“This black man called the Secretary of the Navy. And the Secretary of the Navy says to the judge: ‘Let him go.'”

“They did not knuckle under to the institution of slavery or, following that, the institution of Jim Crow-ism,” reflected Edwin Caldwell Jr. on evaluating some two hundred years of his family’s history in North Carolina. Descended from November Caldwell, coachman and slave of the first president of the University of North Carolina, the Caldwell family has been entwined with the cultural “ways of the South” through more than five generations. Caldwell’s great grandfather opened the first school for African Americans in Chapel Hill in 1868, and the family is rich in educators, doctors, and scientists.