Sinners, Saints & Episcopalians: People of Color at Chapel of the Cross through Reconstruction

 

Sinners, Saints & Episcopalians:

People of Color at Chapel of the Cross through Reconstruction

By Mark Chilton

Orange County Register of Deeds

Presented at Chapel of the Cross 13 Feb 2022

 

  

Special thanks to Kim Smith, Michael McVaugh and the Reverend Brooks Graebner for sharing their insights in the development of this presentation.

Chapel of the Cross’s first priest, the Rev. William Mercer Green deeply believed in Episcopalians bringing enslaved people to church.  Rev. Green owned many slaves himself and he brought them to his churches. He also encouraged his slave-owning parishioners to bring their slaves.[1] His ideas about including enslaved people in the church were evidently well accepted by white parishioners at Chapel of the Cross.

Reverend Green, enslaved at least seventeen people in the 1840’s, including Godfrey, Francis, Nancy, Ellen, Cain, Jenny, Peter, Celia, Anna, Robert, Rachel, Lucy, Aaron, Julia, Margaret and Sam.[2] Of these, both Celia and Ellen were married at Chapel of the Cross in the late 1840’s. And Ellen’s daughter Edith Jane was baptized here as well. Almost all of the other people enslaved by Rev. Green are mentioned in the Register at St. Matthew’s in Hillsborough, where he also served.

Our founding Priest however, was not the only man of the cloth to serve at Chapel of the Cross while enslaving people. The Parish Register shows that several of Chapel of the Cross’s early Rectors enslaved one or two people each.[3] Likewise UNC Professor Manuel Fetter and Professor Hosea H Smith were Chapel of the Cross parishioners who each enslaved a few of their fellow human beings.

More like Rev. Green, William Horn Battle, an Orange County Judge, enslaved many people – eighteen of them by 1860. Because he lived quite near Chapel of the Cross – at 203 Battle Lane - it was convenient to bring the people he enslaved to his church. The Parish Register indicates that Judge Battle enslaved Cora, Washington, Robert Lewis, Henry, Fanny, Jane & her children Sarah, Patsy Alice, & Margaret, as well as Ann Elisa and her children Henry & Rufus – fifteen of the eighteen people Judge Battle enslaved. So almost all of them were at Chapel of the Cross at one time or another.

Wealthy local merchant Andrew Mickle enslaved at least five people – three of them having been baptized at Chapel of the Cross. He was also involved in the mortgaging of people enslaved by others. And just to be clear: What do you imagine happened if someone defaulted on a loan secured against a human being? Why that person was sold at auction on the steps of the Orange County Court House, of course. We will come back to Andrew Mickle in a bit.

St Matthew’s parishioner James S Smith enslaved at least 30 people, though it is not certain to what extent he or his sons attended Chapel of the Cross after they moved from Hillsborough to the Chapel Hill area. But it is clear that his daughter, Mary Ruffin Smith was a very active member of Chapel of the Cross. And as we will discuss further in a moment, she definitely brought to her church the people she enslaved.

I could go on - and on, but you get the idea. My count of the people enslaved by congregants at Chapel of the Cross is necessarily incomplete, but I can say for certain that at least 223 people were enslaved by white people who worshipped at Chapel of the Cross – and over a third of these enslaved people are mentioned by name in the Parish Register because they were baptized, married, or had their funerals here. Enslaved persons who worshipped at Chapel of the Cross would have completely filled the old chapel if all of them had attended at one time – not merely the slave gallery above, but the whole chapel.

The Chapel of the Cross’s Parish Register records a total of twenty marriages in its first two decades – eleven of them for white couples, and nine for couples of color. This gives you, perhaps, an idea of how small this congregation was at that time – barely one marriage per year.  But more importantly, note that 45% of all weddings at Chapel of the Cross were among people of color. Remarkably, these statistics hold up for baptisms and other rites. Almost half of all people receiving sacraments at Chapel of the Cross before the Civil War were people of color. When you look around the room at Chapel of the Cross, you are seeing a very different group of people today. How did this come about?

In addition to enslaved congregants, the Parish Register mentions a significant number of free people of color.  For example, one of those nine marriages I mentioned was between a free man of color named Thomas Kirby and Judy, a woman enslaved by Judge Battle.[4] Judge Battle’s son, Kemp Battle in his extensive local histories described Thomas Kirby in rather racist terms as "a big burly yellow man,” who worked as the assistant janitor at UNC.[5]

The head janitor was Wilson Caldwell, a man enslaved by the President of UNC.[6] Caldwell, like Kirby, was married at Chapel of the Cross, though in Caldwell’s case his wedding was after Emancipation.[7] Although Caldwell was a Presbyterian and later a Congregationalist,[8] the woman he married, Thomas Kirby’s niece, Susan was an Episcopalian – hence their wedding at Chapel of the Cross.[9]

A Local Government of Color

After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Governor William W Holden appointed new Justices of the Peace for Orange County in July 1868. Among the men he appointed was Wilson Caldwell.[10]

Six months later, in January 1869 an election was held for the Chapel Hill Board of Commissioners (now Town Council).  Newly enfranchised African-American voters carried the day – voting out a slate of white Democrats including Andrew Mickle. A multi-racial slate of Republicans took control of the Board, including Thomas Kirby.[11]

Ku Klux Fever

These were tumultuous and terrifying times across North Carolina; the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise. Many historians have observed that there were two distinct classes within the Klan. The leadership often included formerly powerful white men who had lost power when African-American men gained the right to vote. Yet the bulk of the Klan was made up of poor whites who felt that their low socio-economic position had been made still lower by being reduced to mere equality with the one group they had formerly looked down upon: African-Americans.

The body of Wright Woods was found hanging in far northeastern Orange County in September 1869.[12] But this was merely the beginning of the Klan’s 1869 reign of terror in Orange County. Many marches, assaults and lynchings occurred in the latter parts of 1869 – and much of their activity focused on Chapel Hill.

By October the Klan’s thirst for blood reached a fever pitch and a mob of between seventy-five and one hundred and fifty men - with “a shrouding sheet hung over their face[s] with just two holes for their eyes…cackling among them of ‘Ker Klux’” (as the Hillsboro Recorder reported it) seized Daniel and Jefferson Morrow and left them hanging.[13]

In November 1869, an angry mob of one hundred Klansmen[14] seized twenty-five year-old Cyrus Guy, a man of mixed racial heritage.[15] They left him hanging at a prominent intersection just north of Efland where his body remained on display for ten days.[16] In all, the Orange County Klan lynched at least four men in a space of just three months – the Fall of 1869. While the actual lynchings happened in rural areas, most of the Klan’s non-lethal attacks occurred in Chapel Hill – the center of African-American public office holding.

On 1 Sep 1869, Robert G Fitzgerald, an African-American schoolmaster near Hillsborough complained of the Klan in his diary: “They have also marched or paraded in Chapel Hill & are committing depredations on Union men all around.”[17] The very next day, night riders beat African Americans in Chapel Hill, compelled a “Negro Republican leader” – evidently Thomas Kirby – to swear his support for the Conservative Party, and hurled stones at the home of Wilson Caldwell’s father.[18]

By September 22nd, a white Republican in Chapel Hill found the situation so intolerable that he wrote to Governor Holden, complaining that “It has become no uncommon thing to see 40 to 50…Ku Klux rowdying up and down through the streets of this village at the late hour of twelve o’clock.”[19] Three days later, Robert Fitzgerald recorded in his diary that his brother “Richard saw a number of men supposed to be KKK’s in Chapel Hill and he was informed that they are to march tonight.”[20]

The Hillsborough Recorder summed it up: "Chapel Hill has the Ku Klux fever."[21]

The Whole Administration of the Law

That merchant I mentioned earlier, Chapel of the Cross parishioner Andrew Mickle, had served in several local government offices including a 14 year stint as the Orange County Register of Deeds – until he decided to relocate to Chapel Hill.[22] He transferred to the Chapel of the Cross from St Matthew’s in 1849.[23] By 1855, Mickle was the Treasurer of the Village[24] and by 1859 he was on the Chapel Hill Board of Commissioners as well.[25]

In 1860, Andrew Mickle was enslaving six people and had some $90,000 in assets – having become one of the most successful merchants in Chapel Hill.[26] But he lost his human ‘property’ when the Union Army occupied Chapel Hill in April 1865.[27] Soon after, Mickle’s mercantile customers were unable to pay their debts to him and of course his Confederate dollars were worthless. He was in deep financial trouble in 1867.[28] By the 1870 census his household’s assets had dropped to $2,200[29] - down 97% from a decade earlier.

Kemp Battle related that during Wilson Caldwell’s time as a Justice of the Peace (1868-1869), a case arose in which an African American man filed criminal charges against former Professor (and Chapel of the Cross parishioner) Hosea H Smith for the theft of a dog.[30] Battle understatedly noted how “an ex-slave and University servant, sitting in judgment on an ex-professor…was a novel spectacle to Southern people.” Under tremendous pressure, Caldwell judiciously sidestepped this political landmine by ruling that the case should be dismissed as a criminal complaint and pursued as a civil matter – a ruling which protected the white professor from criminal prosecution, but did not close the door to justice for the African-American complainant.[31] Years later Judge Battle’s son wrote of Caldwell’s “peculiar fitness for his work…his uncommon good sense and tact, and the propriety of his conduct” which maintained “the confidence and esteem of the faculty.” While Caldwell’s deftness in handling the politically charged atmosphere of Reconstruction Chapel Hill met with Kemp Battle’s approval, Andrew Mickle felt quite differently.

Just days after yet another Klan riot in Chapel Hill and near the peak of the Klan’s 1869 reign of terror, Andrew Mickle pursued a more law-abiding course of opposing African-Americans in local government. He called to order a meeting of prominent white Chapel Hillians which included, among others, some of his fellow parishioners at Chapel of the Cross.[32] The meeting resolved to censure Governor Holden for “refusing to appoint white magistrates…thereby putting the whole administration of the law in the hands of the negroes.”[33]

#JanuarySixth

Andrew Mickle must have been outraged when Chapel Hill’s newly enfranchised African-American voters ousted him and his friends in favor of the Republicans – one of them his fellow churchman, Thomas Kirby.[34] Bankrupted and voted out of office, Mickle could not abide being governed by a board that included African-Americans. So he and his allies staged an unauthorized ‘election’ which purported to replace the entire Board of Commissioners in February 1870. The new ‘officials' – largely the same group who had met four months earlier to complain about Justice of the Peace Wilson Caldwell –appointed Mickle as their purported Magistrate of Police.[35]

The legitimate Board appointed a Commissioner to meet with Mickle and the other pretenders to demand that they stop their illegal proceedings.[36] Mickle and company quickly conceded, after which the Commissioner was inclined to let the pretenders off without prosecution because, he said, it seemed to have been a good faith misunderstanding.[37] But the Klan’s raids on Chapel Hill, the lynchings elsewhere in Orange County, and Mickle & Company’s earlier protests against Wilson Caldwell make good faith hard to imagine. This supposed election happened just two days after the White Brotherhood made a nighttime raid 25 miles west of Chapel Hill, kidnapping Alamance County’s first African-American official, Graham Town Board Member Wyatt Outlaw. His body was left hanging from a tree in the Alamance Court House Square – by the way, the very same spot where a Confederate monument would be erected 44 years later.[38]

While on the surface, Mickle’s spurious election in February 1870 appears inconsequential, Mickle’s efforts and the Klan’s reign of terror evidently had a dispiriting effect on the Republican controlled Chapel Hill Board of Commissioners. Over the course of six weeks, starting in April 1870, four of the five members of the Board resigned – including Thomas Kirby resigned.

Conservative Democrats won control of the General Assembly in the Fall election of 1870. The new General Assembly impeached Gov. Holden for his zealous prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was removed from office on March 22, 1871. With many African American voters in Chapel Hill afraid to cast ballots, all of Chapel Hill’s Republican Commissioners were voted out six weeks later at the next municipal election.[39] Thomas Kirby never returned to public office, but Andrew Mickle fared better. He was elected Mayor in 1874.[40] Another 80 years would pass before another African-American served on the Chapel Hill Town Council.[41]

Baptists of Color

No parishioners attended Chapel of the Cross during Reconstruction because the church went dormant from 1868 to 1874. But it appears that Thomas Kirby did not merely stop attending the closed-up Chapel of the Cross; he affirmatively quit the Episcopal Church altogether. While I cannot speak for Thomas Kirby, it seems likely to me that at least part of the reason for his departure was that he no longer wanted to associate with people like Andrew Mickle, who would accept him as a member of their church, but not as a member of their government. In 1870, Thomas Kirby became a founding member of First Baptist Church in downtown Chapel Hill.

The Smith Family and Chapel of the Cross

By contrast, some African-Americans who attended Chapel of the Cross before the Civil War came away with a very different perspective on Episcopalianism.

As I mentioned earlier, Mary Ruffin Smith was a prominent white member of the Chapel of the Cross, whose family enslaved some three dozen people. Her father owned thousands of acres and had many slaves, though as I mentioned it appears he was more active in St Matthew’s, rather than Chapel of the Cross.

In the mid-1830’s, Mary Ruffin Smith’s father bought a slave named Harriet to look after his daughter.[42] Harriet had very light colored skin and descendants supposed that her lineage was far more Cherokee than African.  Her features are said to have been very beautiful and her hair was long and hung down her back in loose curls. When Mary’s brother Sidney returned home from college, he became obsessed with the beautiful and exotic Harriet. As an enslaved woman, Harriet had no one to protect her from Sidney Smith’s very unwelcome advances. Mary could see what was happening in the Smith household and tried to get her father to do something about Sidney, but James S Smith was evidently of the “boys will be boys” school of thought.

While they lived in Hillsborough, one night in 1843 Sidney broke down the barred door of Harriet’s cabin and after beating Harriet into submission, he raped her. This scenario played out time and again in 1843 until finally Mary Ruffin Smith’s other brother Frank intervened – not out of sympathy for Harriet, but out of rivalry. One night, after yet another of Sidney’s attacks on Harriet, Frank Smith beat his brother into unconsciousness. Sidney never went near Harriet again, but by that time Harriet was already pregnant. When the infant was born, Harriet named her Cornelia.[43]

But even after Frank Smith beat his brother to stop his continual raping of Harriet, her troubles were far from over. Frank now used his position of power to coerce Harriet into sex with him instead. This went on for years afterward and Harriet eventually gave birth to three more children – the progeny of Frank Smith.

Mary Ruffin Smith was aware of all these events and was mortified by the behavior of her brothers. Eventually the situation became so self-evident to white society in Hillsborough that the Smiths were embarrassed. It is said that Sidney doted on his enslaved daughter Cornelia. When he had had too much to drink (which was often, we are told), he would declare himself to be her father in front of company. Perhaps seeking to flee from the shame, the whole family moved from Hillsborough out to Smith Level Road, just south of Carrboro.

Perhaps the Smith men were too ashamed of their behavior to show their faces at Chapel of the Cross, but Mary Ruffin Smith was not. She became a regular Communicant, and she routinely brought her enslaved nieces and nephews, Harriet’s children.[44]

In 1885, Mary Ruffin Smith’s will left each of her formerly enslaved nieces & nephews 100 acres and $100. While the bequests Mary Ruffin Smith left to her former slaves could hardly be called stingy, they pale in comparison with the rest of her estate: her share of hundreds and hundreds of acres in Chatham County she left to the University of North Carolina.  And almost 1400 acres in Orange County she left to Chapel of the Cross along with some lots in Chapel Hill and the rest of her cash. [45] This legacy would fifty years later play a critical role in keeping Chapel of the Cross solvent during the Great Depression.

Shortly after the Civil war Cornelia Smith married that Hillsborough schoolmaster I mentioned earlier, Robert Fitzgerald, and they went on to have a family of their own. Quite unlike Thomas Kirby, Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald evidently doubled down on the Episcopal Church. She remained a steadfast Episcopalian, though she and her children would become founding members of St Titus – the historically black Episcopal Church in Durham. Cornelia’s siblings went on to be involved in the founding of St Michael’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte. It seems that Harriet’s descendants wanted to be Episcopalians, but they did not want to be second class Parishioners in majority white congregations.

One of Cornelia’s daughters, Agnes Fitzgerald married another schoolteacher, William Murray. And among their children was a brilliant little girl they named Pauli. Pauli entered college at the age of 16 and was an outstanding students, yet when she applied to graduate school at the University to which so much of Mary Ruffin Smith’s estate had gone, Pauli was rejected - because she was black. So she became the only woman at Howard Law School instead. She applied to do further graduate studies at Harvard University a few years later, but Harvard too rejected her - because she was a woman.

Undeterred Pauli Murray went to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, fighting Jim Crow in the courts. But still held back by what she called “Jane Crow,” she was only the architect of the legal strategy that carried the day in Brown v. Board of Education – not the man – who argued the case before the Supreme Court – merely the genius who supplied him with the argument.

Like her mother and grandmother, Pauli Murray was a lifelong Episcopalian.[46] And although Jane Crow kept women out of Episcopal pulpits at the time, she received her Masters of Divinity in 1976. A year later, the Episcopal Church of the United States ordained its first seven female priests. Pauli Murray was the only woman of color among them. After her ordination, when it was time for the Reverend Pauli Murray to give her first ever communion, she chose to share the body and blood of Christ at, of all places, the Chapel of the Cross in the old sanctuary, looking up at the slave gallery, where her ancestors had been relegated, right next to the font where William L Saunders sponsored his niece’s baptism just a year before he became the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and  standing at the ornate carved lectern prominently bearing the name of the woman who enslaved her great-grandmother.

Rev. Murray later wrote of this moment:  “Whatever future ministry I might have as a priest, it was given to me that day to be a symbol of healing. All the strands of my life had come together. Descendant of slave and of slave owner…I was empowered to minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no black or white, no male or female – only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.”[47]

 

Sources: 

1850 US Census, Orange County, NC, Chapel Hill district, accessed via Ancestry.com.

1860 US Census, Orange County, NC, Chapel Hill district, accessed via Ancestry.com.

1870 US Census, Orange County, NC, Chapel Hill district, accessed via Ancestry.com.

The Act of the General Assembly for the Better Regulation of Chapel Hill Ratified 29th of January 1851 and the Ordinances of the Commission of Chapel Hill, adopted in Conformity thereto, 3d Mar 1855, Hillsborough: D Heartt & Son, 1855.

The Act of the General Assembly for the Better Regulation of Chapel Hill Ratified 29th of January 1851 and the Ordinances of the Commission, Revised and Adopted 19th March 1859, Chapel Hill: James M Henderson, 1859.

Battle, Kemp P, History of the University of North Carolina, Volume 2. 

Battle, Kemp P, Sketch of the Life and Character of Wilson Caldwell, University Printing Co, 1895. 

Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, Chapel Hill Town Clerk’s Office, Chapel Hill Town Hall, Chapel Hill, NC.

Chapel of the Cross Parish Register, Chapel Hill, NC. 

Chapman, John K, Black Freedom and the University of North Carolina, 1793-1960, Doctoral Dissertation, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2006.

The Daily Tar Heel, Chapel Hill, NC. 

Dunaway, Stewart H, Orange County, NC Road Records - Volume 3, 1850-1883. Lulu, 2008.  

Fitzgerald, Robert G, Diary, part 2, volume 4, 28 Jun 1867 to 8 Aug 1871, UNC Southern Historical Collection microfilm.

Graebner, N. Brooks, Hitherto excluded for want of room: Slave evangelization in the North Carolina ministry of William Mercer Green from 1823 to 1848, a paper presented to the Natchez Historical Association, October 9, 2009.

The Greensboro Patriot accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Hicks, Mary A & Daisy B Waitt (eds), Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. North Carolina Narratives, Volume XI, Part 2.  

The Hillsborough Recorder accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

The Milton Chronicle accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Murray, Pauli, Pauli Murray: The autobiography of a Black activist, feminist, lawyer, priest, and poet, University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Murray, Pauli, Proud Shoes: The story of an American family, Harper & Row, 1978.

The North Carolina Weekly Standard, Raleigh, NC accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Orange County Court of Pleas & Quarter Session Minute Books, NC Archives, Raleigh, NC

Orange County Deed Books, Orange County Register of Deeds office, Hillsborough, NC.

Orange County Freedmen's Marriage Book, NC State Archives, Raleigh, NC. 

Orange County Marriage Book C, Orange County Register of Deeds office, Hillsborough, NC.

The Orange County Observer accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Orange County Will Books, NC State Archives, Raleigh, NC. 

Peele, W. J., A Pen-picture of Wilson Caldwell, Colored, Late the Janitor of the University of North Carolina, 1889. 

The Raleigh Farmer and Mechanic accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

The Raleigh Gazette accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Russell, Phillips, The Woman Who Rang the Bell: The Story of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, UNC Press, 1949.

Saint Matthew's Parish Register, Hillsborough, NC. 

Semi-Weekly Raleigh Sentinel accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Salisbury Tri-Weekly Examiner accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

Trelease, Allen, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

The Wilmington Journal accessed via ChroniclingAmerica.LOC.gov.

 

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[1] Graebner, N. Brooks, Hitherto excluded for want of room: Slave evangelization in the North Carolina ministry of William Mercer Green from 1823 to 1848, a paper presented to the Natchez Historical Association, October 9, 2009.

[2] Orange County Deed Book 31, page 88 and Orange County Deed Book 32, page 118.

[3] Francis W Hilliard, Samuel Iredell Johnston, and John Thomas Wheat.

[4] Parish Register, page 35. See also Orange County Freedmen's Marriage Book, page 179.

[5] Battle, History, Volume 2, page 560.

[6] Battle, Sketch, page 4.

[7] Orange Marriage Book C, page 36. Chapel of the Cross Parish Register, page 36.

[8] Orange County Observer, 18 Mar 1897. Raleigh Gazette, 13 Mar 1897.

[9] Battle, Sketch, pages 7 & 8.

[10] North Carolina Weekly Standard, 15 Jul 1868. Hillsborough Recorder, 22 Jul 1868.

[11] North Carolina Weekly Standard, 13 Jan 1869.

[12] The body was found 12 Sep 1869. Semi-Weekly Raleigh Sentinel 29 Sep 1869; Salisbury Tri-Weekly Examiner, 1 Oct 1869.

[13] Hillsborough Recorder 20 Oct 1869.

[14] Hicks.

[15] 1860 Census.

[16] Holden.

[17] Fitzgerald, 1 Sep 1869.

[18] Russell, page 128.

[19] Trelease, page 196 – citing a letter from James B Mason to William W Holden 22 Sep 1869, Governor Holden’s Correspondence, NC State Archive, Raleigh, NC. Many other events of this kind happened around Orange County in 1869 – see for example the Diary of Robert G Fitzgerald, 8 Oct 1869.

[20] Fitzgerald, 22 Sep 1869.

[21] Hillsborough Recorder, 1 Sep 1869

[22] OCPQS 13/475 (May 1835); OCPQS 17/380 (Aug 1849).

[23] St Matthew’s Register, page 113.

[24] Act & Ordinances, 1855.

[25] Act & Ordinances, 1859.

[26] 1860 Census, Orange County, Chapel Hill district, household 117. 1860 Census, Orange County, Slave Schedule, Chapel Hill district, page 4, line 19-24.

[27] Battle, Sketch, page 5. Seven prominent men of Chapel Hill went to negotiate the peaceful surrender of the village. Among them were Andrew Mickle and Wilson Caldwell. Caldwell’s presence was no doubt calculated to appeal to the Union officers, but it is also an indication of his status in the eyes of the white community even before Emancipation.

[28] Orange Deed Book 37, page 524.

[29] 1870 Census, Orange County, Chapel Hill District, household 61.

[30] Raleigh Farmer and Mechanic, 19 Jun 1879.

[31] Battle, Sketch, pages 5-6.

[32] Among the COTC parishioners present was William P Mallett and KKK Grand Wizard William L Saunders. Also present were John R Hutchins, J M Alexander, R H Lee, J H Watson, H J Stone, T M Argo, Foster Utley, W J Newton, A Mickle, J F Freeland, Fendal Southerland, and James B Mason. Mason was the sole dissenter at the meeting.

[33] Wilmington Journal, 1 Oct 1869.

[34] UPDATED: In the online presentation I referred to Thomas Kirby as a parishioner at Chapel of the Cross. I am not sure what the exact definition of the term parishioner was at the time. Kirby is mentioned in multiple places in the Parish Register, but he is not on the official list of Communicants. I leave it to you to interpret exactly what the right term would be, but I will note that it seems likely to me that race was a factor in his not being listed as a Communicant.

[35] Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, page 3. The purported Commissioners were David McCauley, W J Newton, J F Freeland and J H Watson. John W Carr administered their oaths of office. The ‘Board’ appointed Mickle as Magistrate of Police, G A Long as Treasurer, Ruffin Cheek as Constable, and J M Alexander as Clerk. T M Argo had directed them to hold this election. Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, page 3.

[36] Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, page 10.

[37] Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, page 11.

[38] Greensboro Patriot, 3 Mar 1870.

[39] Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, page 37.

[40] Chapel Hill Minute Book 1, page 108.

[41] Since the election of Hubert Robinson in 1953, there has always been at least one African-American member of Chapel Hill’s governing board. Wilson Caldwell’s grandson Eddie Caldwell Jr was elected to the Chapel Hill School Board in 1955.

[42] Orange Deed Book 31, page 329.

[43] Proud Shoes by Pauli Murray, pages 38-43.

[44] UPDATED: In my online presentations, I asserted that Harriet attended Chapel of the Cross, but this was a mistake. Kim Smith, who is a far greater expert than I am, informs me that she has found no evidence that Harriet attended Chapel of the Cross.

[45] Orange County Will Book H/394.

[46] UPDATED to remove a reference to her great grandmother Harriet. It appears Harriet did not attend COTC.

[47] Pauli Murray autobiography, page 435.