Civil War Lecture: African Americans in NC During the Civil War

Dr. Jeffrey Crow, Deputy Secretary of the NC Dept.of Cultural Resources, will talk about the lives of African Americans in NC during the Civil War. By 1860 more than 300,000 African Americans lived in the state. Existing laws prevented enslaved people from learning to read, and more stringent restrictions were enacted during the Antebellum period. Union occupation of the South offered an avenue to freedom.