The public panel discussions, Liberating Futures: Erasures, Reckonings, and Transformations, grew from a community-wide challenge prompted by a 2021 newspaper editorial from Jereann King Johnson and The Nineteen Twenty-One Project. The editorial encouraged Warren County Community members to reflect on Warren County, North Carolina history, a hundred years past.
The Nineteen Twenty-One Project’s purpose revolves around historical truth-telling to help us all understand how racial oppression and white supremacy at the turn of the 20th Century shape systemic racism and our society today. In 2022, the Nineteen Twenty-One Project, in partnership with the Warren County, NC, Branch of the NAACP and with funding from the University of North Carolina’s Humanities for the Public Good, organized a series of public panel discussions and a revised version of the play “Seeking Justice,” the re-enactment of a trial for fifteen men charged with rioting in 1921. The public panel discussions covered the following:
May 14: Legacies of Enslavement, exploring the hidden histories of enslavement and Jim Crow in Warren County and charting their longstanding impact on individual lives and community experience.
May 21: Histories of Public Education, addressing the self-determined growth of Black public education in Warren County, the deep challenges posed by desegregation, and the future of schooling in the county.
May 28: Black Progressive Thought, uncovering the longstanding legacies of progressive anti-racist action in Warren County, from early educational reform initiatives to Civil Rights struggles to contemporary political activism.
June 4: Ties to the Land—Sharecropping, Black Land Ownership, and Black Land Loss, interrogating the systems that have simultaneously connected Black farm families with the land and challenged their ability to own the fields in which they’ve labored for so many generations.
June 11: Descendants Stories, charting the longstanding legacy of the 1921 Warren County lynchings of Plummer Bullock and Alfred Williams and the associated 1921 imprisonment of 16 Black men charged with defending their Norlina neighborhood from a threatening white mob through the stories of family members.
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