Discover the Historic Self-Governing Town of Mitchelville: America’s First Black Community in South Carolina
As a Black American woman with deep Southern roots, I cherish opportunities to learn more about my history. My father was born on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, and my mother was born in a rural North Carolina town that still doesn’t have streetlights. They took part in the Great Migration, fleeing the Jim Crow South in the mid-1950s and early ’60s to escape segregation and persecution. Both wound up in New York City, where I was born.