Local family's photos, geneaology depict history of segregated South

By Jim Morrill - The Charlotte Observer

CHARLOTTE -- To know the story of black history, Dylan Holmes didn't have to look any further than the wall of his boyhood home in Rock Hill.

In a large frame, fading photos and straight lines trace five generations of his father's family to the 19th Century. Next to some names are red stars. Each signifies a slave, including one who passed down his own account of an infamous moment in American history.

Other frames hold more stories: the 1845 sale of two ancestors, how those ancestors later changed their surname in a rebuke to a callous owner.

Photo 1: Local family's photos, geneaology depict history of segregated South

Holmes, 40, will watch the latest chapter in black history in person when he attends this month's inauguration of Barack Obama in Washington.

"It's a good feeling to actually be a witness to all these progressions, and be a part of (them)," said Holmes, a Charlotte health care consultant. "I want to see it for myself."

For his family, as for millions, the inauguration of the nation's first black president marks a new passage in their collective story. Obama will take his oath on the steps of a Capitol built with slave labor. Holmes will be among thousands of black Carolinians expected to travel to the historic event, many aboard virtual convoys of chartered buses.

"It's coming full circle for a multitude of Americans," said Kerry Haynie, a Duke University political scientist and Kannapolis native. "It's particularly true with African Americans, but I've talked to older whites who've lived through Jim Crow. ... They see it as coming full circle for them as well."

Electing a black president in the year that saw the death of former Sen. Jesse Helms -- a lion of the Old South -- underscores the region's dramatic change, Haynie said.

Holmes' parents, Wilbert and Zora, grew up in a different South.

Both were educators. Before desegregation in 1970, they taught in York County schools reserved for blacks. Not until his 20s did Wilbert Holmes have an actual conversation with a white person.

For many blacks, family history hits a dead-end in the 1800s. Public records are sketchy, slave roots often impossible to trace. The Holmes family can reach back further than most.

Zora Holmes talks about an ancestor who was one of South Carolina's first black legislators. Her husband shows a visitor the framed photos and stories on the walls of his den. From a bound collection of family lore, he finds the transcript of an oral history his great-grandfather gave the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s.

"My great-grandfather," he said, "talking to me from the grave."

The world 'upside down'

Cornelius Holmes was born a slave to an Edgefield County plantation owner and congressman named Preston Brooks.

At the time, blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina and would for decades. Many came through Charleston, a hub of the American slave trade. Slaves worked in coastal rice fields and later the cotton plantations that became the foundation of the state's antebellum economy. Brooks and other owners were zealous defenders of the institution.

In 1856, angered by an anti-slavery speech by abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Brooks stormed onto the Senate floor and clubbed Sumner repeatedly with a metal-tipped cane. Brooks strolled out as a bleeding Sumner was carried away.

The incident heightened emotions on both sides of the slavery issue and escalated sectional tension in the run-up to Civil War.

"Dat turn the world upside down," a transcript quotes Cornelius as recalling.

Speaking at the age of 82 to the Federal Writers Project -- a New Deal program that collected more than 2,300 first-person narratives from former slaves -- he described how he'd heard the account from his parents. He went on to describe life in slavery and in freedom.

Though slavery had ended, he said in the 1930s, the "race question will be (with) us always."

"In the end," he added, "will it be settle(d) by hate or by de policy of love your neighbor as you do yourself?"

Life of education

Wilbert Holmes, who wouldn't give his age, remembers meeting his great-grandfather as a boy outside Winnsboro, about 40 miles south of where he lives now in Rock Hill.