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Object Description
Interview no. | R-0757 |
Restrictions | No restrictions. Open to research. |
Project | R.42. Special Research Projects: West Southern Pines, N.C. |
Project description | This is a collection of interviews conducted in 1982 by Nancy O. Mason of Southern Pines, North Carolina with residents of part of Southern Pines which used to be its own, predominantly Black township in the 1920s, called West Southern Pines. West Southern Pines was annexed back into Southern Pines in the 1930s, but the twenty-six interviews attest to the longevity of the West Southern Pines community. Both black and white residents of West Southern Pines tell their recollections of the incorporation of West Southern Pines and the daily lives of its inhabitants. |
Date | 16 March 1982 |
Interviewee |
Jordan, Eulah Nelson, Christina. |
Interviewee occupation | Unknown|Unknown |
Interviewee ethnicity |
African Americans African Americans |
Interviewer | Mason, Nancy. |
Abstract | Eulah Jordan estimates that she came to West Southern Pines in 1924 or 1925 because her family was in search of a better way of life. Jordan’s father had been a sharecropper. He opened his own small grocery store in West Southern Pines and lived in Pennsylvania Ave. Christine Nelson moved to West Southern Pines when she was 16. Jordan recalls being young when the town got the charter, and that as a child she was not well aware of such things, but that her father was always “civic-minded” and went to town hall meetings. Though she was young and didn’t understand the inner workings of the charter process, she was able to feel a difference in West Southern Pines after the Charter took effect, with the new presence of black mayors. Jordan recalls that the area around what is now the Farmers Market was a dangerous part of town, and cited the violence as a reason that East Southern Pines took back West Southern Pines. Nelson recalls her husband working for 50 cents per day during the Depression. During this time, she states, most people had enough food from their own gardens, and that this could be supplemented by a community garden. Nelson’s job was working for the laundry. Mason, Jordan, and Nelson remember various families and individuals who were neighbors and friends. Nelson says that West Southern Pines was a good town for her to live in. This interview was conducted by Nancy Mason for the Town of Southern Pines on March 16, 1982. It is part of a series of interviews with people who lived in or around West Southern Pines as it had existed as a separate and entirely African American municipality from 1923 to 1931. |
Subject Geographic | Southern Pines (N.C.) |
Citation | Interview with Eulah Jordan and Christine Nelson by Nancy Mason, 16 March 1982, R-0757, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
Description
Interview no. | R0757_Audio_1 |