"We have heard on numerous occasions that you cannot appreciate your present unless you know something of your past.This statement becomes particularly meaningful to those whose roots trace back to the "Old Warnersville Community."
Warnersville is a neighborhood in southeast Greensboro. It is the first organized African American community in the city. It was established in 1867 by ex-slaves. It was aptly named for its founder Yardley Warner, a white Pennsylvania Quaker, who bought and resold 37 acres of land to people of color who had previously been unable to own property in Greensboro.
Warner hired an ex-slave, Harmon Un-Thank, with a keen business savvy to divide the property into lots and sell it. This community was settled by people who had limited education and less formal training, but it was the first community where people of color could own homes, build their own churches, run their own businesses and educate their children."
Records at the Greensboro Historical Museum, Greensboro Public Library and at all black Bennett College all show that Lee Street was outside of the Greensboro City Limits as late as 1870 and yet Lee Street clearly runs through all black Warnersville-- a community that in 1870 was bigger than Greensboro just as the Bessemer Community I live in was bigger than Greensboro.
And like my Bessemer Community, much of Warnersville was bulldozed under the guise of urban renewal when in-fact the only benefactor of the program was Downtown.
If the Greensboro City Council votes Monday to change the name of Lee Street they will be doing a great disservice to the citizens of Greensboro and most importantly the African-American descendants of Greensboro's first free African-American community.
Nowhere in the definition of progress does it mention wiping out history. As a matter of fact: the destruction of history has long been an impediment to real progress as history forgotten is history we are doomed to repeat. Changing the name of Lee Street is one more slap in the face to Greensboro's communities and those people who died at the hands of slavers and others who would deny any of us the most basic of freedoms just to make a fast buck.
Until it can be firmly established that Greensboro's Lee Street was named for Confederate General Robert E Lee and not an African American resident of historic Warnersville, the renaming of Lee Street cannot continue. For too long Greensboro has been destroying our history and our communities so that a few can profit. It's time to bring these practices to an end.
Update: More evidence, Greensboro's Lee Street was not named after Robert E Lee.
North Carolina, like the rest of the Confederacy, was occupied by Union troops from the end of the Civil War in 1865 and continued until Reconstruction ended in 1877. Memorials to Confederate war heroes did not begin to be built, honored or named until after Southern Democrats again seized control of local and state governments were able to establish the Jim Crow Laws beginning in 1876 at least 6 years after Warnersville is already known to have its own Lee Street.
In 1920, the Virginia General Assembly renamed Alexandria County as Arlington County, to honor Robert E. Lee and to end the ongoing confusion between Alexandria County and the independent city of Alexandria
Robert E Lee Monument, Charlottesville, Virginia, Leo Lentilli, sculptor, 1924
Robert E Lee, Virginia Monument, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Frederick William Sievers, sculptor, 1917
Lee by Mercié, Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia, 1890
The USS Robert E. Lee, a George Washington class ballistic missile submarine built in 1958, was named for Lee
The Mississippi River steamboat, Robert E. Lee, was named for Lee after the Civil War. It was the participant in an 1870 St. Louis – New Orleans race with the Natchez VI, which was featured in a Currier and Ives lithograph. The Robert E. Lee won the race. The steamboat also inspired a song Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (Lewis Muir-L. Wolfe Gilbert).
The Commonwealth of Virginia issues an optional license plate honoring Lee, making reference to him as 'The Virginia Gentleman'.
The M3 Lee tank.
From Humanities Magazine, How Did Robert E. Lee Become an American Icon?
" In a Gilded Age America rife with scandal and greed, such a selfless and incorruptible hero was not a hard sell. The New York Herald had already declared upon Lee’s death that “here in the North we . . . have claimed him as one of ourselves” and “extolled his virtue as reflecting upon us.” Frustrated and perplexed by such eulogies, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained bitterly that he could scarcely find a northern newspaper “that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee,” whose military accomplishments in the name of a “bad cause” seemed somehow to entitle him “to the highest place in heaven.” Twenty years later, a crowd estimated at 100,000 to 150,000 showed up in Richmond for the unveiling of a massive statue of Lee astride his beloved mount, Traveller. Even a writer for the Minneapolis Tribune who took exception to white southerners’ insistence on anointing Lee “as a man of finer and better mold than his famous antagonists” was forced to admit that the “Lee cult is much in vogue, even at the North, in these days.”
Although it had denounced Jefferson Davis as a traitor on more than one occasion, in 1903 the New York Times charged that the Kansas congressional delegation had simply been “waving the bloody shirt” of sectional bitterness when they opposed efforts to place Lee’s statue in the U.S. Capitol. Journalists were hardly alone in helping to nationalize Lee’s appeal. Popular historian James Ford Rhodes, an Ohioan, praised him unstintingly, as did no less a proper Bostonian than Charles Francis Adams II, who felt Lee’s courage, wisdom, and strength could only “reflect honor on our American manhood.” No one put greater stock in American manhood than Theodore Roosevelt, who, with characteristic restraint, pronounced Lee “the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth” and declared that his dignified acceptance of defeat helped “build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share.” A generation later, as readers devoured Douglas Southall Freeman’s adoring four-volume biography of Lee, another President Roosevelt would simply laud him “as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.”
Robert E Lee died in 1870. The City of Greensboro had already published maps of Greensboro showing there to be a Lee Street located south of the Greensboro city limits. You can buy a copy of your own at the Greensboro Historical Museum.
Greensboro's Lee Street was once Warnerville's Lee Street and there is little doubt it was named for a freed slave or perhaps a white man who helped Yardley Warner and Harmon Un-Thank with the establishment of Warnersville or Greensboro's previous link to the Underground Railroad. If the Greensboro City Council votes tonight to change the name of Lee Street they will be doing a great disservice to the citizens of Greensboro and most importantly the African-American descendants of Greensboro's first free African-American community.
As you can see in this 1919 map of Warnersville, Lee Street runs right through the middle of the little town. As late as 1919 Warnersville still stood outside of Greensboro. More on history of Warnersville including the City of Greensboro's efforts to "renew" Warnersville at Greensboro's Treasured Places.
