Abstract: Before her marriage to Dub White, Grace McSpadden Overholser was married to James Overholser and, at some point, worked as a reporter. Later in life, she taught English and African American studies and served as dean at Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, N.C. The collection contains memoranda, letters, notes, writings, course syllabi, and other items chiefly relating to Grace McSpadden Overholser’s tenure at Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian College. Materials include an article that Overholser wrote regarding Richard Wright; letters to the editor of New Letters, a journal at the University of Missouri in which Overholser’s Richard Wright article was published; a schedule and participant list of the 1971 Afro-American Institute at the University of Iowa; letters to the director of the Afro-American Institute; an essay regarding the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University; several pages of Overholser’s notes and course syllabi; and other materials.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 1 contains items related to Overholser’s tenure at Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian College as well as letters, memos, and other materials. Included is a University of Missouri journal article Overholser wrote on novelist Richard Right, and correspondence from the Afro-American Institute at the University of Iowa.

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: Members of the Gillespie and Wright family, included James Gillespie (1747?-1805), planter, North Carolina state legislator, 1779-1786, and U.S. congressman, 1793-1799 and 1803-1805. Gillespie was married to Dorcas Mumford Gillespie (1750-1801). Their daughter, Jane (1785-1858), married planter Isaac Wright (1780-1865). The Gillespie and Wright families owned thousands of acres of land and significant numbers of slaves in the lower Cape Fear region of North Carolina, especially in Duplin County. The collection is chiefly legal and financial papers, 1735-1845, of Gillespie and Wright family members, including land records, deeds, plats, and surveyor’s notes; tax records; slave bills of sale and other tiems relating to slaves and slavery; accounts, bills, and receipts; papers relating to business dealings with various Duplin County tenants of Isaac Wright; wills and property inventories; and documents relating to the settlement of the estate of James Moorhead (d. 1808?), for which Isaac Wright and Hinton James (1776-1847) acted as executors. There are also some personal papers, mostly 1790-1830, of family members. In addition, there are two acrostics by black poet Geroge Moses Horton (ca. 1797-ca. 1883); a handwritten version of Jeb Stuart’s “Ode to his Favorite War Horse ‘Maryland'”; and a 1990 Gillespie family tree and short family history. The papers contain few references to political and national events; they are chiefly concerned with business and family matters.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights:The collection contains slave bills of sale and other slave papers  from 1735-1861 (Folders 1-7) and tax-related slave documents from 1801-1845 (Folder 4-7).

There are papers relating to a court case involving two slaves accused of stealing a pig in 1825 and a note giving the average value of slaves in Cumberland and Sampson counties, North Carolina  in 1861 (See Folder 9, entitled “Slave Documents, 1802-1861, and undated”).

Other items include two undated acrostics by well known enslaved poet George Moses Horton (See Folder 17).

Abstract: William R. Ferris (1942- ), born and raised in Vicksburg, Miss., is an author, folklorist, filmmaker, professor, photographer, administrator, and scholar chiefly working in the areas of African American and southern culture. Among his many published works is the “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,” which he co-edited with Charles Reagan Wilson. Papers, photographs, slides, sound recordings, videotapes, films, and other materials documenting Ferris’s life and work. Professional papers relate to his teaching career at Jackson State University, Yale University, the University of Mississippi, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Papers, images, and recordings document life in Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta; folk, blues, gospel, fife and drum corps music, and other musical types; folk and music festivals; folk arts, culture, and humor; “Highway 61”; the Ku Klux Klan; prisons, especially Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary); auctioneers; and other topics. Films and videotapes include footage of Ferris’s documentaries. Individuals important in the collection include writers, artists, musicians, political figures, and others. Note that subjects and names significant in the collection are cataloged separately.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Papers, images, and recordings document life in Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta; folk, blues, gospel, fife and drum corps music, and other musical types; folk and music festivals; folk arts, culture, and humor; Highway 61; the Ku Klux Klan; prisons, especially Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary); auctioneers; and other topics. Films and videotapes include footage of Ferris’s documentaries. Individuals important in the collection include writers, artists, musicians, political figures, and others.

Abstract: Miscellaneous financial and legal papers, including documents relating to the settlement of accounts, tax returns, estate inventories, bills of sale for the purchase and rental of slaves, court papers, and other items from many dates and locations in North Carolina. Individual units have been cataloged separately.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights:  Included are several slave bills of sale (1856 in Folder 1). Folder 2 also contains bill of sale (9 November 1847) by Francis Harper of Pitt County to Henry Wingate (two enslaved women were sold for $1,000 in settling the estate of Francis Harper’s father) as well as a record of auction, 1856(?), where the Harper, Harris, and Wingate families were principal buyers and an enslaved boy was sold.

Folder 3 includes a manuscript certificate of character written by W. W. White, Justice of the Peace of Granville, North Carolina, for Susan Pettiford, a free black woman (1861)

Folder 9 includes a letter from Lawrence Wood Roberts Jr. introducing Eneas Africanus, a book that Roberts praises as “a very human portrayal of our old Southern Negroes, who are very near and dear to my heart” (1937).

Abstract: Paul Eliot Green (1894-1981), of Chapel Hill, N.C., was an author, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, and humanitarian. This collection contains material documenting the many facets of Green’s life and work, material relating to the

life and work of his wife, Elizabeth Lay Green, and numerous items relating to members of the Greens’ immediate and extended families. Paul Green’s work as a dramatist and writer is documented in his professional correspondence files (ca. 34,400 items); by extensive files on his “symphonic dramas,” including background material, drafts, musical scores, and business records; and by drafts of poems, novels, and essays by Green. Also included are yearly diaries, 1917-1981, photographs, tape recordings, and appointment books. Correspondents include Sherwood Anderson, James Boyd, Erskine Caldwell, William T. Couch, Jonathan Daniels, Donald Davidson, John Ehle, Caroline Gordon, Frank Porter Graham, John Howard Griffin, Tyrone Guthrie, Dubose Heyward, Noel Houston, Langston Hughes, Gerald W. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Frederick Koch, Lotte Lenya, H. L. Mencken, Howard Odum, Clarence Poe, Carl Sandburg, Betty Smith, Lamar Stringfield, Allen Tate, Kurt Weill, Orson Welles, and Richard Wright. Green’s associations with various theater, cultural, and humanitarian organizations in North Carolina and elsewhere are extensively documented. Correspondence and other materials show his opinions on such social issues as lynching, capital punishment, nationalism, communism, race relations, religion, and the Vietnamese, Korean, and First and Second World Wars. Also included are a considerable number of photographs relating to Green’s family and to his work, and financial records.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The collection contains information on race relations, African Americans in the theater and in literature; African-American employment; lynching; the NAACP; the North Carolina Committee on Negro Affairs, and other organizations. Some noted series include Series 8 (Source Material), Sub Series 1.2 (General Files: for information on the Negro Little Theater) Sub Series 1.3 (General Files 1940-1949: for Green’s interest in Civil Rights and the NC Commission on Interracial Cooperation) and Subseries 2.1.18 (Major Dramatic Works: In Abraham’s Bosom, 1926-1960)

Some of the items in this collection have been digitized. Please click here to view the finding aid for this collection and to link to the digitized items.

Abstract: The Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1968 to further scholarship on the writings and writers of the American South. Records of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature include minutes of executive council meetings, newsletters, correspondence, and a few other files all relating to the SSSL’s interest in southern literature, southern authors, southern culture, and African-American studies. Correspondence of the organization’s secretary-treasurers, Louis D. Rubin, Robert L. Phillips, and Susan Snell, comprises the bulk of the collection.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Part of the Society’s interest are in African American studies. Box 1 contains newsletters from 1985 to 1990, as well as correspondence from 1967 to 1991 (See Box 2-5 for additional correspondence).

Abstract: Episcopal clergyman, publicist, executive secretary of the Southern Education Board, 1903-1908, author, and amateur astronomer. Correspondence, writings, and miscellaneous papers of Murphy, whose interests included race relations and child labor reform. The collection consists of an incomplete manuscript of a projected book, “Issues, Southern and National;” scattered correspondence, mostly letters received by Murphy from scholars and philanthropists, with some copies of letters from Murphy to his son, Gardner (b. 1895), psychologist and author; scrapbook, 1891-1901, and clippings and other printed matter written by or about Murphy, his ideas and activities while a minister in Texas, Ohio, New York, and Montgomery, Ala., reflecting an interest in race relations, education of African Americans, industrial conditions, child labor legislation, public schools, and the question of suffrage restrictions in the Alabama constitutional convention of 1901. Also included is a German translation of “A Beginner’s Star Book” by Kelvin McKready (a.k.a. E. G. Murphy).

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights:  Clippings and letters in the scrapbook discuss the Southern Conference on Race Problems, an African-American Episcopal Church, and the question of suffrage restriction, particularly between 1899- 1901 (Folder 11). The collection also includes the incomplete manuscript of a projected book, “Issues Southern and National,” which covers topics including Tuskegee Institute, suffrage restriction, and the role of African Americans in the southern and northern states (Folders 12-14).

Abstract: An original poem entitled “Departing Love” by George Moses Horton, a Chatham County, N.C., slave. The poem was commissioned by the Reverend Henry A. Dixon of Chapel Hill, N.C., for his bride to be, Martha Sugg. A contemporary transcription, dated 1 August 1856, by the recipient, Martha Sugg Dixon, is also included.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: An original poem entitled “Departing Love” by George Moses Horton, a Chatham County, N.C., slave. The poem was commissioned by the Reverend Henry A. Dixon of Chapel Hill, N.C., for his bride to be, Martha Sugg. A contemporary transcription, dated 1 August 1856, by the recipient, Martha Sugg Dixon, is also included.

Additional poems by Horton can be found in the Pettigrew Family papers (#592) and the David Swain papers (#706).

Abstract: Correspondence, writings, notes, and other items of North Carolina journalist Reed Sarratt (1917-1986), whose career took him from editorial posts at the “Charlotte News” and the “Winston-Salem Journal and Twin City Sentinel” to directorships of the Southern Education Reporting Service and the Southern Newspaper Publishers’ Association. Sarratt’s chief editorial interest was civil rights, and he was particulary involved in monitoring the desegregation of public schools.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Papers reflect Sarratt’s chief editorial interest in civil rights and his involvement in monitoring the desegregation of public schools.

There are several subject files with research materials and clipping related to various topics such as school desegregation and Civil Rights (See the various folders entitled “Civil Rights” and “Desegregation” (by state) in Boxes 1-3).

Boxes 9-13 in Series 2 also contain a lot of information related to Sarratt’s book “The Ordeal of Segregation: The First Decade, 1960s”.