Where is the Black Town in American National Memory? The Case of Princeville, North Carolina

This article reports on a community-engaged research study of Princeville, North Carolina, the first formally chartered autonomous Black town in the United States, that has been in continuous existence. The article seeks to enhance historical understanding of the Black town in the United States and of the lesser-known history of Black resistant histories of North Carolina. Reporting on interview and observation research, the article analyzes (and reports on) key themes specifically related to cultural processes: those of place-making and meaning-making in the contexts of collective memory and forgetting. Analysis of themes that arose in interviews and observations uncovered three general sources of non-memory, each of which is also shown to be in conversation with ‘rememory’: landscape erasure as a proxy for social memory erasure; population dispersal as social non-memory; and narrative displacement. The findings also highlight the importance of cultural memory: intentional acts of keeping Princeville town doors open. It is argued that the dynamics uncovered may be particularly relevant for understanding the loss of the Black town across the United States more generally.