When she was a clerk at the N.C. General Assembly, Carmen Cauthen \u201989 had designs on writing a book. She envisioned it centering on her mother, Cliffornia Wimberley, a Raleigh educator who helped lead efforts to desegregate city and county schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, 10-plus years retired from her work at the state capitol, Cauthen has delivered a book, but it\u2019s an altogether different story. Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh<\/em> tells the history of Wake County\u2019s Black citizens, where they lived and how some of those imprints in Raleigh have disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cauthen, 64, says she stumbled upon two master\u2019s theses detailing Raleigh\u2019s segregationist era a couple years back when she was researching Black housing in Raleigh. \u201cWhat came to me was that there was a reason the majority of Black people were in Southeast Raleigh,\u201d says Cauthen, \u201c. . .\u2009When I started doing the research for the book, I realized Southeast Raleigh was platted based on real estate investors who bought land after the Civil War. And so those lots were platted narrow because they were trying to cram as many people into their land as they could to make as much money as they could.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was a reason the majority of Black people were in Southeast Raleigh.\u201d Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh<\/em> traces the lives of Black people from slavery up through the 1960s, and details the significance of local churches, libraries, recreational sites and community leaders, like Calvin Lightner, father of Clarence Lightner, Raleigh\u2019s first Black mayor, to help tell Raleigh\u2019s story of the Black experience. \u201cIt\u2019s just fascinating to me to know the things that Black people did that nobody knows they did,\u201d Cauthen says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cauthen says she\u2019s working on a project about formerly enslaved people whose stories were collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. And there\u2019s always a possible book about her mother. Both projects deal with stories of Black stamina that disappear every day, Cauthen says. \u201cAs elders pass, that information goes away.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false,"raw":"\n\n\n\n\n When she was a clerk at the N.C. General Assembly, Carmen Cauthen \u201989 had designs on writing a book. She envisioned it centering on her mother, Cliffornia Wimberley, a Raleigh educator who helped lead efforts to desegregate city and county schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, 10-plus years retired from her work at the state capitol, Cauthen has delivered a book, but it\u2019s an altogether different story. Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh<\/em> tells the history of Wake County\u2019s Black citizens, where they lived and how some of those imprints in Raleigh have disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cauthen, 64, says she stumbled upon two master\u2019s theses detailing Raleigh\u2019s segregationist era a couple years back when she was researching Black housing in Raleigh. \u201cWhat came to me was that there was a reason the majority of Black people were in Southeast Raleigh,\u201d says Cauthen, \u201c. . .\u2009When I started doing the research for the book, I realized Southeast Raleigh was platted based on real estate investors who bought land after the Civil War. And so those lots were platted narrow because they were trying to cram as many people into their land as they could to make as much money as they could.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was a reason the majority of Black people were in Southeast Raleigh.\u201d Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh<\/em> traces the lives of Black people from slavery up through the 1960s, and details the significance of local churches, libraries, recreational sites and community leaders, like Calvin Lightner, father of Clarence Lightner, Raleigh\u2019s first Black mayor, to help tell Raleigh\u2019s story of the Black experience. \u201cIt\u2019s just fascinating to me to know the things that Black people did that nobody knows they did,\u201d Cauthen says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cauthen says she\u2019s working on a project about formerly enslaved people whose stories were collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. And there\u2019s always a possible book about her mother. Both projects deal with stories of Black stamina that disappear every day, Cauthen says. \u201cAs elders pass, that information goes away.\u201d<\/p>\n"},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Carmen Cauthen \u201989 details Black life and housing patterns in her new book, Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":4236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"views\/single-immersive.blade.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"source":"","ncst_custom_author":"","ncst_show_custom_author":false,"ncst_dynamicHeaderBlockName":"ncst\/default-immersive-post-header","ncst_dynamicHeaderData":"{\"backgroundColor\":\"aqua_400\",\"caption\":\"Photograph by Joshua Steadman\",\"displayCategoryID\":5,\"showAuthor\":true,\"showDate\":true,\"showFeaturedVideo\":false,\"subtitle\":\"Carmen Cauthen \u201989 details Black life and housing patterns in her new book, Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh.<\/em>\"}","ncst_content_audit_freq":"","ncst_content_audit_date":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,10,9],"tags":[191,199,259,261,524,828,1088,1282],"_ncst_magazine_issue":[],"class_list":["post-4235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-bets","category-class-act","category-stories","tag-calvin-lightner","tag-carmen-cauthen","tag-clarence-lightner","tag-cliffornia-wimberley","tag-historic-black-neighborhoods-of-raleigh","tag-n-c-general-assembly","tag-southeast-raleigh","tag-works-progress-administration"],"displayCategory":{"term_id":5,"name":"Best Bets","slug":"best-bets","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":5,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":52,"filter":"raw"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4235"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4235"},{"taxonomy":"_ncst_magazine_issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_ncst_magazine_issue?post=4235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u2013 Carmen Cauthen<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u2013 Carmen Cauthen<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n