Black, White, Colored

Description

In the late nineteenth century in Laurinburg, North Carolina, there was a beacon of racial calm—a place where Blacks and Whites could live and work together. Black families like the Malloys became landlords, businessmen, and doctors. But progress was challenged on the eve of Election Day, 1898 when a bloody riot expanded and spiraled into the only recorded insurrection and middle-class Blacks—who made strides during Reconstruction—stripped of their seats on every electoral board. Figures such as Booker T. Washington rallied around Laurinburg in response

Black, White, Colored is the first book to tell the story of the events in Laurinburg and its impact on the town’s Black occupants. Descendants, Lauretta Malloy Noble and LeeAnét Noble, carefully piece together that fateful event and its aftermath, providing compelling details of how their family became one of this Southern town’s richest and most powerful despite slavery, violence, floods, war, and more and how the community fought to preserve its culture and continue progress.

Shining a spotlight on Laurinburg and the insurrection elevates it to its rightful place in American history, beside the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and offers insights relevant to our society today.