When I was growing up in the 1960s, my family went on several long road trips from North Carolina to my parents’ home states of Louisiana and Texas. Having come of age in the Jim Crow South, both my mom and dad were ardent supporters of the civil rights movement and those trips through the segregated South offered plenty of teachable moments for my sisters and me. One that has stuck with me for many years was a sign welcoming us to the small city of Greenville with the words “The Blackest Land, The Whitest People.” That was such blatant racism even for those times that I never was able to quite forgive the city for it. As the years went by, whenever I heard anything positive about Greenville, SC, I would think to myself self-righteously “apparently that city’s overt racism has been forgotten.”
Not long ago I met a young woman from Greenville and, knowing she was young enough to have been born long after that sign had come down, I told her about it. She was surprised to have never heard of it and then got a puzzled look on her face saying, “The weird thing about that is that the soil in Greenville isn’t black at all, it’s red clay.” That made me curious so I turned to trusty Google and, lo and behold, discovered that the infamous sign had hung in Greenville, TEXAS, not South Carolina. All my life I’d been holding those words against the wrong town!

All of that brings me to my trip last weekend to the sixteenth county in my quest, Johnston, a place that was known in the middle of the last century for a shameful sign of its own. Fairly or unfairly, when I was a child, my friends and I associated Johnston County and the town of Smithfield with the hateful Klan sign that welcomed people to the town of Smithfield with the words “Help fight communism and integration!” As I grew older and came to know people from Smithfield, I also came to understand how painful that association was for them and how helpless they had felt to do anything about a sign they didn’t endorse. That sign has been gone now for many years but some of the people who erected it and some of those who opposed it must still be living in the area – that past is not, after all, so far away.
Today if you mention Smithfield, people are most likely to think not of a KKK sign but of outlet stores or Smithfield’s Chicken & BBQ. I was more interested in trying to discover what it is that makes Johnston County tick in 2013. This trip was notable because I had my favorite traveling companion of old along for the ride, my husband Ron. Unfortunately he’s not much for car rides any longer so this may have been his one and only county trip and he was not impressed. It’s true there wasn’t a lot happening in downtown Smithfield on a Saturday afternoon but I was surprised to discover an open welcome center in the original First Union building downtown, complete with exhibits and a genealogy library (as a member of the Chapel Hill Historical Society board and a Chapel Hill resident who loves my hometown, I think it’s a shame that Chapel Hill doesn’t have something similar to welcome visitors). Walking through town to the Neuse River, I was entranced to come upon a wedding in progress. Then as we drove out of town, we passed a house decorated for a birthday party and, just down the road, a burial taking place. Johnston County’s much-maligned sign from the past is long gone and in its place I saw instead signs of birth, marriage, and death, signs that life goes on.
May 25, 2013, County #16 – Johnston