The Lords Proprietors Voyage to Carolina

The Lords Proprietors of Carolina

King Charles II  --  On March 24, 1663, Charles II granted to the Lords Proprietors a slice of North America running from the Atlantic to the Pacific, lying between 36 degrees north latitude on the north and 31 degrees on the south. This huge section of continent was granted absolutely to the following men, to be financed by them, and for them to profit by, and to rule, with the help or interference of such a local government as they might permit. Above them was only the King. In the order named in Charles' charter they were: the Earl of Clarendon, the Duke of Albemarle, Lord Craven, Lord Berkeley, Lord Ashley, Sir George Carteret, Sir William Berkeley, and Sir John Colleton. The most important of these was Lord Ashley (Anthony Ashley Cooper), who specified the street plan for the new city and whose secretary, the philosopher John Locke, wrote the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina.

Two years later, the charter was amended to raise the north line 30 minutes and the south line by two degrees. In other words, the huge slice of North America that was Carolina included: the present states of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, a small part of Missouri, most of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, the southern half of California, the southern tip of Nevada, the north part of Florida, and a slice of northern Mexico.

1. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon
2. George Monck, Duke of Albemarle
3. William, Lord Craven (Earl of Craven)
4. John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton
5. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury
6. Sir George Carteret
7. Sir William Berkeley
8. Sir John Colleton

King Charles II of England

English colonies have proliferated along the Atlantic coast, some formed by those fleeing religious persecution, others are seeking fortune in the New World. The growth has caused a shortage of good land around Jamestown and with the Virginia governor on the wrong side in the coup that costs Charles I his head, Virginia's ports are ordered blockaded by Oliver Cromwell... leaving the only route south into the rich lands of Carolina a swampy wilderness that borders Virginia. [Lindley Butler ]

But the lands of Carolina are populated by the Tuscarora, a successful people with both an agrarian and a hunter society, as well as a trading culture that carries them as far as the Great Lakes. And they are a tribe of warriors not to be taken lightly.

The Virginian English find cleared land theirs for the taking, at least in their perspective, as many of the Indians have died from diseases brought by the Europeans and town sites as well as cleared agricultural sites abound along the riverbanks. Still, expansion southward is slow, and only a few hundred settlers homestead among the Indians during the next decade.

George Monck, Duke of Albemarle 

Civil war in England comes to an end in 1660 and Charles II is placed on the throne. He rewards eight of the men who helped him with huge land grants in Carolina and they become the Lords Proprietors. They quickly insist that their charter include the settled areas north of the Albemarle Sound. And suddenly, the people who thought of themselves as Virginians are now under new rulers, with the prospect of government and taxes a reality.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon

The Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas  --  The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a complicated document combining the old feudal land laws with liberal political notions, is handed down to the displeased settlers. Taxes will be collected, but an effort is made to give the landholders a voice in their own government. And religious freedom is confirmed in the new laws.

The Quakers are the first to establish a church in Carolina. And in this promising political environment, an effort is made to encourage fair treatment of the natives as well. [Clara Sue Kidwell ]

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury

Agitated colonists  --  The efforts of the Lords Proprietors are not well-received in the Carolina colony. The colonists are an especially independent lot, self-sustaining and disdainful of outside government meddling. And there is more than just the rebellious spirit of the settlers that stands in the way of success for the Proprietors--the colony's lack of a deep-water port drives up the costs for shipping and there is general stagnation in the economy. [William Price ]

By 1670, there are really two colonies in Carolina, the one north of the Albemarle Sound and the second far to the south around the growing port of Charleston. The deepwater port there creates tremendous economic activity and the Proprietors begin to concentrate their efforts on the winning settlement, bringing still more wealth to the region.

Sugar slaves  --  The Charleston area sees the emergence of a new cash crop, rice, and with it the need for labor. This need intensifies in Virginia as well, with the clearing of land and expanding tobacco plantations.

Slavery is already present in the Americas, brought by the Spanish, and soon the English colonists who can afford it turn to African slaves as a source of labor.

Indian slave being loaded onto boat

Slavery is legal in Carolina and there were slaves available, but the colony was, for the most part, not as wealthy as its neighbors to the south and north. Lack of ports meant less trade and, consequently, less money, holding the rise of slavery back in what is now North Carolina. But with the expansion of the colonies, the English settlers encourage their Indian trade partners to bring their captured neighbors to them as slaves, and many of the tribes seem more than eager to oblige.

Many of the enslaved Indians are destined, not for the plantations of Carolina, but to other colonies or to the Caribbean, and so they are taken from their native lands to faraway places, never to return.

Lawson surveying in woods  --  Englishman John Lawson would have an impact on the colony's growth, following his arrival and early explorations in 1701. Lawson was a surveyor and a writer with a keen interest in the people, flora and fauna of this New World and he would write of his travels and observations in a successful publication called A New Voyage to Carolina.

John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton

After his journey, he settles on the Neuse River near the native village of Chattoka and he writes glowingly of his Indian neighbors, describing them as a kindly and considerate people. [John Lawson ]

Lawson helps to establish the town of Bath, North Carolina's first, and more settlers are attracted to the region, drawn both by his book and the availability of building lots on the Pamlico River.

Portrait of Baron de Graffenried

He convinces a Swiss Baron, Christopher de Graffenried, to settle a group of Palatines, German Protestants fleeing religious persecution, in the new Carolina colony. Lawson arranges a purchase of land at the point where the Trent and Neuse rivers join, and De Graffenried names the new settlement New Bern, after the capitol of Switzerland. The Baron would later accuse Lawson of selling land that belonged to the Tuscarora, but De Graffenried would be the only one around to tell the story. [source: http://www.unctv.org/birthofacolony/act4.php]

Watch Birth of a Colony: North Carolina on PBS. See more from UNC-TV Presents.

Albion Tourgee: Citizenship Rights For ALL!

From North Carolina's News and Record's Opinion Page, "THE SIT-INS: Albion Tourgee a pioneer for rights," on 31 January 2010, by Professor Frank Woods:

After much hesitation and anticipation, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum will soon open its doors. A broad spotlight will be cast on Greensboro in recognition of its activist spirit in the quest for equality, one that reaches deep into the past and beyond the transformative day of Feb. 1, 1960.

Woolworth's Luncheon Counter located at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum (Greensboro, NC)

The city’s history is, in fact, steeped with courageous individuals who have lobbied intensely for positive change in the midst of racial injustice and, sometimes, sacrificed body and soul to secure for all the precious guarantees found in the 14th and 15th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Across the street from the museum, is an informational marker that honors a former resident of Greensboro who made it his primary mission to secure basic rights of freedom for newly emancipated slaves and to see that when the new state constitution was framed, it was favorable to black advancement.

Albion Winegar Tourgee

The same man is also honored by a historical marker on Lee Street near the ramp leading up to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, citing the location where his home once stood. Obviously, he left a mark on the city but the city hardly knows of him today. His name was Albion Winegar Tourgee, the most “infamous” carpetbagger to set foot in North Carolina.

Map of Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Born in Williamsfield, Ohio, in 1838, Tourgee grew up in Kingsfield, Ohio, an area of strong abolitionist sentiment. He later joined the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War and sustained a severe wound to his spine. After the war, Tourgee’s injury left him in poor health. In an attempt to recoup his strength, he decided to try the warmer climate of the South, and Greensboro was his destination.

Tourgee’s early years in the city during Reconstruction were filled with righteous outrage as he continually witnessed the mistreatment of “freedmen.” He soon drifted into a personal crusade for social justice and became increasingly vocal on behalf of African American rights. This, in turn, caused him to be vilified and ostracized by whites in the state who wished to see the old social and political order preserved.

Tourgee took an active part in the N.C. State Constitutional Convention held in Raleigh in 1868, and served as one of the chief framers on the new constitution. He pushed for a progressive document that called for the inclusion of blacks in the creation of a “New South.” For his efforts, Tourgee was branded a derisive figure in North Carolina politics and a “contemptible friend of the Negro.”

North Carolina Ku Klux Klansmen, 1870

Wearing that label like a badge of honor, Tourgee continued to be an outspoken champion of African American rights and liberties. He was elected a judge of the Superior Court, Seventh Judicial District of North Carolina — a position that gave him the authority to enforce his ideals throughout the Piedmont. Judge Tourgee continued to lobby against those who opposed African American progress, even though his life was threatened by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.

Undaunted, Tourgee attacked that organization with a scathing expose titled “The Invisible Empire.” This material was later incorporated into a best-selling novel, “A Fool’s Errand” (1879).

Tourgee left the state in the waning years of Reconstruction as the “Old South” was being redeemed.

Living outside of the South did not dampen Tourgee’s efforts at racial redemption. He continued to write and speak on matters of race.

More importantly, he founded a national civil rights group in 1891, the National Citizens’ Rights Association, to deal with mounting racial injustices throughout the country caused by restrictive “Jim Crow” laws and lynchings.

Homer Plessy, the man who set the standard for the American Apartheid system called "Jim Crow," was only 1/8 African American and 7/8 white. In 1896 Homer Plessy became the standard bearer of how black is black, hence the "one drop rule" has been in full effect in the United States since 1896.

But Tourgee’s greatest battle against the forces of oppression came in a showdown before the Supreme Court in 1896 as the chief counsel for Homer Plessy in his case against the Louisiana railroad company that forced him into a segregated car (Plessy v. Ferguson). Unfortunately, Tourgee’s eloquence and fervor were not enough to sway a majority of the high court justices and the floodgates of discrimination were thrown open in America. Now that he was a beaten man, Tourgee’s activism shortly ground to a halt.

As local, state and national officials, along with the curious public, descend on the new civil rights museum, many will walk the same street that Tourgee trod long ago. In a way, they will follow in his footsteps to a “sacred place” in the struggle for equal rights. Had Judge Tourgee been alive on Feb. 1, 1960, there is little doubt that he would have been at the Woolworth building, lending his support to the Greensboro Four as they accelerated the cause he championed. (source: Professor Frank Woods, UNCG, published in The News & Record).

Low Country Rice Fields: A Feat as Great as Building the Pyramids

The black swamp, lily pads and cypress trees on a one time rice plantation.

A Feat as Great as Building the Pyramids

Rice cultivation is dirty, hard, dangerous work. Contemporaries compared the work of converting 150,000 acres of virgin land into tidal plantations as an undertaking comparable to building the Pyramids or re-channeling the Euphrates River.

An acre of mud flats would be measured into a rectangular field. Slaves would clear the land, chopping down and burning or removing any trees. Oxen were the only draft animals that might be used to assist, but they had to wear a special boot or else they would sink in the muck. Using only picks and shovels, slaves excavated a five-by-five foot ditch through the clearing that would serve both as the canal that brought tidal waters to the field and its main drain. The slaves used the muddy soil they had excavated to form a levee as high as six feet tall around the field. Slaves constructed sluice gates (first of cypress plug trunks and later hanging floodgates) to drain the water from the field for sowing and flood it for cultivation. Typically the following season, the field would be divided into four ¼-acre sections. Slaves added quarter drains (secondary canals) and cleared stumps. With the extra weight of water-laden soil, the danger of snakes and alligators that had been stranded behind the levee, mosquitoes and hot summer temperatures, the slave's work was dangerous and exhausting.

The cultivation of the rice began in late spring, around April, with the seed being sown. Ploughs were dragged through the wet soil to create furrows about three inches deep spaced 18 inches apart. Then, the slaves planted the rice in rows called drills. Slaves' daily work included operating the sluice gates with the tides. They flooded the fields following their planting of the seeds to the time of sprouting. After three weeks, they weeded and flooded the plants to cover the top of the young plant, gradually draining it halfway down the stem after a few days. The fields were drained and weeded, and the ground around the plants "hilled up" (hoed). Around mid-June or early July, the plants were gradually flooded and remained underwater for two months. Slaves freshened the water in the fields to keep it from stagnating. Tidal water is where fresh, inland water meets the salt water of the ocean. Fresh water rises on top of salt water, so the rice fields would be sown below the level of the high tide. A slave would open a sluice gate to skim off the fresh water floating on the top of the tidal waters to irrigate the crop, shutting it off before the salt water could intrude and kill the plants. At low tide, the gates were reopened to drain the fresh water out. A slave would be expected to weed a 105 foot square plot (¼-acre) in one day. Charles Ball, a runaway slave reported:

Watering and weeding the rice is considered one of the most unhealthy occupations on a southern plantation, as the people are obliged to live for several weeks in the mud and water, subject to all the unwholesome vapours that arise from stagnant pools, under the rays of a summer sun, as well as the chilly autumnal dews of night.

At harvest time, slaves with iron sickles reaped the rice stalks, bound them into sheaves (bundles), and stacked them in mule-drawn wagons. The slaves would unload the sheaves on a piece of hard ground or a barn's threshing floor and allow it to dry before threshing it with flails. (Treading the grain with mules was easier but resulted in more damage to the rice, so slave labor was used rather than animal labor.)

Rice must be processed to be the familiar white grain we see at the grocery store. The seed shell has to be removed, and then the brown coat of bran polished off the grain. Slaves used wooden mortars and pestles to mill the rice, separating the hulls from the grain with hand-sewn black rush winnowing baskets. An account from 1775 reported, "When winnowed it is ground, to free the rice from the husk; this is winnowed again, and put into a mortar large enough to hold half a bushel, in which it is beat with a pestle by negroes to free it from its thick skin; this is very laborious work." Following the pounding, the grain was sifted to remove the flour and dust produced in the process, and finally the rice was run through a market sieve, which separated the whole grains from the broken grains. Grains that were damaged in the process were called "little rice" and brought a lower price than whole grains. When the rice was clean, it would be placed in barrels that held roughly 600 pounds each. Rice mills appeared in the late 19th century, first operated by oxen, then by water (Jonathan Lucas, 1787), and finally tide-operated (1792). Although much of the work was back-breaking, unskilled labor, skilled slave artisans, such as carpenters, coopers, millwrights, and surveyors, contributed a great deal to the engineering, construction, and maintenance of the rice plantations.

Rather than the "gang system," where overseers or drivers directly supervised a group of workers, most rice plantations used the "task system," a specific amount of work that an average hard-working slave could complete in ten hours. When the slave completed the work to the driver's satisfaction, he or she could use the remaining hours of the day for their own purposes. Typically work began at dawn to avoid the worst heat of the day.

On rice plantations, a daily task might be the excavation of 24 linear feet of main drain excavation (the ditch dug five-by-five feet for each linear foot) or 133 feet of quarter-drain excavation (three feet by 18 inches). Sam Polite, a freedman, explained:

Every slave have task to do, sometime one task, sometime two, and sometime three. You have for work till task through. Have to cut cord of marsh grass maybe. Task of marsh been eight feet long and four feet high...If slave don't do task, they get licking with lash on naked back.

Fugitive slave Charles Ball reported one overseer's method of controlling slaves:

I gave them a hundred lashes more than a dozen times; but they never quit running away, till I chained them together, with iron collars round their necks, and chained them to spades, and made them do nothing but dig ditches to drain the rice swamps. They could not run away then, unless they went together, and carried their chains and spades with them. I kept them in this way two years....

Deadly Work

The mortality of slaves working in the rice fields was extremely high. One 18th-century writer declared:

If a work could be imagined peculiarly unwholesome and even fatal to health, it must be that of standing like the negroes, ankle and mid-leg deep in water which floats an ouzy mud, and exposed all the while to a burning sun which makes the air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furness of stinking putrid effluvia.

Up to a third of Low Country slaves died within a year of their arrival. Records from Somerset Place Plantation in North Carolina indicate that 80 Africans were brought to the site in June 1786 to transform the land into a rice plantation. By 1803, only 15 of the original 80 slaves were still alive. At Gowrie Plantation in South Carolina during an eight-year period between 1846 and 1854, 92 more slaves died than were born; 90 percent of the infants who survived birth died before they were 16 years old.

Part of the problem was poor health. The environment in which rice is cultivated is the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. Both malaria and yellow fever may have been introduced from Africa to the rice cultivation regions by the slave trade. Slaves suffering from malaria may have brought the disease to the New World, where it infected Anopheles mosquitoes. Yellow fever victims would not have survived the Middle Passage, but Aedes (Stegiomyia) aegypti mosquitoes could have bred in the slave ships' open-water barrels. A sickle cell genetic defect provided protection from malaria to some slaves, while yellow fever survivors had a lifelong immunity to the disease. Nonetheless, malaria and yellow fever claimed the lives of many slaves working the rice plantations. Zamba, an African king brought as a slave to South Carolina, reported, "Under the influence of a powerful sun, this practice naturally produces what is called marsh miasma, which engenders fevers of a dangerous nature: fatal, indeed to white men in most cases; and even negroes, in some seasons, suffer greatly from it."

Slaves' nutrition, clothing, and shelter typically were poor. A pint of boiled rice, a pint of cornmeal, and either a couple of pounds of butter or fat rendered from bacon were a slave's typical daily ration, supplemented by salt and molasses. Those slaves who completed task work might grow vegetable gardens with beans or yams or fish, if near the water, to improve their diet. Although high in carbohydrates, it was a low-protein, low-calorie diet for persons involved in heavy physical labor, and the resulting malnutrition contributed to slaves' early deaths. Slave quarters consisted of wooden frame buildings in which a family or a group of individuals lived. They were inexpensive to build, Johann Bolzius explained, because "One buys only a few nails for them." They were also flimsy and prone to fire. Most plantation owners provided their slaves with five yards of heavy, coarse cloth from which to make winter clothing each year and a pair of shoes. Slaves might spin their own summer clothing, although some provided linen pants or skirts, and a cap or kerchief for head cover. Some plantations had sick rooms or slave hospitals, but since doctors didn't know the cause of fevers and resorted to blood-letting and purging medicines, slaves may have fared as well (or as poorly) remaining in the slave quarters and taking home remedies.

Working in the kitchen at the old rice plantation

As rice plantations expanded, the demand on slaves and their labor increased. Modern economists have noted that, unlike virtually every other slave-produced commodity, the output per slave in the rice industry grew from 2,250 pounds around 1750 to over 3,000 pounds by 1800. In human terms, this represented an enormous amount of physical hardship and arduous labor.

Gold Mines of Grain

The cultivation of rice required not only a large initial investment of labor, but also required money. In the late 18th century, it cost £2,500 to establish a 200-acre rice plantation. Most of the money was required for the purchase of slaves (an estimated cost of £1,800). In 1710, Thomas Nairne estimated that it was necessary to have 30 slaves to start a rice plantation; contemporaries calculated that a field hand should produce a ton (2,000 pounds) of rice each year working on two to three acres of old rice fields or five acres of new rice fields.

Based on average prices for rice between 1768 and 1772, the average slave generated five-six barrels of rice worth £15 ($975). Between 1722 and 1770, slave prices averaged around $150; from 1780-1809 they were substantially higher, averaging $305 per slave. By 1850, prices averaged $480 per slave. In the 1760s and 1770s, prices for women slaves grew more quickly than for men and sometimes exceeded them. Since African women (rather than men) milled rice on a daily basis and broke less grain than inexperienced male slaves, this may have been a case of price responding to demand for an important skill. A contemporary remarked, "Rice is raised so as to buy more Negroes, and Negroes are bought so as to get more rice."

Consequently, rice plantations could produce profits of up to 26 percent, prompting one Savannah River planter to describe his rice fields as "gold mines." For example a Charles Manigault invested $49,500 in Gowrie Plantation in 1833, and, by 1861, the plantation was worth $266,000.

(source: http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_rice.htm)

Child Labor In North Carolina's Textile Mills

CHILD LABOR IN NORTH CAROLINA'S TEXTILE MILLS

From the University of North Carolina Libraries: “Labor” was not a new concept to children who went to work in the mills. Many spent their earliest years on their family’s farm, helping their parents with chores and working in the fields. Making a living on a family farm was difficult, especially when the family was renting the land from a large landowner. Everyone on the farm worked hard at raising enough crops and livestock to support the family, but farm families rarely made a profit. Some went into deep debt during years with poor crops.

Mill owners looking for employees capitalized on the frustrations of farm families. They sent recruiters to rural and mountain farm areas to hand out pamphlets singing the praises of mill life. For families struggling to grow enough food to feed themselves and make a small profit, the prospect of a regular paycheck was appealing. Ethel Shockley and her husband moved off the farm they were renting in Virginia to work in the cotton mills of Burlington, NC in 1921. They made about 75 cents a day working on the farm and could make 2 dollars a day working in the mills. Like the Shockleys, thousands of farmers across the South made the decision to trade in their self-sufficient farm life for life in the mill village, and they brought their children with them.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, the few laws prohibiting child labor were moderate and rarely enforced. In North Carolina, the age limit was 13 for employment in factories such as mills, and children under 18 were allowed to work up to a shocking 66 hours per week! Mill owners had to “knowingly and willfully” break these laws before they could be convicted. Even more lenient laws were in place in South Carolina, where the age limit for factory workers was 12 years old. However, orphans and children with “dependent” parents (those too sick to work) could work at any age and any amount of hours. These laws were rarely, if ever, enforced. Former child workers remember scrambling to hide in closets on the few occasions when factory inspectors would visit to check on working conditions in the mill.

The system of “helpers” was another way mill owners got around child labor laws. Very small children as young as 6 or 7 years old would visit the mill to bring meals to their parents or older siblings during the work day or simply to play amidst the machinery. These young “helpers” would begin to learn the jobs that older workers performed and try their hand at various tasks. The presence of tiny children in the mill could be explained to inspectors by saying the children were only “helping” and not on the payroll. As they got older, they spent more and more time helping until they began working full-time in the mills, usually between ages 10 to 14.

Many young mill laborers worked in the spinning room because mill owners felt their small hands were well-suited to this work. Work in the spinning room was not especially skilled or difficult, but required a watchful eye. Spinners were usually preteen or teen girls, who had to constantly attend to the cotton being spun on machines. These were the workers who “put up ends”, or repaired breaks in the thread. Doffers, often small boys, walked back and forth in the spinning room, replacing the full bobbins of thread with empty ones. Sweepers, also small boys, swept up the cotton fiber and lint from the floor and machinery to keep things running smoothly. Spinners and doffers were usually required to keep up with a certain number of machines on a side, and many workers remember“running sides” or being paid by the number of sides they worked.

Many former child workers speak of their eagerness to earn money, which pushed them to drop out of school and begin working in the mill. Some even began working against their parents’ wishes. It was difficult for some to see the advantage in continuing their schooling when recruitment ads claimed they could make as much as adult mill workers. Workers under 16 usually began working for 25 to 50 cents per day during the early 20th century, and could increase to $1.50 per day or more as they became more experienced.

CHARLIE AND OLLIE ALLEN. Charlie and Ollie Allen had been working at the Harriet Cotton Mills when this photograph was taken. Ollie was then about ten years old. Hine wrote that “the sanitary conditions are frightful.” Note that the front porch is held up by a slab of rock.

Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer. From the records of the United States National Child Labor Committee.

For the child workers, working in the mills wasn’t always uninterrupted drudgery. Children were allowed to take breaks when their work was caught up, and some of the less strict supervisors let them go outside to play during breaks. The child workers were also allowed to talk to one another in the mill across the openings in the machinery. Sometimes, the workers learned how to read lips because the machines were so loud they couldn’t understand each other otherwise!

Workers in the mills also played pranks on each other. Frank Durham remembered workers teasing new employees who had just moved from the farm and didn't know much about mill work. “There was something like that going all the time, some little old tricks and then playing pranks,” said Durham. “A new hand would come in down there sometime to work, and they’d send him after a left-handed monkey wrench, or go down there and get the key to the elevator, or the bobbin stretcher and all that stuff. Somebody that didn't know there was no such thing.” (source: Learn North Carolina)

North Carolina Sterilization Program Sponsor Wickliffe Draper

From Journal Now, Against their Will: North Carolina's Sterilization Program, "Benefactor With a Racist Bent: Wealthy recluse apparently liked the looks and potential of Bowman Gray's new medical-genetics department," by Kevin Begos:

The official version of the story from Wake Forest University has long been that a "New York philanthropist with a deep interest in population genetics" made a $100,000 gift of stock to the fledgling Department of Medical Genetics in 1953 - the equivalent of more than $650,000 today.

The whole story is this: The philanthropist was Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy recluse with a record of paying for research that tried to "prove" that whites were superior to blacks. The Bowman Gray School of Medicine got the money, but as part of the deal one of the most controversial patrons of racist science got his identity hidden.

"There appears to be some association with Draper. We don't know what the total amount was. We don't know specifically what it was used for," Dr. William B. Applegate, the dean of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, said last week.

Scholars taking hard looks at Draper say that his visit to a Nazi eugenics conference, his bankrolling of the racist tract "White America" and support for sending black Americans back to Africa are part of a pattern - the money promoted the now-discredited eugenics movement and radical racial politics.

"Draper wished to use science as a way to stop the civil-rights movement," said William Tucker, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and author of The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, published this year.

Applegate said he couldn't condone the school's acceptance of money from Draper, but didn't want to judge his predecessors.

"Clearly the Bowman Gray School of Medicine took a gift from a source in those days that we would not take from that source today, for ethical reasons," said Applegate, who is creating a faculty committee to investigate Draper's ties to the school. "It would be impossible to accept money from a source with those views at this school today. It's absolutely, totally unacceptable."

The official history of the school of medicine is The Miracle on Hawthorne Hill, by Dr. Manson Meads. It refers to an anonymous patron and a gift of $100,000 to be spread over 30 years to pay for the first professorship of medical genetics at the school.

Bowman Gray School of Medicine Amphitheater

It was 1949 when Draper met Dr. C. Nash Herndon of Bowman Gray. Little is known about their meetings, but Herndon was playing a major role in the expansion of the North Carolina eugenic sterilization program at the time.

Research by the Winston-Salem Journal shows that in 1951, Dr. C.C. Carpenter, the dean of the medical school, sent Herndon a memo about grants. The school policy was to assume responsibility if the other source terminated, Carpenter wrote, and "this would be true in your case in regard to payment of your salary through the Draper grant."

Paul Lombardo, the head of the University of Virginia's Center for Biomedical Ethics, said that before Draper gave money to Bowman Gray, a similar offer to another school had raised ethical questions and fallen through.

In 1948 Draper suggested a gift of $100,000 to officials at the Dight Institute at the University of Minnesota to begin a "human genetics project," but director Shelton Reed wrote in a letter that year that Dight probably wouldn't get the money.

"Colonel Draper has very definite ideas as to what the subject of human genetics encompasses," Reed wrote, adding that meant "improvement of the American people by shipping the Negro inhabitants back to Africa. My remark about Colonel Draper is not flattering, but I think you will agree it is generally correct."

Wickliffe Preston Draper

Born in Massachusetts in 1891, Draper had old Kentucky blood on one side of the family, old Puritan on the other, and was sure that kind of family tree represented the true American. He inherited a multimillion-dollar textile fortune in the early 1920s and never worked at a job other than military service in World War I and World War II. A lifelong bachelor described as extremely reclusive by even his admirers, Draper lived in a huge New York apartment filled with stuffed big-game trophies he'd shot on trips to exotic parts of the world.

The $100,000 gift to Wake Forest was one of Draper's largest, Lombardo said, and an examination of what kind of science he was interested in raises questions about what he expected in return for his money.

In 1935 Draper attended the Nazi's International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems in Berlin, Lombardo said. The Honorary Chairman of the meeting, Wilhelm Frick, was later convicted during the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal and hanged in 1946.

Draper's companion at the conference, Dr. Clarence C. Campbell, gave a speech that resounded across the Atlantic. "The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable (sic) as that between black and white," and closed with a rousing "To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" Time magazine noted.

The next year Draper chose Campbell as a judge for an essay contest he funded, and in 1937 Draper and eugenicists Harry Laughlin and Frederick Osborn launched the Pioneer Fund as a vehicle for distributing grants. Tucker notes that a proposed Pioneer budget for 1937 mentions "two German films referred to by Colonel Draper have been received," and that one, The Hereditary Defective, was shown at 28 U.S. high schools through Laughlin's efforts. Draper continued to work with Laughlin to find ways to use his money to further science that focused on racial issues. Lombardo said there is conclusive evidence that Draper funded a special printing of Earnest Sevier Cox's racist tract "White America" that was sent to every member of Congress in 1937.

Tucker has shown that Draper gave $215,000 to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission in the 1960s, a group that used the money for a failed effort to stop the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In the late 1950s Kinston, N.C., native Harry Weyher became the president of the Pioneer Fund, a position he held until his death this year.

Through Weyher, Draper gave $500 to Wesley Critz George, a staunch advocate of segregation and a professor at the University of North Carolina, to help distribute a 1961 anti-integration pamphlet. Draper sent George $1,000 Christmas checks every year until 1972, Tucker notes.

Pioneer Fund ties to North Carolina expanded in later years, as Marion Parrott of Kinston and Tom Ellis, a Raleigh lawyer, served on Pioneer's board of directors. Ellis' Coalition for Freedom, a part of the Jesse Helms political machine, received $195,000 in Pioneer grants in the 1980s, the equivalent of more than $300,000 today. Ellis did not return calls seeking comment.

Pioneer Fund grants paid for much of the research that supported The Bell Curve, a 1994 best-seller that argued that blacks are genetically inclined to be less intelligent than whites.

J. Philippe Rushton, the current Pioneer president, said there's no doubt some of Draper's past is a public-relations embarrassment, but "that has absolutely nothing to do with the Pioneer Fund."

Because the Pioneer Fund doesn't take stands on political issues, Rushton said it makes no sense to apologize for Draper's past.

"We wouldn't condemn Draper's views on segregation or somebody else's views on integration," he said. Those who attack Draper and Pioneer downplay details that don't fit allegations of racism, Rushton said.

One of the original members of the Pioneer Board of Directors was John Marshall Harlan, who later became a Supreme Court justice and voted for the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling.

Draper's critics reject those defenses. "(He) made a point of funding people who shared his views on race, and he also made a point of trying to hide what he did," Lombardo said.

Draper was extremely secretive, but even his scant correspondence suggests that he must have believed that Herndon shared his general views on race. Tucker quotes from a 1954 letter to Osborn:

"I should be reluctant to assist investigators whose personalities and view points were markedly alien to my own," Draper wrote, adding that he believed in "measures to promote considerable ethnic homogeneity...."

North Carolina Highway Historical Marker (Raleigh, NC) to commemorate the victims of the state's Eugenics Sterilization Program ( 1933) between 1929 and 1974, over 7,600 individuals were sterilized.

Rushton said he knew nothing about Draper's gift to Bowman Gray, or Herndon's role in the expanded eugenic sterilization program in North Carolina that would become dramatically more racist in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Maybe that's good or bad charity, depending on your values," he said of possible links between Draper's gift and sterilizations in North Carolina.

Applegate is just beginning to look into ties between the school, Draper and sterilizations in North Carolina, but he rejected the entire concept of eugenics.

"To me, the whole concept of involuntary sterilization sends a chill down my spine," Applegate said. "I just think that it's morally wrong. The very concept of that is profoundly upsetting to me and to the leadership and the faculty of the school."

(source: http://extras.journalnow.com/againsttheirwill/parts/two/story3.html)