Mixed Race Studies

Building a Mixed Race Community: The People, Building, and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Photoworks at Glen Echo Park
2024-02-09 through 2024-03-31
7300 MacArthur Blvd.
Glen Echo, Maryland

Photoworks is delighted to host the work of acclaimed photojournalist and historian, Marvin Tupper Jones, in the exhibition, Building a Mixed Race Community. The show will be on display from February 9th – March 31st.

The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations.

For more information, click here.

New CDG-produced Video tells the history of the Winton Triangle’s Greatest Institution

Chowan Discovery Group
2023-10-15

Marvin Tupper Jones

C.S. Brown School and Auditorium’s story

C.S. Brown Auditorium needs restoration work and a new video production has come to its aid. We hope this effort will help raise the resources needed for the restoration. Please donate.

Titled, “The C.S. Brown Auditorium Story” is a documentary video about C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC, one of the largest Rosenwald Schools. It can be viewed online and was funded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Chowan Discovery Group…

Read the entire article here.

BUILDING A MIXED RACE COMMUNITY: The People, Building and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Chowan Discovery Group
2023-03-06

Marvin Tupper Jones

The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations. One building included among the thirty 20”x30” panels is the exhibit’s first venue, the C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC…

For more information, click here.​

Marvin Jones’ Winton Triangle research a personal journey

Coastal Review: A Daily News Service of the North Carolina Coastal Federation
Newport, North Carolina
2021-07-06

Kip Tabb

The Pleasant Plains Baptist Church founded in 1851 is one of the oldest multiracial congregations in North Carolina. The brick church, built in 1951, replaced the original wooden church. Photo: Kip Tabb

Marvin Jones, Chowan Discovery Group executive director, has made it his life’s work to document the history of a northeastern North Carolina community of color.

NORTHEASTERN NORTH CAROLINA — In 1845, North Carolina passed a law prohibiting free people of color from selling liquor. Fourteen years later, the law was expanded banning the sale of liquor to “… any free person of color, for cash, or in exchange for articles delivered, or upon any consideration whatever, or as a gift …”

Almost immediately, 55 white men from Hertford County requested an exemption. There does not seem to be a record of why the exemption was requested, but in his University of North Carolina Chapel Hill 2012 doctoral dissertation, Warren Milteer points out that “by 1860, approximately 1,000 free people of color resided in Hertford County, giving the county one of the largest free non-white populations in the state.”

The law, specifically calling out free people of color, highlights how complex the story of race in America is.

Not every person of color in the South was enslaved.

It is a point Marvin Tupper Jones, the executive director of the nonprofit volunteer preservation and research organization Chowan Discovery Group, explains in detail. A native of what he describes as the Winton Triangle in Hertford County, Jones traces his heritage to the late 17th century.

“My oldest named ancestor was from India. William Weaver shows up around 1690,” he told Coastal Review. Weaver was the father of biracial children who were free…

Read the entire article here.