Goldsboro-Wayne NAACP to celebrate 60th anniversary
By News-Argus Staff
Published in News on October 14, 2005 1:47 PM
The Goldsboro-Wayne branch of the NAACP will celebrate its 60th anniversary Nov. 4 in the H.V. Brown Hall of Dillard Alumni Cultural Center on Poplar Street. Festivities begin at 7:30 p.m.
The anniversary celebration will feature a banquet and Freedom Fund Drive, as well as a time to pay tributes to former leaders. The theme will be "The Past That Awakened, the Present That Inspired, the Future That Challenges."
The civil rights organization began its movement in Goldsboro-Wayne County in 1945 under the leadership of Geneva Bass Hamilton. As its first local president, Mrs. Hamilton worked with state and national NAACP units, civil rights agencies in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. as well as city and county officials and others in the community to help the cause.
Supporters along the way who helped organize sit-ins, stand-ins, boycotts and other economic movements to bring about integration in the schools, the hiring of black bank clerks, store clerks, city and county employees, policemen, and elected officials included attorney Earl Whitted, Jr., Bishop J. L. Melvin, Dr. Hardy Cofield, Dr. O.R. Stovall, William N. Foye, Neal Stitt, Daisy Coley, Helen Townsend, and Willette Starke.
Since its inception in the mid-1940s and early 1950s, branch presidents have included Cofield, Frank Edwards, Foye, Lemuel Craft, Tommy Cox, Rev. Kenneth Matthews, Hilda Rouse, Ulis N. Dawson, Dorothy Whitted Hardy, and Sylvia Barnes.
During the anniversary celebration, life members and Mothers of the Year participants will be recognized.
Tickets and table reservations are available.
For more information, people can contact Neal Stitt at 735-2180.