Abstract: Contempo was a journal of literature and social commentary published by Milton Abernethy and Anthony Buttitta in Chapel Hill, N.C., from 1931 to 1934. Incoming correspondence, typescripts of literary works, clippings of articles, and photographs pertaining to Contempo. Among the correspondents are Conrad Aiken (one letter, one poem), Sherwood Anderson (four letters), Kay Boyle (three letters, one long poem), James Branch Cabell (one letter), Erskine Caldwell (one letter, one short story), Hart Crane (two letters, one poem), e. e. cummings (one letter), Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (one long poem), T.S. Eliot (one letter), William Faulkner (two letters, one note), Langston Hughes (3 letters); H.L. Mencken (three letters), Eugene O’Neill (one letter), Ezra Pound (twelve letters, one clipping), Upton Sinclair (ten letters), Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (two letters), Wallace Stevens (two letters), and William Carlos Williams (seven letters, one article).

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There are three letters and a photograph of Langston Hughes in the collection.

Abstract: Nathaniel Russell Middleton of Charleston, S.C., was a plantation owner, treasurer of the Northeastern Railroad Company, and treasurer of the city of Charleston. Other family members represented include Annie DeWolf Middleton (1815-1908) of Bristol, R.I., N. R. Middleton’s second wife; and the children bythis second marriage: Maria Louisa Middleton (b. 1844), Annie Elizabeth Middleton (b. 1847), Alicia Hopton Middleton (b. 1849), Nathaniel Russell Middleton, Jr. (1851-1896), and Charlotte Helen Middleton (b. 1854). The bulk of the collection consists of Middleton and DeWolf family letters, many between family members in Bristol, R.I., and Charleston, S.C. In addition to standard family matters and the peculiarities of life in a family divided between the North and South, these letters and the other papers deal with such topics as Middleton’s plantation, Bolton-on-the-Stono (apparently near Charleston), an 1849 slave insurrection, the College of Charleston, supply shortages during the Civil War, and selling rice and phosphate fertilizer during Reconstruction. Also included is “Narrative of his own Conversion” by Rev. John Joice, Darien, Ga., 1824.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: In addition to standard family matters and the tensions of family life divided between North and South, letters and papers discuss managing the Middleton plantation, “Bolton-on-the-Stono”, particularly in 1842 (Folder 11 and 12);

In a letter dated 9 June 1845 Annie wrote to Russell about the death of a slave who was a carpenter at -Stono and the question of who would be trained to replace him (Folder 14).

Correspondence in 1849 discusses a slave revolt in Charleston.  In a letter dated 16 July 1849, Lesesne described a revolt of slaves who were in the Charleston work house. They beat several white men with sledge hammers before they were overpowered; several were tried and sentenced to death (Folder 16).

In a letter dated 6 August 1852, Annie described reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and feeling she ought to give up her rights to slaves (Folder 18) In a letter dated 1 October 1860 Russell wrote that he did not think that the South could be united over the issue of Lincoln’s election to the presidency and that efforts to unite it should wait for some larger issue (Folder 25).

Abstract: Writer of Talladega County, Ala., who used the pen name “Betsy Hamilton.” Scattered letters, 1882-1927, from editors, readers, and friends, and clippings of her newspaper series, “Backwoods Letters,” and other humorous articles in the dialects of the backwoods of Alabama and of antebellum blacks.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence and clippings of Idora McClellan Moore of Talladega County, Alabama, writer of dialect articles about the backwoods of Alabama and of antebellum blacks. She wrote under the pen name “Betsy Hamilton. Folder 7 contains information about her articles written under the title “Pen Pictures of the Negro on the Oldtime Plantation and Life in the Southern Backwoods”.

Abstract: Essay or speech by Peter Francisco Smith, Atlanta, Ga., lawyer.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: An essay or speech by Smith, an Atlanta lawyer, entitled “Tribute to the Character of the Old Time Slave.”

This item has been digitized and is available online. Click here to link to the finding aid for this collection and to access the digitized content.

Abstract: Items include “Gap Road,” by George Folsom Cranberry (1876-1956), a short story, 23 p., typescript, undated; “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” by Ralph Ellison (b. 1914), an essay concerning Afro-American literature and folklore, 16 p., typescript with handwritten emendations, undated; “Daughter of the Piedmont: Chapel Hill’s First Co-Ed Graduate,” the autobiography of Sallie Walker Stockard (b. 1869), edited by Ione M. Kilmer, discussing life in rural Alamance County, N.C., in the late nineteenth century and the author’s education at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere, 97 p., photocopy of typescript, undated; and a handwritten copy of poems of various authors including Arthur Cleveland Coxe.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 3 contains an essay entitled “Change the Joke and Slip on the Yoke” by Ralph Ellison, which focuses on African American literature and folklore.

Abstract: Roberta H. Jackson (1920-1999), African American professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was married to Blyden Jackson (1910-2000), African American professor of English and dean of the Graduate School at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blyden Jackson wrote novels and works on African American and southern literature. He also served from 1973 to 1981 as the Assistant Dean/Special Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, charged with promoting the recruitment and retention of minority graduate students and working with the University’s Student Aid Office to secure scholarships and fellowships for graduate students. Office files, correspondence, and other papers relating to African American college teachers Roberta H. Jackson and Blyden Jackson. Most papers relate to Blyden Jackson’s teaching of and research on African American literature in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or to his work recruiting minority students as Assistant Dean/Special Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School. Other papers relate to Blyden Jackson’s work as a member of faculty committees and still others result from his other activities, including editing the Journal of Southern Literature and serving on the North Carolina Humanities Council. Also included are letters, 1959-1963, that Blyden Jackson wrote while teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., to Roberta H. Jackson, in Bluefield, W.Va.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The collection includes family correspondence to and from Blyden Jackson to Roberta Jackson while he was teaching at Southern University in Louisiana (Boxes 1-3). Box 7 also includes materials and information on the creation of the African and Afro-American Studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Abstract: Charles Anderson Farrell was a native of Yadkin County, North Carolina, and in 1923 moved to Greensboro where he became the first professional photographer of the Greensboro Daily News. In the 1920s and 1930s, Farrell also operated a photography studio, camera store, and art supply house in downtown Greensboro. Farrell died at the age of 83 in the Friends Home at Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1977. The collection includes correspondence, photocopies and drafts of literary manuscripts, clippings, and other material documenting the career of Charles A. Farrell (1894-1977), a Greensboro photographer, who contributed the photographs for several University of North Carolina Press books. The majority of the material relates to Stella Gentry Sharpe’s Tobe (1939), ahead of its time as a Southern book because it pictured blacks favorably as warm, intelligent human beings.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The majority of the material relates to Stella Gentry Sharpe’s Tobe (1939), a book describing the life of a young black child and his family in the 1930s. Tobe was considered revolutionary literature as it depicted black characters favorably. The collection includes public reactions from blacks and whites toward the book.

Abstract: Correspondence and other materials relating to the writing and publication of “Mary, Wayfarer” (1981) and to other projects undertaken by North Carolina writer and educator Mary E.
Mebane.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence and other materials relating primarily to the writing and publication of Mary Wayfarer , the autobiography of black writer and educator Mary Elizabeth Mebane. (1981). Of particular note are her many writings and unpublished works in Series 3, including an article and interview with singer Millie Jackson