NCNorth Carolina Famous People

Four freshmen at a Greensboro lunch counter

On February 1, 1960, four first year students from North Carolina A and T walked into the Woolworth store on South Elm Street in Greensboro, bought a few small items, then sat down at the whites only lunch counter and asked for coffee. Ezell Blair Jr., who later took the name Jibreel Khazan, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond were refused service and stayed until closing. They came back the next morning with more students, and within two months the tactic had spread to dozens of southern cities. Woolworth desegregated the counter that July. Part of it is now in the Smithsonian and the rest sits in the building where it happened.

Ella Baker, born in Norfolk and raised at Littleton in Halifax County, had already spent decades organizing for the NAACP and for Martin Luther King's conference when the sit ins started. She called the students to her old campus, Shaw University in Raleigh, over Easter weekend in 1960, and the meeting produced the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She argued that the students should keep their own organization rather than become anyone's youth wing.

Three presidents claimed, one of them contested

James K. Polk was born in 1795 in a log house in Mecklenburg County near Pineville and served one term, from 1845 to 1849, refusing to run again and dying three months after he left office. Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh in 1808 in a two room building on the grounds of Casso's Inn, was apprenticed to a tailor, had no formal schooling at all, became president in April 1865 when Lincoln was shot, and was impeached in 1868 and acquitted by one vote. His birthplace now stands in Mordecai Historic Park.

Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, was born in 1767 in the Waxhaws, a settlement straddling a border that had not yet been surveyed. Both Carolinas claim him and both maintain markers. Jackson himself said he was born on the South Carolina side. Dolley Madison, who defined the role of presidential hostess, was born in 1768 in the New Garden Quaker settlement in what is now Guilford County.

Jazz and bluegrass out of towns of a few thousand

John Coltrane was born at Hamlet in 1926 and raised in High Point, where he lost his father, grandfather and uncle within a few months as a boy. Thelonious Monk was born at Rocky Mount in 1917 and left for Manhattan before he was five. Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon at Tryon in 1933, was playing for her mother's church congregation at three, and at her first formal recital refused to begin until her parents, who had been moved to the back to make room for white listeners, were returned to the front row. Roberta Flack was born at Black Mountain in 1937 and entered Howard University at fifteen.

The mountains produced a different tradition. Earl Scruggs was born at Flint Hill in Cleveland County in 1924 and brought his three finger banjo roll into Bill Monroe's band in 1945, which is roughly the moment bluegrass became a distinct thing. Doc Watson was born at Deep Gap in 1923, blind from infancy, and turned flatpicked fiddle tunes on a guitar into a standard technique.

The screen, the page and the pulpit

Ava Gardner was born in 1922 at a crossroads called Grabtown outside Smithfield, the youngest of seven children of tenant farmers, and was found by MGM because her brother in law hung her photograph in his New York studio window. Andy Griffith was born at Mount Airy in 1926, and the town has been selling itself as Mayberry ever since. Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville in 1900 and grew up in his mother's boardinghouse; after Look Homeward, Angel appeared in 1929 the Asheville library kept it off the shelves and he stayed away for years. O. Henry was born William Sydney Porter in Greensboro in 1862 and worked as a licensed pharmacist before he wrote a line. Billy Graham was born on a dairy farm outside Charlotte in 1918 and is buried at the library there. Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis but taught at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem from 1982 until her death in 2014.

Stock cars, and a sophomore left off the team

Junior Johnson, born at Ronda in Wilkes County in 1931, learned to drive hauling his family's whiskey, served time for tending a still, won fifty NASCAR races, and worked out at Daytona in 1960 that a slower car could hold a faster one's slipstream. Richard Petty was born at Level Cross in 1937 and won 200 races and seven championships. Dale Earnhardt was born at Kannapolis in 1951, won seven championships of his own, and was killed on the last lap at Daytona in 2001.

Michael Jordan was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Wilmington, was left off the varsity roster as a sophomore at Laney High School, and as a freshman at North Carolina hit the shot that beat Georgetown in the 1982 national final. The state's most famous flight belongs to two Ohioans: the Wright brothers came to Kitty Hawk in 1900 because the Weather Bureau told them where the steadiest wind was.

Tobacco money and a drugstore soda

James B. Duke was born outside Durham in 1856, built the American Tobacco Company and then a power company, and endowed Trinity College in 1924 on the condition that it change its name to Duke. Caleb Bradham, a pharmacist in New Bern, mixed a syrup he called Brad's Drink in 1893 and renamed it Pepsi-Cola five years later. Vernon Rudolph opened the first Krispy Kreme in Winston-Salem in July 1937, selling to grocers until passers by started knocking on the window for hot doughnuts. Richard Jordan Gatling, born in Hertford County in 1818, patented a seed sowing machine before he patented the gun that carries his name in 1862.

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