Jim Crow shaped neighborhoods

100 years of history by Carol Pelosi

In 1937, there were two facts of life: the Depression and Jim Crow. Neither was particular to Wake Forest, but both shaped lives and neighborhoods.

In most, not all but most, areas of Wake Forest, the streets were paved and some even had sidewalks. Most had street lights. Most families had installed electricity, lights and appliances along with indoor plumbing.  

None of that was true in the northeast part of town, the black, Negro, African-American section. Streets were dirt and remained so up through the 1980s. There were no street lights, only a very few water lines and no sewer lines. Without water lines, there could be no fire hydrants. Fire was a daily risk in wood homes where wood stoves provided the only heat and means of cooking.

Because segregation kept people from knowing each other, few white people knew the black leaders – and there were many.

Oscar C. Smith, for instance, who owned Smith’s Shoe Shop, Henry Hopkins, Luther Tuck, Bruce Lucas, Tafford Richardson and Matthew Smith were some of the men who formed the black Wake Forest Fire Department, known as Station 2, and built a fire station on Taylor Street. The men received hand-me-down equipment from the town’s white fire department.

Smith and Tuck both served as presidents of the North Carolina Volunteer Firemen’s Association, the statewide counterpart to the white association. Smith, in fact, served at least 10 terms as president, up through the early 1970s.

But in January of 1937, when the town was about to receive its first swimming pool through federal funds, Tuck and Allen L. Young went to the town board to beg for some basic help for their neighborhood. This was a time when the town board met in private, only allowing residents in to present petitions or ideas, and very few if any black residents had spoken to the commissioners.

Tuck and Allen asked that the town pave or at least gravel streets, install street lights, provide police patrols and install fire alarm boxes. Fire alarm boxes on street corners were important at a time when few people had telephones.

Tuck and Allen were important men in their community and their plea should have had weight. I do not know Tuck’s profession, but Allen was the owner and principal of a boarding school for black youth on Spring Street and pastor of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. One of his daughters, Ailey M. Young, a retired teacher, would become the first black town commissioner.

There was some response. Tuck was appointed a special policeman, but he was not given a salary. His only compensation was from fees allowed by Recorder’s Court presided over by Judge Donald Gulley.

The town commissioners did tell Oscar M. McKaughan, the public works superintendent, “to investigate the necessity for streetlights in the negro section.” There was no further report. Streetlights, street improvements and fire alarm boxes were never mentioned again.

On the other hand, in the same time frame, the town board did install a water line and fire hydrants near the new school, DuBois High School, built by local funds and the Julius Rosenwald Fund.

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