Mecklenburg County’s rural past and the role African Americans played in it will be the focus of this year’s eighth annual African American Heritage Festival — Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Charlotte Museum of History.
Most past heritage festivals focused on historically Black colleges and universities. But museum officials said as the 100-year-old Rosenwald Siloam School was being restored on their site, they learned many stories about Black residents when Mecklenburg County was an agricultural center. Museum Director Terri White said they wanted this year’s festival to highlight those stories and the people still alive who remember that period in the county’s past.
“One man in his early 90s remembers when east Charlotte was a massive dairy farm,” White says. “He remembers, as a child, digging around to build artificial lakes for the cows and a small airport up the road from where we are to fly the milk across the state. It’s hard to imagine today Shamrock and Eastway being a farm.”
In addition to food vendors, drummers, dancers, and other entertainment, several Black farmers will showcase their produce and teach people how to grow it. The festival’s keynote speaker is John Boyd, a fourth-generation farmer and founder of the National Black Farmers Association. His organization is credited with securing a $2 billion settlement by proving that the federal government discriminated against Black farmers in terms of loans.
“We wanted to bring him in because that’s an amazing accomplishment, and it affects farmers from North Carolina," White said. "He is the perfect person to talk about how to maintain that lifestyle where everything is going digital and what does that mean for Black Americans.”
Saturday’s Heritage Festival will open as it always does, with the ringing of a bell as each name is read of the 17 enslaved people who lived on the museum site when it was a 600-acre dairy and tobacco plantation.
