Making a Way Out of No Way: A Century of African-American Entrepreneurship in North Carolina 1800-1900

FAIN: GE-235023-16

Tryon Palace Foundation, Inc. (New Bern, NC 28563-1007)
LeRae Sikes Umfleet (Project Director: August 2015 to March 2016)
Alyson Rhodes-Murphy (Project Director: March 2016 to October 2025)

Planning of a traveling exhibition that would explore the history of 12 free and enslaved black entrepreneurs of 19th-century North Carolina.

The Tryon Palace Foundation seeks a planning grant to design and prototype test a traveling exhibit: Making a Way Out of No Way: A Century of African-American Entrepreneurship in North Carolina: 1800-1900. The exhibit's goal is to increase public knowledge of 19th-century black entrepreneurship in NC. It especially targets at-risk minority youth, aligning it with NEH's Common Good Initiative. The exhibit encourages critical thinking about how ten featured entrepreneurs improved their circumstances despite resource deprivation and race-based societal constraints, including enslavement. This struggle continues to be a major issue in American society and one that profoundly influences the social, political, and economic development of this nation.