in a 2009 handshake deal, Brower said. Bringing new life to the building would be a tremendous task.

Repairs are still underway, and the goal is to transform the space into a community center and museum that will house historical artifacts and stories collected by Jenkins. The Sandhills Family Heritage Association has spent about $330,000 on the project so far, and remaining renovations are expected to cost about $150,000.

The association is the protector of several historical sites, including a brush arbor in Spring Lake. Brush arbors are small wooden structures, usually deep in the woods, where people who were enslaved gathered to practice their faith.

“It was a place they felt safe to worship,” Brower said.

The group maintains a portion of the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road, a stretch of flattened wooden posts that served as a roadway spanning almost 130 miles from the Market House in downtown Fayetteville to Forsyth County.

The organization also cares for the Deerfield Cemetery in Spring Lake. Myron Jones, who serves on the association’s board, said the cemetery was once part of a nearby plantation. Though the process is slow and painstaking, the association is working to clean up and maintain the cemetery and identify the people who rest there. Board members say the goal is to remove over 100 tree stumps from the area.

In November, the Sandhills Family Heritage Association and Sankofa Players presented The Chair, a one-act play written by board member Tonya Brinkley. The play reflects on the concepts of truth, healing, heritage, and the power in everyday stories.

The troupe dedicated the performance to Jenkins.

“Without her vision, determination, and faith,” the glossy page of the program read, “the Sandhills Family Heritage Association would not exist.”

Brower recalled visiting the land Jenkins once called home, where only a chimney remains of the house. Even then, Jenkins was determined to preserve history.

“She was saying, ‘See if you can find something that we can take back,’” Brower said. They left that day with a pile of rocks and an old shoe.

“She wanted to preserve the stories of the elders,” Brower said. “Those stories needed to be recorded, and they needed to be preserved for future generations.”

With the stories she collected, Jenkins independently published her book Healing From the Land in May 2021, adding the title “author” to a lifelong list of accomplishments and legacy.

WHITE-WASHED HISTORY
Some members of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association say the history of the region has been whitewashed. They say the sanitization of historical accounts—and erasure of Black narratives—paints an inaccurate picture of the area and skews the lens from which we view the past.

“It has a snowball effect because you’re starting out with a small lie, which grows to a big lie,” Jones said. “You’re going to have people that will never change their minds once they hear it. So at that point, it’s distorted.”

Board member Debra Clyde said she read a book about the history of Spring Lake and was shocked that it failed to mention the name of any Black people until the section about the 1970s. “It wasn’t just washed over,” she said. “It was buried.”

Dobbins said that when inaccuracies in history come from people in power, they become almost “gospel for folks.”

“You can destroy it, white-wash it, and then the attempt is to start all over again,” he said. “I pray to God that never happens.”

A LEGACY CONTINUED
Members of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association say they will take their time to find a new executive director.

The group’s members gathered around a table in early December, reflecting on what it means to continue Jenkins’ work and legacy as a mother, grandmother, author, historian, trailblazer, and fierce protector of Black voices.

“She laid a great foundation. She’s gone now, at no fault of anybody. That’s just God’s way of doing things, you know?” Jones said. “But if we don’t continue, her dream dies.”
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[under told stories]®
PBS NewsHour

African Americans Land Rights Legacy - July 24, 2007
Organization helps preserve family land.

Sandhills Family Heritage Association
Ammie McRae Jenkins, founder of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association, helps preserve black family-owned land and culture.
Transcript

GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, another in our series of profiles of Purpose Prize nominees. The prize is awarded to people who began new social enterprises after retiring. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from the Sandhills region of North Carolina.

FARMERS MARKET ATTENDEE: And we don’t have to put it all out, but let’s put enough out to…

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, NewsHour Correspondent: This summer, for the first time in recent memory, there was a farmers market in Spring Lake, North Carolina.

FARMERS MARKET ATTENDEE: We do thank you for giving Mrs. Jenkins a dream.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The weekly event is the brainchild of Ammie McRae Jenkins. She retired in 2001 at age 60 and returned to the Sandhills area, a sprawling region about an hour south of Raleigh-Durham, a land steeped in rich, sometimes painful history.

On this spot in 1789 in the Sandhills largest city, Fayetteville, North Carolina ratified the U.S. Constitution. But this also was a market where slaves were bought and sold. Ten miles away is the Army’s Fort Bragg. Tucked inside is another would-be landmark.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS, Sandhills Family Heritage Association: This is what is left of the foundation.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: A few rocks from the fireplace are about all that is left of the 650-acre McRae family homestead, built by her great-grandfather. He was in a pioneering group of freed slaves who bought and farmed land here after the Civil War. This was Jenkins’ childhood home.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: We grew everything. We had the fruits, the vegetable gardens. We had lots of hogs. We had cows, goats, chickens.

Fulfilling her ailing mother’s wish

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That all changed suddenly in 1954, when her father died of lupus at age 35. Ammie was 13. Soon after, her mother and six younger siblings were harassed by racist hate groups and evicted from this land, which eventually became part of the Army base.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: We didn’t leave because we wanted to. It was through intimidation. My mother didn’t know that people were working behind the scenes to take the land. So we lost all of that.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Were you paid at all for that?

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: Oh, no. No, we were not paid.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Just completely sent…

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: Just completely lost. It was like a bad memory. Amongst all of the good memories that we had living here, that was a bad memory.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: She went to Durham Technical College and was a computer programmer and businesswoman in Raleigh, where she married and had two children. She never wanted to come back to these childhood haunts, thinking it would bring back painful memories. But she did so in the late-’70s to fulfill one of her ailing mother’s final wishes.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: She wanted to see the old home place before she died. We wanted her to see it, but she was so sick at the time that she couldn’t come. Coming down that road, that fear was still there, and it was like, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.”

But I wanted to do it for Mama, because Mama had told me, “See, if you just go, look around, if there’s an old jar lid or anything that reminds you of the old home place or if there’s still any grapes or pears around, bring me something from the old home place.” And I wanted to do that for her. We came down that road and started up the little road that leads to the house, and a miracle happened.

A back-to-the-land movement

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That miracle was that it brought back fond memories and a rediscovery of her ties to the land, her own family’s story similar to many African-Americans who moved, willingly or unwillingly, to cities and urban lifestyles.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: We didn’t have land. We left from being self-sufficient to, where do we go from here? We have nothing, to the point of accepting handouts and that type of thing. So I know what it is to own land, which is one of the reasons that I’m so passionate about land ownership, especially if your whole culture and everything about your life is tied to that land, so it was just like we had lost everything.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In 2001, a retired Ammie McRae Jenkins founded the Sandhills Family Heritage Association, a back-to-the-land movement for African-Americans. It provides workshops on estate planning and how to avoid modern-day versions of the fraud and intimidation that dispossessed her family.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: We are in an emergency phase right now trying to hold onto our land, because we are losing land now at a rate of 70 percent of African-American farms, as compared to the 18 percent in the white community.

Hanging onto the land

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: She says many who have left the area inherit land here, which they attempted to sell to developers in this fast-growing region. Jenkins tries to coax them to hang onto land or to sell to a relative who might farm it.

Ed and Sheila Spence are a poster couple. They returned to their native Sandhills area after long military and teaching careers in San Diego, California.

ED SPENCE, Resident of Sandhills Area: My grandparents were sharecroppers. We literally lived off the farm. You know, all our meats come from the farm, the hogs, the cows. All the vegetables came from the farm, but they never owed any of the land. And so this was special for us to be able to do the same thing that we did when I was a child, but now we own the land.

SHEILA SPENCE, Resident of Sandhills Area: Last year, we cut it down, because we didn’t realize that they produced grapes.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The Spences bought 10 acres in 2001 on which they grow various fruits, vegetables, herbs, and raise goats. Jenkins’ program linked them with available extension services to reacquaint them with land management practices that sustained their ancestors.

ED SPENCE: They lived off the land. Their medicine came from the land. Their food came from the land.

SHEILA SPENCE: We’ve shared that with our grandchildren. With Sandhills, we had a youth program. My granddaughter and I participated in that program, and it was very enlightening to her. Without her being out in the field, in the heat of the day, picking peas, she would have never been able to realize what it was like for our ancestors to be working on sharecroppers’ farms or be enslaved, to have to do that.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: This is Mr. Wright, our black farmer of the year.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Ammie Jenkins says the next step is to help people go beyond just owning farmland, but to making a living. The farmers market is one way.

AMMIE MCRAE JENKINS: I’m not talking about living in the past, but I’m talking about recognizing those things that we had that are of value and building on those assets.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Her ultimate goal is to recognize and preserve those things in a museum. Jenkins is negotiating with the Army to put it on the homestead her family began here in 1882.
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