From the Civil War to WWII: New book examines Raleigh’s historic Black neighborhoods

Neighborhoods in Raleigh are changing.

To help understand the changes, Raleigh native Carmen Wimberley Cauthen used her love of research and history to examine the roots of those changes in the city’s Black neighborhoods. The resulting “Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh,” her first book, was published in January.

Cauthen wrote the Journal of the House of Representatives, recording the votes and other official actions of the North Carolina legislative chamber, for over 20 years.

Her book is available wherever books are sold. People who buy an autographed copy from her website, cauthenbiz.com, will get a couple of bookmarks with it and a family history worksheet.

We spoke with Cauthen about her book and the lessons Raleigh residents can learn from it. This conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

Q: What’s the first thing readers should know before picking up your book?

Cauthen: It’s not a history class text. It’s little vignettes that put you into what life was as soon as the Civil War ended. And it brings you forward to the 1940s.

And it is a story about how southeast Raleigh became Black. Because it wasn’t. I think it’s important for people to know that after slavery ended, there wasn’t necessarily segregation. People lived where they could afford to live, and white people were able to make more money and move out, because there weren’t any restrictions on where they could go. And that was the difference in how the neighborhoods really grew.

Q: What was the inspiration behind the book?

Cauthen’s advocacy for affordable housing through a historical lens led to her hosting a webinar on the city’s Freedmen’s Villages.

Cauthen: I had no intention of writing this book; this had not crossed my mind. And the editor I work with at Arcadia press emailed me within 30 minutes of the webinar and asked if I’d be willing to write a book. And so that’s where it came from. I had some books in mind, but this wasn’t one of them.

One of the resources Cauthen turned to was “Culture Town: Life in Raleigh’s African American Communities,” (1993) which includes 74 oral histories.

Cauthen: I realized there were only two or three paragraphs from (each of) the people who had been interviewed. So I wanted to read the transcripts, and I looked online for them. I found four. And I realized that (former Raleigh Mayor) Clarence Lightener’s interview was 47 pages. And I thought, if they are all this length or anywhere close to this length, there’s so much more information out there than we know.

She discovered the transcripts were stored at the City of Raleigh Museum.

Cauthen: When I got them, they were literally all at least 30 pages long. And so that was a lot of interviews to go through. And take my little index card and highlight on the page and and write that information down, because I’m very old school. But it was such a rich history. And for me, these were people that I knew; these were people who were the elders for me when I was growing up.

Q: You mentioned knowing people interviewed for Culture Town. How did your personal history tie into your book?

Through her research Cauthen learned more about her father’s drug store, that her grandfather attended Shaw University and she discovered family photos that hadn’t been seen in decades.

Cauthen: It’s been an amazing discovery of things in my family. To be able to start to pull my some of my own family history from this, and see some things that I had not seen or did not know about on my paternal side was really, really interesting.

A lot of people say, ‘Oh, you’re so fortunate that you have this family legacy.’ But we all do. We all have a legacy. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. But we’ve all got one. And sometimes we don’t know, and we’re maybe scared to look. But this has encouraged me to be able to say to people, whatever it is you have, whatever memories you got, you need to write them down, especially because we’re in a digital age. We’ve got all these pictures on our phone. But if we don’t start to share that information, then that’s all it’ll be is pictures on our phone.

Q: What do you hope people take away from this book, especially local elected or community leaders?

Cauthen: The big thing for me was in the ability to look at the how the land was platted after the Civil War when real estate investors were buying it because, obviously, there weren’t Black people buying the land. And to see how it was platted in little tiny, narrow lots. And that’s not what was done on the other side of town. The other side of town, you got a lot as big as you wanted, and you platted it that way.

And now you drive down in southeast Raleigh, and you see the gentrification. The houses are going up. They’re modern, and I couldn’t figure that out. And that was also a question I had asked my mother,when we moved to this white neighborhood: ‘Why did we do that?’ And she told me that they would have had to buy two lots in southeast Raleigh in order to build the kind of house they wanted. And that wasn’t feasible to them. So I didn’t get the answer until after I was researching.

And so in terms of planning, and in terms of generational wealth, it is important to understand that in America, most of us get our generational wealth from our homes getting passed down, and people can sell the houses. If the land you own, is not a tenth of an acre or a twelfth of an acre, as opposed to on the other side of town where someone white lived and their land that they can pass down is half an acre to an acre, then not only did these people come out of slavery with nothing, but even when they were able to purchase a plot of land they were they were still behind. And there was no way to catch up.

So ... when people say, “Well, it’s your own fault that you didn’t do this,” you have to understand that the system was created to do what it did. And it you know, it was frustrating. It made me understand even more, that the systems in America, they were created to do something. And so not only do we have this housing system, we have a system of environmental injustice, because the land that tended to be sold was the land that white people didn’t want. And that was the land that was downhill that would flood. When you look at some of the pictures, you see, the houses were built on brick stilts. You see the streets are going downhill. And that’s what happened in Rochester Heights. That was the land the white people didn’t want.

And then also to understand what the annexation process was. So all of these Freedmen’s Villages were outside of the city limits. And some of the research said that in order to control the populations, they would annex those areas to bring them under police control. So you know, there’s more than one system that was built to continue to oppress people or to control them. And you can’t fix it from patching it on the outside. You’ve got to go back and understand the beginning. And work from there.

Q: Are there other book topics you want to pursue? What do you plan next?

Cauthen: I’m always compiling information. The next book I would want to do about Raleigh would be about people. About regular everyday people and who they were. I am in talks to work on that.

And also a book about my mother. Her name was Cliffornia Wimberly. She was on the Raleigh City School Board, she was on the last city board, and the first merged Wake County School Board. But she was very active in the community. And there are, of course, other Black women that at some point I’d like to write about but I want to do a book on my mother.