DURHAM, NC – A HISTORY
Durham, NC, home base for the America’s Hallowed Ground team, is a vibrant city with a rich and complicated history. We identified many hallowed spaces here during the course of our work.
In Spring of 2024, the America’s Hallowed Ground team felt called to work in our own community of Durham, NC. This place – where our team lives and works – is rich with history, but is also a place where people have struggled, where neighborhoods have fought for equality, and where people died for simply being different. All these occurrences make ground hallowed.
Before Europeans arrived in the mid-1700s, the area that is now Durham was home to the Eno and the Occaneechi, two indigenous groups who farmed the land. According to the Museum of Durham History, the Great Indian Trading Path passed through Durham, helping to establish settlement sites and transportation routes.
When Europeans settled in the area, they built grist mills along the Eno River and farmed the land around it. By the 1860s, several plantations were built in the area, including Stagville Plantation (image below) – one of the largest in the South.
Following the Civil War, the area’s abundance of tobacco farms resulted in Durham becoming home to one of the country’s largest producers of tobacco products – American Tobacco Company. Other major industries included the country’s first mill to produce denim and the world’s largest hosiery maker. Duke University was established in 1892 and North Carolina Central University (the nation’s first publicly supported liberal arts college for African Americans) in 1910
The late 1800s and early 1900s also saw the rise of black-owned businesses in Durham. Parrish St. in downtown became known as the Black Wall Street thanks to the genesis of companies like North Carolina Mutual Insurance (image on right) and Mechanics and Farmers Bank. The Hayti District boasted over 200 black-owned businesses. But the thriving businesses were still subject to Jim Crow laws which segregated Durham’s Black citizens from its white residents.
As the Civil Rights movement got underway, sit-ins at lunch counters demanding service for Black patrons across North Carolina were organized with the assistance of many Durham religious and community leaders. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the city several times. He utilized one of those trips as a trial run of his “I Have A Dream” speech. Over the course of the next fifty years, segregation laws fell, but as often happens in many cities, Durham’s prosperous Hayti district was dissected by a major freeway isolating many of those citizens from ease of access to vital downtown businesses and services.
Over the last fifty years, Durham has become a city known for the abundance of university-related research, high tech corporations, and excellent medical facilities.
Source: Museum of Durham History
Additional Resources on Durham History
