"We urge the appointment of white committeemen for each colored school in Bertie County.

We urge the complete taking charge by white men of every public agency in the county.

The school committeemen really spend the school's money, the white people raise the school's funds, the Negroes pay little of it.

The white people demand to know what goes with their taxes.

They're getting very sore over having any of it educate the Negro.

White men should supervise the spending of the taxes.

Give us none but white committeemen for every school."

Good gracious.

What's it like to read that?

In some ways what it does is make something that you know as a historian, real.

Yeah.

And concrete, right?

I felt the same way.

You know.

How dare you spend any money for those folks unless we control it.

Yeah, isn't that cold?

Oh.

This article did not represent an isolated opinion.

Eight months earlier, heavily armed bands of white supremacists had besieged Wilmington, North Carolina, murdering Black people and burning down their businesses.

So what do you think Jesse was thinking when he joined that school board?

That's what I'm so moved by is the courage and the sense of willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.

You had to know that you were putting yourself and your family at risk.

That, you know, the notion of staying below the firing line, yet here is somebody stepping above it, saying this is too important.

And I just can't imagine what courage that took.

I wish I could hear the conversations he and his wife had about these choices that he would make.

And I bet his wife was saying, "Stay on the farm!"

You know?

That's right.

"You know how crazy these-" That's right.

"Ku Klux-ers are."

Jesse was appointed to the committee for a term of two years, but by the time those two years were up, Jim Crow was firmly entrenched in North Carolina, and it seems that Jesse never had the opportunity to serve again.

But even so, Lonnie's ancestor did not slow down.

In 1902, Jesse purchased 75 acres of land and made the most of them.

When you were a child, your grandparents still owned property from that very purchase.

Really?

Yes!

You visited that land, you played on it.

And you chopped cotton on it.

Wow.

So maybe I should have been a better chopper then, you know?

But that's amazing to me that- I'm just trying to get my head around what it would take to believe you could do that.

Right.

And then to do it.

Right.

And boy, I could see though that's also why you're a leader, because you're trying to lead to help people understand how important education is, how important it is to own your own land.

Can you imagine what Jesse would've thought knowing he was buying something that would shape his family for generations?

You know, there's a part of me that hopes he had that vision.

Of recognizing that what he was going to do was to touch people yet unborn.

And I think that that's at least the way I'm gonna think about it, because I think that clearly the way he thought about education, the way he thought about land ownership, he was really recognizing that he could change the trajectory of a family by those actions.