ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. — Local museums are taking part in Black History Month by telling the stories of how people lived over the decades. That includes the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City.
On Wednesday, its History for Lunch series focused on the lives of African-Americans in Pasquotank County during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Elizabeth City State University Professor Glen Bowman discovered a thesis on the topic from 1941 as he was doing research on the history of the university and Black education.
It was written by Alphonse Simpson Hunnicutt, a teacher at P.W. Moore School, who was also a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati. She was the wife of William Hunnicutt, a professor at what then known as Elizabeth City State Teachers College.
“Most people who lived in the county didn’t have more than a 7th grade education, and here she is working on her master’s degree,” Bowman said.
Bowman said she likely traveled north to work on the graduate degree over the summer, as there were few opportunities in the South for Black people to seek graduate degrees.
Hunnicutt did research interviews and reviewed state statistics to gain an understanding of living conditions. Many lived under severe poverty.
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“The average annual income for a Black tenant farmer in the county was $400," Bowman said. "That today would be under $9000 annual income. We’re talking here about 14-to-16-hour days, backbreaking work without the benefit of modern technology.”
Yvette Sutton was in the audience for the event. She grew up in the area and said the conditions Bowman described lingered into her childhood in the 1960s.
“Looking at the dwellings that people lived in, and living on dirt roads and having had that experience young, there was also so much love and fun and things that money cannot put a price on,” Sutton said.
But she said the lecture was also a reminder of how much things have changed.
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“The opportunities are there now versus in the 30s, you know a lot of people were really smart and hard-working and the opportunities just weren’t there,” she said.
The next History for Lunch event is Feb. 21 at noon. The Fort Raleigh National Historic Site will discuss the Freedmen’s Colony of Roanoke Island, established during the Civil War.
Other events include a Frederick Douglass Living History presentation on Feb. 16 during a school day at the museum.
The exhibit “Freedom! A Promise Disrupted: North Carolina, 1862-1901” will be on display until Feb. 19. More information can be found at the museum’s website.
