Black, White, Colored: The Hidden Story of an Insurrection, a Family, a Southern Town, and Identity in America

Summary

An absorbing investigation into a little-known historical tragedy—an insurrection at the turn of the twentieth century which upended post-Reconstruction gains made by Black residents in a small North Carolina town.

In the late nineteenth century, Laurinburg, North Carolina, was a beacon of racial calm—a place where Blacks and Whites could live and work together. Black families like the Malloys became landlords, businessmen, and doctors. But that progress was shattered on the eve of Election Day, 1898, when supremacist groups launched a bloody attack, forcing Laurinburg’s Black citizens to flee. This bloody race riot was the only recorded insurrection, stripping middle-class Blacks—who made strides during Reconstruction—of their seats on every electoral board.

Black, White, Colored is the first book to tell the story of the events in Laurinburg and its impact on the town’s Black occupants. Descendants, Lauretta Malloy Noble and LeeAnét Noble, carefully piece together that fateful event and its aftermath, providing compelling details of how their family became one of this Southern town’s richest and most powerful despite slavery, violent white supremacist groups, floods, war, and other roadblocks to success.

Black, White, Colored shines a spotlight on the Laurinburg Insurrection, and elevates it to its rightful place in American history, beside the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and offers insights relevant to our society today.