The G.C. and Frances Hawley Museum

Bennett students and Greensboro citizens register to vote as part of "Operation Door knock", 1960.

Source: Thomas F. Holgate Library Archives Department

In 1960, Bennett College For Women President Dr. Willa B. Player dedicated the College's Annual Homemaking Institute to Operation "Door Knock".

This was a door-to-door voter registration campaign that reached over a thousand people in Greensboro, NC.

Bennett College College For Women, Basketball Team, 1932.
Greensboro, NC.

Source: UNCGGateway / database at Thomas F. Holgate Library

1960 Photograph of Langston Hughes speaking to Bennett College for Women students.

Source: of Thomas F. Holgate Library Archives Department.

On 12/7/1931, poet and social activist Langston Hughes spoke at the Bennett College chapel about African American literature.

Some of his famous poems are “Harlem,” “I Too,” and “Mother to Son.”
Hughes would visit Bennett again, in 1960.

In 1961, he adapted the Christmas story as the musical “Black Nativity.”

Without these women "catching babies" many would not live.

'Catching Babies,' Black Midwives Delivered, Despite Segregation

by Anne Cheskey Smith, Special to Black Mountain News Published 1:16 a.m. ET Feb. 21, 2018

Photograph: Mary Hayden, about 1919, with her daughter-in-law Hattie Payne Burnette and two of her oldest grandchildren, Lorenzo and infant Juanita. (Photo: SPECIAL TO BMN)

'Catching Babies,' Black Midwives Delivered, Despite Segregation

by Anne Cheskey Smith, Special to Black Mountain News Published 1:16 a.m. ET Feb. 21, 2018

Photograph: Black Mountain, NC Midwife "c1942-Mary Hayden, 84, with her granddaughter, Mary O. Burnette, about 1942 and two of Hayden's great-grandchildren.
(Photo: SPECIAL TO BMN)

"Mary Hayden 84 who was still working, Mary Burnette standing next to Granny holding my nephew his sister born with veil over face"

(Editor’s note: Anne Chesky Smith is director of Swannanoa Valley Museum & History Center.)

This is how it was, then, for Mary Stepp Burnette Hayden.

“She used to tell me how she would have to outsmart a catamount that picked up her scent as she walked home through the mountains at night, carrying a chunk of fresh pork, her payment for a new delivery,” Mary O. Burnette said last week of Hayden, her grandmother and a midwife and herbalist renowned in the Valley.

“She would hear this animal squeal and … she would start pulling off garments. Pull off a bonnet, throw it down and she’d hear that animal stop long enough to tear that up and she’s still running. Then she’d pull off something else, maybe a vest, and then an apron, and then undergarments or even stockings if she needed to and had the time, so she could make it home.”

Often descended from enslaved midwives, midwives in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries were typically African-American women who learned the trade from their mothers. Mary Stepp Burnette Hayden of Black Mountain was no exception.

Born in January 1858 to Hanah Stepp (c. 1832–Nov. 6, 1897) on the Joe Stepp farm in Black Mountain, Mary learned to deliver and care for babies from her mother, who had served as a midwife from a very young age, having been sold to the Stepps from a plantation in Alabama when she was 13.

Though Mary O. Burnette never met Hanah Stepp, she heard stories about her. “My mother said (she) had very black skin, but not African black," Burnette said. "And she had a strange dialect. My grandmother said she was part Native American.”

According to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, in the early to mid-1800s, when Hanah Stepp would have been practicing, slave ownership included directing treatment for sick or injured slaves. African-American beliefs about the causes of illnesses, however, often differed greatly from the beliefs of white slaveholders and their physicians, who called for treatments that were typically much harsher than the natural remedies favored by enslaved people.

Despite these conflicting beliefs, many enslaved midwives would deliver their mistress’ children and have their services sold to other white women in the area. After slavery was abolished, African-American women continued to practice as midwives and herbalists.

Though Mary Stepp Burnette Hayden told Burnette little about being enslaved, Burnette recalled one story that stood out. “She remembered when slavery was abolished. She told me that a man came on a horse and stood before her mother’s cabin door and read to them the Emancipation Proclamation. She was 5 years old. It would have been in January of 1863. It was one of the most wonderful things she told me.”

Mary Hayden and her mother most likely stayed in Black Mountain at the Stepp farm until the end of the Civil War in 1865, and perhaps in Black Mountain for a time afterwards, so that Mary could learn to read and write at a local school for former slaves. Hanah’s skills were not place-dependent, and she was able to help sustain the family – Mary Hayden and her two sisters, Margaret and Easter – as a midwife. The family eventually moved to Polk County.

Mary married her first husband, Squire Jones Burnette, by the time she was 18. They had many children, but only two survived to adulthood – Mary O. Burnette’s father, Garland Alfred Andrew Burnette, and her Aunt Margaret. Mary Stepp Burnette and Squire divorced, and her second marriage to Andy Hayden was short-lived. In the 1910s, Mary Stepp Burnette Hayden moved back to Black Mountain, following her son, who had purchased a small farm in town.

Hayden would live in Black Mountain for the remainder of her life and continue to support herself as a midwife and herbalist. Mary O. Burnette, who was delivered by Hayden along with her six siblings, remembered of her grandmother, “She was small. Tiny woman. Maybe 100 pounds. Very small foot, but very hearty. Tough. And a very straight nose, small mouth. Intense, stern eyes. Bushy eyebrows.

“She had long straight hair that hung below her waist. Her hair was twisted into two ropes and those ropes were twisted tight at the back of her neck. I used to stand behind her chair and comb and brush her hair, and I’d have to keep backing up because her hair was so long.”

One day, Hayden went out to pick blackberries. As she was picking through the brambles a long, black thing fell down over her shoulder. Startled, she jumped away from the what she thought was a black snake. Upon closer inspection, she declared, tossing her head back and clapping her hands, “Gentlemen, it was just a braid of my hair!”

“That was Granny's manner of speaking when she wanted to make a point,” Burnette said.

Hayden dressed modestly, in skirts down to her ankles; rarely, if ever, buying new clothing. “She made her long white aprons by hand,” Burnette remembered. “She would sew a pocket that went all the way to the hem because that’s how she carried things. I never remember her having a purse, she would drop things in that apron pocket so she would have things handy, particularly her s***f ... She would reach down and pull the hem up so she could get her hand all the way down to the bottom of that pocket.”

(Editor’s note: In next week’s edition, Anne Chesky Smith writes about how the two African-American midwives in the Swannanoa Valley used their knowledge of herbs to treat blacks and whites.)

Link to another photograph of Black Mountain, NC Midwife "c1942-Mary Hayden,

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=378125779578677&set=a.176792746378649


Source:https://www.blackmountainnews.com/story/news/2018/02/21/catching-babies-black-midwives-delivered-despite-segregation/337914002/?fbclid=IwAR0OdWI5ca4H2HfecSrRpzllCE_sRY7tsQf5wueoLqcLda4EcMknjim8QtE

Purposely erased..... One thing that never changes during the seasons of Thanksgiving through New Years as we witness the social media pages and the programs at State historic sites in NC and other States, as well as White focused county historical organizations, they always highlight and promote the lives of the slavers, and if they do post about the enslaved Black people owned as chattel, it is a crumb here and there.

We, the public are always presented with all the wonders these slavers did for themselves and how they enjoyed fabulous family and friends time during Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year.
As we are entering a new month, and as the Christmas Season is upon us, we are re-sharing this post about the enslaved and how the slavers treated them during the Christmas and New Year's seasons.

We also want to introduce to those who do not know, Harriet Jacobs and the book she wrote.

We are committed to not only remembering the lives of the enslaved and some freedoms that Emancipation provided, we are dedicated to keeping these lives in the spotlight for all who are teachable to learn about.

'The Enslaved People Dreaded New Year's Day The Worst':- The Grim History of January 1

BY Olivia B. Waxman/ TimeMag
Updated: December 27, 2019 8:57 PM ET

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Painting.
"To the Highest Bidder"

oil on canvas
1906
by Harry Roseland -1867-1950
Painting owned by Oprah Winfrey

Image description: A painting of an enslaved Black mother holding her daughter close to her, as they stand on a slave auction block to be sold.

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Americans are likely to think of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as a time to celebrate the fresh start that a new year represents, but there is also a troubling side to the holiday’s history. In the years before the Civil War, the first day of the new year was often a heartbreaking one for enslaved people in the United States.

In the African-American community, New Year’s Day used to be widely known as “Hiring Day” — or “Heartbreak Day,” as the African-American abolitionist journalist William Cooper Nell described it — because enslaved people spent New Year’s Eve waiting, wondering if their owners were going to rent them out to someone else, thus potentially splitting up their families.
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The renting out of slave labor was a relatively common practice in the antebellum South, and a profitable practice for white slave owners and hirers.

“‘Hiring Day’ was part of the larger economic cycle in which most debts were collected and settled on New Year’s Day,” says Alexis McCrossen, an expert on the history of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and a professor of history at Southern Methodist University, who writes about Hiring Day in her forthcoming book Time’s Touchstone: The New Year in American Life.

Some enslaved people were put up for auction that day, or held under contracts that started in January. (These transactions also took place all year long and contracts could last for different amounts of time.)

These deals were conducted privately among families, friends and business contacts, and slaves were handed over in town squares, on courthouse steps and sometimes simply on the side of the road, according to Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South by Jonathan D. Martin.
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Accounts of the cruelty of Hiring Day come from records left by those who secured their freedom, who described spending the day before January 1 hoping and praying that their hirers would be humane and that their families could stay together.
“Of all days in the year, the slaves dread New Year’s Day the worst of any,” a slave named Lewis Clarke said in an 1842 account.

“On New Year’s Day, we went to the auctioneer’s block, to be hired to the highest bidder for one year,” Israel Campbell wrote in a memoir published in 1861 in Philadelphia, in which he describes being hired out three times.

“That’s where that sayin’ comes from that what you do on New Year’s Day you’ll be doin’ all the rest of the year,” a former slave known as Sister Harrison said in an interview in 1937.
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Harriet Jacobs wrote a particularly detailed account in “The Slaves’ New Year’s Day” chapter of her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

“Hiring-day at the south takes place on the 1st of January. On the 2[n]d, the slaves are expected to go to their new masters,” she wrote.

She observed slave owners and farmers renting out their human chattel for extra income during the period between the cotton and corn harvests and the next planting season. From Christmas to New Year’s Eve, many families would “wait anxiously” to find out whether they would be rented out, and to whom.
On New Year’s Day, “At the appointed hour the grounds are thronged with men, women, and children, waiting, like criminals to hear their doom pronounced,” Jacobs wrote.
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On one of these fateful days Jacobs saw “a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all.” The slave trader who took the children wouldn’t tell her where he was taking them because it depended on where he could get the “highest price.” Jacobs said she would never forget the mother crying out, “Gone! All gone! Why don’t God kill me?”

Enslaved people who attempted to resist going to their new masters were whipped and thrown in jail until they relented and promised not to run away during the new arrangement. Older slaves were also particularly vulnerable, as Jacobs describes one owner trying to hire out a frail roughly 70-year-old woman because he was moving away.

But the history of New Year’s Day and American slavery is not all horror. The holiday was also associated with freedom.

The federal ban on the transatlantic slave trade went into effect on New Year’s Day in 1808, and African-American communities did celebrate, but the festivities were short-lived.

“Different slave-trade abolition commemorations took place between 1808 and 1831, but they died out because the domestic slave trade was so vigorous,” says McCrossen. The risk of violence was also too great. For example, on New Year’s Eve in 1827, in New York City, a white mob attacked African-American congregants and vandalized their church.

The holiday became more associated with freedom than slavery when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in Confederate states on New Year’s Day in 1863. Slaves went to church to pray and sing on Dec. 31, 1862, and that’s why there are still New Year’s Eve prayer services at African-American churches nationwide.

At such “Watch Night” services, congregants continue to pray for more widespread racial equality 157 years later.

Source: https://time.com/5750833/new-years-day-slavery-history/?fbclid=IwAR1q7Fr2RTctrTGhuNlX6or-LU4dGXfFrjc7EbyEPNhfdTBh8i16QbWiF0w





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Purposely erased..... One thing that never changes during the seasons of Thanksgiving through New Years as we witness the social media pages and the programs at State historic sites in NC and other States, as well as White focused county historical organizations, they always highlight and promote the lives of the slavers, and if they do post about the enslaved Black people owned as chattel, it is a crumb here and there.

We, the public are always presented with all the wonders these slavers did for themselves and how they enjoyed fabulous family and friends time during Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year.
As we are entering a new month, and as the Christmas Season is upon us, we are re-sharing this post about the enslaved and how the slavers treated them during the Christmas and New Year's seasons.

We also want to introduce to those who do not know, Harriet Jacobs and the book she wrote.

We are committed to not only remembering the lives of the enslaved and some freedoms that Emancipation provided, we are dedicated to keeping these lives in the spotlight for all who are teachable to learn about.

WATCH NIGHT ON THE PLANTATIONS

Before December 31, 1862, New Year's Eve was called "Watch Night", and New Yea's Day was referred to as “Heartbreak Day,” according to Valdosta State University history professor Dr. David Williams in his book, “A People’s History of the Civil War.”. because, New Year’s Day was often the day when slaveholders sold slaves and or "rented" them out.

It was when families, parents and children, siblings, husbands and wives, were separated.

The enslaved people would gather on New Year’s Eve knowing that may be the last time many families had the opportunity to be together. For the enslaved Black people, it was not a joyous time to celebrate the new year's arrival as was the case for White people in America.

We know from a recorded account from the section entitled, THE SLAVES' NEW YEAR'S DAY.,
from the book, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Written by Herself: Harriet A. (Ann) Jacobs, 1813-1897" that on the plantation she was held on in Edenton, NC that the enslaved people gathered on December 31, with anxious feelings of the New Year's Day coming, because that was the day that many of the enslaved Black people would be sold and or rented out. It was the day in which families were torn apart in order for the slave master to increase his profit.

Read Harriet Jacobs account here: https://www.facebook.com/IRememberOurHistory/photos/a.173727343351856/331469334244322/?type=3&theater

Watch Night took on a different meaning beginning with Dec. 31, 1862, as the enslaved Black people on plantations gathered to await word from Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which would free the enslaved Black people, and was to go into effect Jan. 1, 1863.

For those that had gotten word about President Lincoln and the Emaciation Proclamation, The day before the proclamation was signed was called by many 'Freedom's Eve.'

In many cases, the few Black churches that existed and their congregations were joined by white abolitionists throughout both the North and South as they awaited well into New Year’s Day in 1863 for word that Lincoln had signed the Proclamation into law.
Joy and celebration greeted Lincoln’s words in many African American churches and on plantations that did receive word.

“I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States,” the Proclamation read, “and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be, free.”

In the decades since the end of chattel slavery by President Lincoln sighing the Emancipation Proclamation on December 31, 1862, Watch Night has evolved into an evening that honors the lives of the enslaved Black people, celebrates family and fellowship, and encourages a time to reflect on one's past year with prayers, praise and hope for a good and better year coming. .

One recorded "waiting" on December 31, 1862 by the enslaved Black people is this one:

Boston Abolitionists Await Emancipation Proclamation

"On this day, New Year's Eve 1862, William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist paper The Liberator, delayed printing the latest edition as he waited for news from Washington. At midnight, his son and daughter joined Black worshipers in hopeful prayer at the AME Church on Beacon Hill. The next day, thousands of abolitionists gathered at the Music Hall and the Tremont Temple in Boston, hoping they would have cause to celebrate. At dusk, the wire finally came from Washington: President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation."

Read The Rest of this article Here: https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/boston-abolitionists-await-emancipation-proclamation.html?utm_source=Mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=eMoment&=IwAR03z_QuZIn5mibUMqEfq_s1SEUkT7BqbzmIy3OlKZOhWuzpvR-4jx7Kjfs #.WkknZ6f1_wU.facebook

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Purposely erased..... One thing that never changes during the seasons of Thanksgiving through New Years as we witness the social media pages and the programs at State historic sites in NC and other States, as well as White focused county historical organizations, they always highlight and promote the lives of the slavers, and if they do post about the enslaved Black people owned as chattel, it is a crumb here and there.

We, the public are always presented with all the wonders these slavers did for themselves and how they enjoyed fabulous family and friends time during Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year.

As we are entering a new month, and as the Christmas Season is upon us, we are re-sharing this post about the enslaved and how the slavers treated them during the Christmas and New Year's seasons.
We also want to introduce to those who do not know, Harriet Jacobs and the book she wrote.

We are committed to not only remembering the lives of the enslaved and some freedoms that Emancipation provided, we are dedicated to keeping these lives in the spotlight for all who are teachable to learn about.

®
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THE SLAVES' NEW YEAR'S DAY.
from the book,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Written by Herself: Harriet A. (Ann) Jacobs, 1813-1897
ed. by Lydia Maria Francis Child, 1802-1880
III.
THE SLAVES' NEW YEAR'S DAY.

DR. FLINT owned a fine residence in town, several farms, and about fifty slaves, besides hiring a number by the year.
Hiring-day at the south takes place on the 1st of January. On the 2d, the slaves are expected to go to their new masters. On a farm, they work until the corn and cotton are laid. They then have two holidays.

Some masters give them a good dinner under the trees. This over, they work until Christmas eve. If no heavy charges are meantime brought against them, they are given four or five holidays, whichever the master or overseer may think proper. Then comes New Year's eve; and they gather together their little alls, or more properly speaking, their little nothings, and wait anxiously for the dawning of day.

At the appointed hour the grounds are thronged with men, women, and children, waiting, like criminals, to hear their doom pronounced. The slave is sure to know who is the most humane, or cruel master, within forty miles of him.

It is easy to find out, on that day, who clothes and feeds his slaves well; for he is surrounded by a crowd, begging, "Please, massa, hire me this year. I will work very hard, massa."

If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.

Should he chance to change his mind, thinking it justifiable to violate an extorted promise, woe unto him if he is caught! The whip is used till the blood flows at his feet; and his stiffened limbs are put in chains, to be dragged in the field for days and days!

If he lives until the next year, perhaps the same man will hire him again, without even giving him an opportunity of going to the hiring-ground. After those for hire are disposed of, those for sale are called up.

O, you happy free women, contrast your New Year's day with that of the poor bond-woman! With you it is a pleasant season, and the light of the day is blessed. Friendly wishes meet you every where, and gifts are showered upon you. Even hearts that have been estranged from you soften at this season, and lips that have been silent echo back,

"I wish you a happy New Year." Children bring their little offerings, and raise their rosy lips for a caress. They are your own, and no hand but that of death can take them from you.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.

On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all.

The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price?

I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed, "Gone! All gone! Why don't God kill me?" I had no words wherewith to comfort her. Instances of this kind are of daily, yea, of hourly occurrence.

Slaveholders have a method, peculiar to their institution, of getting rid of old slaves, whose lives have been worn out in their service. I knew an old woman, who for seventy years faithfully served her master. She had become almost helpless, from hard labor and disease. Her owners moved to Alabama, and the old black woman was left to be sold to any body who would give twenty dollars for her.

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Harriet Jacobs was born on February 11, 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina, and died on March 7, 1897 (aged 84), in Washington, D.C.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself is an autobiography by a young mother and fugitive slave published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for its author, Harriet Ann Jacobs. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent.

The book documents Jacobs's life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels "to address race and gender issues. "She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced on plantations as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away.

In the book, Jacobs addresses white Northern women who fail to comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution.

Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl after her escape to New York, while living and working at Idlewild, the Hudson River home of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis. Portions of her journals were published in serial form in the New-York Tribune, owned and edited by Horace Greeley. Jacobs's reports of sexual abuse were deemed too shocking for the average newspaper reader of the day, and publication ceased before the completion of the narrative.

Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print the work in book form if Jacobs could convince Willis or abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe to provide a preface. She refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe never responded to her request.

The Phillips and Samson company closed. Jacobs eventually signed an agreement with the Thayer & Eldridge publishing house, and they requested a preface by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who agreed. Child also edited the book, and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women remained in contact for much of their remaining lives. Thayer & Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy before the narrative could be published.

Source for information below line:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Ann_Jacobs

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Without those Black women who "caught babies", many would not have lived.

This family history was told to me by the wife of one of Julia Roberts’ great-grandsons, and is posted with permission.
(ED & Admin of ®
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This is Julia Roberts, she was born in 1908. She was 96 when she died in 2004. Mrs. Roberts’ grandmother was enslaved on a plantation in Virginia, and Julia remembered her talking about having to "tend to white babies as a child."
Roberts who was a midwife in the Kings Mountain, North Carolina, area for many years was described by many as the backbone and matriarch of her small, rural Black community of Ebenezer.

In her time as a midwife, she "caught", as they say, almost 200 babies, including many of her own relatives. She was literally a "life-saver" in the Black communities of the area before local hospitals began to allow Black women to be admitted. Even after Black women were allowed to deliver at the hospitals, many women still preferred to deliver their children at home with the guidance and wisdom of Ms. Julia.

She was also a healer that her people looked to for medical help. Her grandson Alfred remembers having spinal meningitis, or something with similar symptoms, when he was young. His grandmother "whipped up" something to give him and he made a full recovery. Julia deeply believed in Prayer and knew it was the root of her healing powers.

During the Great Depression, she went to Philadelphia and worked as a domestic. There she met her first husband, Clarence Ash. They both lived on the same street and worked in white households according to the census data. This is how Julia's family believes she met Clarence. His family, the Ash's, were from Canada at some point in their history. After her husband, Mr. Ash, passed away, she moved back to NC, where she married Mr. Marvin Roberts.

As with other Black people during that time, Julia also picked cotton and worked on white people's land in the area to make a living. Julia inherited her own land for farming through marriage to her second husband, Marvin Roberts.

This is a small view into the life of Mrs. Julia Roberts from Kings Mountain, NC, who was a life saver to hundreds of Black women and children in that area, because she was a mid-wife.

These are photographs of Mrs. Julia Roberts and a pair of gloves that she wore.