David Cecelski News Today

"Prison violence should concern everyone, because most incarcerated people reenter society."

By CORBIE HILL For a few years in the late 1800s, one corner of eastern North Carolina looked more like Marvel Comics’ Black-ruled Utopia of Wakanda than the Jim Crow South.

The Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898 destroyed a once thriving multiracial democracy, killed dozens if not hundreds of innocent Black people, and left in its wake a community forever scarred.

“For more than two hundred years, African-Americans have participated in every conflict in United States history. They have not only fought bravely the common enemies of the United States but

Historian David Cecelski recounts spending the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Piney Grove with descendants of Caesar Evans, who escaped from slavery during the Civil War, fought in the Union army, and later bought 228 acres in central Brunswick County.

Did that really happen? A Raleigh resident wanted to know. Yes, an escaped circus simian once entertained barbecue customers in rural North Carolina.

Historian David Cecelski has compiled a selection of photographs from an album the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Office of History discovered in their historical collections a few years ago.

Note from the author, North Carolina historian David Cecelski: This is an updated version of a short essay that I first published two years ago. To write this version, I

In “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,” Gregg Hecimovich pieces together the story of a woman who fled slavery, and whose manuscript was lost for more than 150 years.

New Bern Historical Society 100th Anniversary Event