The Aware Negro

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Hayti (Named after Haiti, the first independent black republic in the western hemisphere) also called Hayti District, is a Historic African-American community that is now part of the city of Durham, North Carolina.

James E. Shepard was one of the founding fathers of Hayti, along with Aaron McDuffie Moore, John Merrick and Charles Clinton Spaulding. Shepard, Moore and Merrick founded the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (1898), which became the largest and richest African-American company in the United States at the time. It had a land development company as a subsidiary, which helped build much of Hayti.

In the Early 1920s and 1930s, more than 200 African-American businesses were located along Fauetteville, Pettigrew and Pine streets, the major boundaries of Hayti.

All classes lived within Hayti, and black-owned business employed numerous residents. The community, majority African-American population flourished from the 1880s through the 1940s. In 1958 a Urban renewal and freeway project took down houses and businesses in 200 acres of the community and split it with a freeway. North Carolina Highway 147.

This small black community was responsible for some national “firsts”:
* First All African-American community to be fully self-sufficient. By the early 20th century, it had its own schools, library, churches, barbershops, Lincoln Hospital (1900), movie theater, recreation center, and hotels.
* North Carolina Central University, a historically black college, was established in 1910 by James E. Shepard as a private religious school: by 1925 it became the first African-American liberal arts college in the United States to be state-funded when the state legislature made it part of the state system.
* The first “sit-in” happened in Hayti on June 23, 1957, when Rev. Douglas Elaine Moore, minister of Asbury Methodist, led a group of six blacks (three men, three women) into the Royal Ice Cream Parlor, which had segregated seating according to state law, and sat down in the “white” section. Such non-violent demonstrations became a basic tool in the increasing popular activism of the civil rights movement.

Two African-American leaders, W.E.B Du Bois & Booker T Washington, visited Hayti in 1910 and 1911, respectively. They said the community was a model for all African-American communities in the United States to follow