Abstract: Otis N. Pruitt and Calvin Shanks photographed life in Columbus, Miss., between the 1920s and 1980s. Pruitt, born in Mississippi in 1891, became interested in photography while photographing his children. He moved to Columbus to work in Henry Hoffmeister’s photography studio, also attending the Illinois School of Photography early in his career. In or around 1920, Pruitt bought out Hoffmeister, becoming the sole photographer in Columbus. Pruitt ran the studio until around 1960, when he sold the business to his assistant, Calvin Shanks. Pruitt died in 1967, and Shanks continued to run the studio until his death in 1981, but the studio remained in operation until about 1986. The collection includes images taken by Otis N. Pruitt and Calvin Shanks between the 1920s and 1980s chiefly in Lowndes County, Miss. Most of the images were created by Pruitt circa 1920s-1950s. They document his work as a commercial (for-hire) and studio photographer in Columbus. Images primarily depict the town and people, including local businesses, churches, residential areas, schools, events, and people. Of particular interest are images of visits by Mississippi state politicians, historic homes, the African American community, and civic groups. The collection also includes images from outside Columbus, including other locations within Mississippi, as well as in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Quite a number of the photographs document African American individuals and groups in Mississippi, from churches to fraternal organizations to social clubs. A few examples included an African American family working in agriculture (Sheet Film 05463/00031), Cedar Grove M.B. Church (Folder 05463/01254), and the Colored Young Mens Christian Association (Sheet Film 05463/01531).

A number of images from this collection have been digitized and are available online. Click here to link to the finding aid for this collection and to access the digitized material.

Abstract: Daniel Hubbard Pollitt (1921-2010) was a law professor, civil liberties lawyer, progressive activist, and staunch advocate and defender of civil liberties and civil rights. The collection documents Daniel H. Pollitt’s legal career and his scholarly and public service interests and activities. The bulk of the collection consists of Pollitt’s subject files. Major topics include ABSCAM and other congressional ethics controversies; amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters; planning a law school with a focus on public service; civil rights, especially school desegregration and employment discrimination; the death penalty in North Carolina; government employee strikes; self-incrimination and the House Un-American Activities Committee, especially with regard to Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller; Hobby v. United States, a case about grand jury foreman selection that Pollitt argued before the United States Supreme Court; impeachment; labor, especially the reorganization of the National Labor Relations Board, migrant workers, and the Brookside Mine Strike in Harlan County, Ky.; the North Carolina speaker ban; and Supreme Court nominations. Numerous other topics are covered in these files, many of which concern narrower aspects of constitutional law, such as separation of church and state and search and seizure. Subject files also document long collaborations with a number of legal scholars, civil liberties attorneys, and government officials, including Congressman Frank Thompson, as well as Pollitt’s work with academic associations, government agencies, and civil liberties and civil rights groups, and his teaching career and his service to the University of North Carolina. Other smaller series in the collection include Biographical Materials; Correspondence and People Files, which refer to legal cases, writings, and career activities and developments of Pollitt and others, including Joseph L. Rauh Jr., Henry Edgerton, and H.L. Mitchell; Writings, which overlap considerably with the Subject Files; and Photographs, which are chiefly of Pollitt.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There are a number of materials that deal with civil rights, civil liberties, employment discrimination, and social justice in this collection. Folder 86 contains correspondence regarding Pollitt’s analysis of school desegregation legislation in Arkansas. Folder 105 contains correspondence with Julius Chambers, former chancellor of North Carolina Central University.

Speech topics include the KKK and the Lumbee Indians (Folder 186), racial discrimination in employment practices (Folder 198) , and legal issues in school desegregation in the South (Folder 192). There are also various subject files related to African American history and civil rights organizations in Chapel Hill (Folders 325, 331). Several subject files deal with civil rights issues in Chapel Hill and throughout the South (Folders 337-350). There are also numerous files related to the death penalty in North Carolina, including discussions of race and subject files related to particular individuals (see Folders 618-740).

 

Abstract: Papers collected by William S. Powell pertaining to Iredell and adjacent counties of North Carolina. The bulk consists of family correspondence, 1867-1901, and account books of two generations of the Goodman family. Letters are personal correspondence of Tobias Goodman (1814-1880) of Amity, Iredell County; his wife Ellen; and his sons and a nephew, including a building materials merchant at Hillsboro, Ill., a railroad employee at Birmingham, Ala., a resident of Lavon, Tex., and others. Letters from Hillsboro, Ill., discuss weather, prices, wages, opportunity that led to leaving North Carolina, the high cost of food in Illinois, and homesickness. Other personal letters discuss farming and give family news, especially about illnesses, deaths, and estates. Account books, chiefly from Iredell County, are for general merchandise and lumber sales, 1853-1856; church contributions (perhaps Presbyterian), 1855-1856; farm crops and miscellaneous labor, 1891; and a blacksmith, Goodwin and White, of Statesville, N.C., 1891-1893. Also included are miscellaneous Goodman family bills and receipts; deeds of other persons; and fourteen letters, 1922-1924, from a North Carolina black medical student, William D. Washington, at Howard University, Washington, D.C., to a friend, Janie Lee Norton, in Davidson, N.C.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 13 contains fourteen letters from William Washington, and African American medical student at Howard University to a friend, Janie Lee Norton.

Collection number: 606

View finding aid.

Abstract: Prominent members of the Polk and Yeatman family of North Carolina and Tennessee included William Polk (1758-1834), land speculator and North Carolina federal internal revenue supervisor; his son Lucius Junius (1802-1870) and grandson Will, planters of Maury County, Tenn.; Lucius’s son-in-law Henry Clay Yeatman (d. 1910), Nashville lawyer and Confederate colonel; and Yeatman’s stepfather John Bell (1797-1869), Nashville lawyer, Whig leader, United States representative (1827-1839), United States senator (1847-1859), and Constitutional Union Party presidential candidate (1860). The collection includes personal and business papers of three generations of the Polk and Yeatman family of North Carolina and Tennessee. Materials through the 1830s are chiefly letters and legal papers of William Polk of Raleigh, dealing with his widespread land speculation in North Carolina and Tennessee and his position as federal internal revenue supervisor for North Carolina. There are also, particularly in the 1820s, items relating to the treatment of slaves on North Carolina plantations. Papers from the 1830s through the 1890s relate mainly to the Maury County, Tenn., cotton plantations of Lucius Junius and Will Polk, including some items about the treatment of slaves; to Henry Clay Yeatman’s law practice; and, particularly 1840-1861, to the political and personal life of John Bell. A letter each from Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk are included. Later materials relate to various enterprises in which Polk family members were involved, including a dry goods store and livestock firms. There is much family correspondence, especially after 1861, and scattered business and personal items of members of the related Hawkins, Devereux, and Rayner families. The Addition of May 2009 consists of an 1827 autographed letter from William Polk to the Adjutant General of the United States Army concerning the absence of his son, Leonidas Polk, and the possible delay of the latter’s acceptance of his appointment as Brevet Second Lieutenant of Artillery.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: In Subseries 1.1 (Correspondence: 1773-1883), Folder 7 contains a letter dated 2 April 1820 describing the punishment of enslaved people. Letters from  17 July 1820 and 16 January 1822 (folder 8) discusses the sale of property and slaves. In Folder 8, A letter from 22 May 1822 discusses the suspected poisoning of a family by 7 or 8 of the enslaved people on their plantation.

Abstract: You Got To Move is a documentary film released in 1985 about southern social justice activists and the Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, in New Market, Tenn. Lucie Massie Phenix directed and edited the film. The collection primarily contains research files compiled by Lucie Massie Phenix on people and communities featured in the documentary You Got To Move. There is a small amount of material relating to funding the film and scattered correspondence of Lucie Massie Phenix about the film. The collection also contains a DVD viewing copy of You Got To Move.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: You Got To Move features several individuals involved in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and Myles Horton.

Abstract: John Perkins, cotton planter and lawyer of Somerset Plantation, Ashwood, La., was appointed judge of the Circuit Court for Madison Parish in 1851; served as Democratic representative from Louisiana in the U.S. Congress, 1853-1855; represented Madison Parish in the permanent Confederate Congress at Richmond, Va., 1862-1865; and emigrated to Mexico in 1865 where he worked as a colonization agent. In 1866, Perkins moved to Paris and thereafter travelled extensively in Europe and in Canada before returning to the United States in 1878. The collection includes correspondence, financial, legal, and other papers primarily documenting the political and financial interests of John Perkins. Some papers reveal Perkins’s financial and personal relationship with his father, but there is little other material related to his personal or family life. Correspondence about politics is especially heavy for 1853 to 1855, the years of Perkins’s service in the U.S. Congress. Civil War materials include correspondence about Confederate government business and letters from soldiers requesting assistance with transfers and discharges from the Confederate Army. Most of the postwar correspondence concerns Perkins’s emigration to Mexico and work as a colonization agent there. Other correspondence concerns the management of Perkins’s Somerset and other plantations in Louisiana in the 1850s and 1870s and Cottonwood Plantation, Ellis County, Tex., in the 1860s.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folders 2 thru 4 contain letters from the years of Perkins’s service in Congress (1853-1855)that discuss the situation of the slaveholding states.

Letters from Perkins’s plantation manager, William Rhodes, at Somerset in July and August 1857 report on the crops, progress of work, and a proposed purchase of slaves there (Folders 6 and 7)  Rhodes also enclosed letters from the overseers at Perkins’s other plantations. These and letters of 1859 and 1860 from overseers J. M. Stanbrough and J. J. Smiley at Homestead, Lewis Carter at Viamede, and A. M. Taylor at Backland, report on conditions at those plantations. E. F. Furniss also wrote to “cousin John” about the plantations. (Folders 9 and 10)

Letters from Henry Pannill and G. W. Smith to John Perkins in 1863 and 1864 report on weather, work, overseers, slaves, and stock at Cottonwood Plantation in Ellis County, Texas. (Folders 13 to 15a).

Abstract: Polk family members included William Polk (1758-1834) and his son Lucius Junius Polk (1802-1870) of North Carolina and Tennessee; and the related Campbell, Brown, and Ewell families of Tennessee. The collection includes financial papers and correspondence of the Polk family of North Carolina and Tennessee; family correspondence of the Campbell family of Tennessee; and military, financial, business, and family papers of the Brown and Ewell families of Tennessee. Polk family papers include correspondence between William Polk of Raleigh, N.C., and his son Lucius Junius Polk of Maury County, Tenn., regarding the management of William’s land in Tennessee, cotton growing, agriculture, relations with slaves and overseers, and Tennessee and national politics. Campbell family papers consist of a few legal and financial documents and correspondence of Liszinka Campbell Brown (1820-1872) and her brother George Washington Campbell, Jr., regarding family matters, European travel, plantation life, slave insurrections, and Indian wars. Brown and Ewell family papers include those of Lt. Gen. Richard Stoddart Ewell and Major George Campbell Brown, consisting of military papers and personal correspondence relating to their service in the Confederate Army, imprisonment at the close of the war, and defense of Ewell’s military record (particularly at First Manassas and Gettysburg). There are also business and financial papers regarding the management of the family’s Spring Hill plantation in Maury County, Tenn., including items relating to cotton growing and sheep raising, problems with securing labor, and legal and financial concerns; correspondence with agents and family members regarding the family’s Melrose and Tarpley plantations in Bolivar County, Miss.; and letters from other family members. There are also volumes kept by Campbell Brown for household expenses for the Spring Hill plantation and of memoranda during his Civil War service.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Included is information on relations with slaves and overseers on the Spring Hill Plantation in Maury County, Tennessee. Letters discuss slave insubordination, problems with overseers, and the buying and selling of slaves (1828-1848); a slave insurrection and slave escapes in Tennessee (1853-1859); general views on slavery and secession (1853-1859; see particularly the correspondence dated 1 July 1856); and a proposal to enlist slaves into the Confederate Army (1864). The collection also contains a slave bill of sale (n.d.).

Abstract: William Dossey Pruden, of Edenton, N.C., was a lawyer, an active Democrat, and the North Carolina member of the commission deciding the boundary between northeast North Carolina and southeast Virginia in 1886- 1888. Chiefly correspondence, 1880-1919, of Pruden with friends and legal colleagues relating to personal matters, national and state politics, business trends, social conditions, and other matters. Prohibition is mentioned frequently as is the Norfolk and Southern Railroad, for which Pruden was attorney. Of particular interest are 116 letters, received 1886-1888, about the work of the Boundary Commission. Also included is a book of personal accounts, 1867-1869, that contains an eight-page family history.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: One letter mentions the African-American vote (1884). Microfilm available.

Abstract: John Johnston Parker (1885-1958) of Charlotte, N.C., was a judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit from 1925 to 1958. Papers include correspondence and other materials relating to legal practice; to jurisprudence in general, including judicial organization and international law; to the North Carolina and national Republican parties in which Parker was influential; to Parker’s unconfirmed appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1930 and other occasions on which he was considered for the Supreme Court;to the University of North Carolina, of which he was long an active trustee; and to many other personal, political, and civic matters and organizations. There are also papers relating to official duties, including informal memoranda of cases and decisions, among them labor and racial integration cases, and reports of annual conferences of circuit judges.Other papers relate to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 1945-1946, at which he was an alternate judge on the International Military Tribunal from the United States, and to study committees of the American Bar Association.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlight: In Series 1 (Personal Papers), there is a an address by Parker entitled “Race Relationships,”quoted in the December 1944 issue of the Church School Herald-Journal. There is a 30 Aug 1943 letter from James Shepard, president of the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University). There is a 29 December 1949 letter from Victor Shaw, mayor of Charlotte, N.C., to Parker, enclosing copy of letter to Walter Winchell on race relations and religious relations in Charlotte. A 6 September 1950 letter to William D. Carmichael, Jr., controller of University of North Carolina, discusses admitting African Americans to the University of North Carolina Law School. Another letter, from 1 June 1954, from Parker to Governor Luther Hodges about action of the board of trustees on University of North Carolina concerning registration of African American undergraduates.In 1955 (Folders 289-290) there is a paper entitled “Race, Heredity, and Civilization” by Wesley Critz George.

Abstract: Philip Henry Pitts was a cotton planter of Union Town (now Uniontown), Perry County, Ala. The collection includes etters written to and from members of the Pitts family, miscellaneous papers, and manuscript volumes, with typed transcriptions, containing accounts and diary entries by Philip Henry Pitts. The letters relate to family matters and business councerns of Philip H. Pitts and of his father, Thomas D. Pitts, including the latter’s involvement as an officer in the War of 1812. A song lyric about the Nullification Crisis of 1832 is included. The accounts are for Philip H. Pitts’s financial dealings in the cotton trade and in both the Alabama and Mississippi Railroad and Selma and Meridian Railroad, loans and debts, household expenditure for his Rurill Hill Plantation, and expenses relating to his slaves. Diary entries concern Pitts’s planting and livestock, weather notes, cases of runaway slaves and a case of slaves murdering their master, and Perry County politics, business, crimes, and social news. The Caldwell and Davidson families are frequently mentioned. Indications of Pitts’s interest in folk medicine and in the Pitts family’s involvement in the Civil War, including participation of several family members in the 4th Regiment, Alabama Volunteers, and anecdotes about Alexander Caldwell Davidson, Wiliam Rufus King, and Zebulon Baird Vance are also given in the diaries.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence includes a 4 March 1839 letter discussing  hiring out slaves in Alabama (Folder 1).

Volume 1 (Folder 2) includes entries related to birth and death records as well as purchases of enslaved people, and also mention of some enslaved people murdering their master.

Pages Pages 1-105 and pages 295-300 (January 1856-1865) in Volume 2 (Folder 3) record Pitts accounting records, including doctor’s bills for his family and slaves and the purchase of marriage licenses from a judge (“20 marriage licenses for freedmen + 10 marriage licenses for whites”). Post war the volume also discusses labor performed by free blacks.

Volume 3 (Folder 6) also discusses Pitt’s hiring slaves from other planters, and his relationships with overseers on his plantation.