If you were to drive the 9.4 miles down Silas Creek Parkway, a colorful blur of trails, schools and businesses would whiz past your window as you neared Wake Forest University’s campus. Although at times scenic, the parkway would be unremarkable to the driver, who has no way of knowing the history they are driving over just as it would be impossible to know the names of the enslaved women and men who helped build Wake Forest’s campus without pay or recognition. 

These are histories that have been paved over with cement, asphalt and an ignorance of Winston-Salem’s complicated past. 

A century later, people are trying to recover and untangle these histories and the stories of the Black experiences that shaped our campus and community today.

Flora Pledger, John Carter, Marjorie Carter at a luncheon for President Truman at Reynolda. (Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

Originally consisting of five wooden houses lined in a singular row, the segregated community of Five Row rested parallel to Silas Creek and was positioned just out of view of Reynolda from the 1910s through the 1950s. Unseen from the Reynolda House and Village buildings, Black farm workers on the estate, along with their families, built a space where children’s education and community values were prioritized during a time when very little opportunity existed for minorities in the city.

Black families and workers in Five Row did not have access to running water and were forced to use kerosene lamps for light and coal heaters for warmth, unlike white workers who lived in the village. Despite these disparities in living conditions between Black and white workers, Black workers were still drawn to the estate. Katharine Reynolds believed in building an ethical workplace, offering higher wages and additional resources to her Black workers. Her vision for the farming community was progressive for its time.

Soon, the community expanded from only five houses to ten houses, a boarding house, a school and a church. It became a compelling place for Black families to live. The Pledger family came to Five Row because of the high wages and improved conditions Katharine Reynolds offered her employees.

“I loved it, I loved it,” Flora Pledger, a laundress and maid who lived in Five Row, said in a 1980 interview for the Reynolda Oral History Project. “And if it had the water and electricity that I’ve got now — I’d rather be there than anywhere that could be.”

Reynolda itself existed, in many ways, as an oasis, located just outside of Winston-Salem’s city lines and thus out of reach of the tobacco city’s bustle, grit and legislative jurisdiction. This distinction would prove to be important. Winston-Salem was one of the first cities in America to enact block-by-block segregation in 1912. Later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1914, the segregation ordinance made it illegal for any Black person to occupy a residence on a street between two majority-white streets, in addition to other race-based housing restrictions.

Meanwhile, north of city limits in the Reynolda estate, the children of Black and white farm workers employed by Katharine Reynolds would play together, despite Jim Crow laws segregating most Black and white children throughout the South. The Black community of Five Row was close-knit and committed to giving their children the best education possible.

Although they attended a separate school from the white children, the children of Five Row were given access to the same schoolbooks. Five Row’s school offered the best education for Black children in Winston-Salem as it had college-educated teachers, course materials that were equal to white students’ and an academic calendar consisting of nine months rather than the typical six months, according to Phil Archer, deputy director of the Reynolda House Museum of American Art. 

Harvey Miller, whose father was hired as a mule teamster for the estate, was a student at the school and remembers his community with fondness:

“Well, we all were raised with white kids and Black kids in this community,” Miller said in a 1980 interview. “We all played together, used to go to church together, we played ball together, would eat at each other’s houses when lunchtime come. There’s not a house hardly that I haven’t had dinner or something at…”

Ellis and Flora Pledger near a building in Five Row. (Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

The Reynolda community during this time was a metaphorical bubble — separate and idyllic, guided by Katharine Reynolds’ progressive ideals. However, like most “bubbles,” it was fragile. Behind the mysticism of the utopian-like estate is the fact that it was built with money earned off of the backs of enslaved persons — a fact that had long been overlooked according to Archer. The museum’s exhibit, “Still I Rise,” strives to remember and celebrate the Black experience at Reynolda while bringing to light the true roots of the Reynolds family fortune.

“There’s a legend that [R.J. Reynolds] was sort of a self-made man,” Archer says. “That’s not true.”

The legend of R.J. Reynolds goes that, through his own hard work and cleverness, he became one of the leaders of the booming tobacco industry. In reality, his childhood was spent on his family’s thousand-acre Rock Spring Plantation in Virginia. During the Civil War, his father, Hardin Reynolds, owned over 60 slaves. After the war, he transitioned from enslaved labor to Black tenant labor. He paid minimally and enforced harsh contracts. 

“He was 15 years old at the time of emancipation,” Archer says. “By the time you’re 15, you’ve absorbed a lot of white supremacy.”

This was in the same decade that the Silas Creek Parkway, originally called the East-West Parkway, was built as part of Interstate 40. The white-majority government designed the parkway, which razed and segregated traditionally Black neighborhoods, including Five Row.

Before the neighborhood’s demolition in the 1960s, many residents chose to purchase their homes and used the materials to construct their new homes elsewhere. Pledger successfully petitioned Charlie Babcock, who had purchased the estate from the Reynolds, to pay for the relocation of their church building. Despite this, the community essentially disappeared with only its unwritten legacy and a few photographs as evidence of its existence. 

It was not until Feb. 2022, when the Reynolda House opened an exhibit titled “Still I Rise: The Black Experience at Reynolda,” that an attempt was made to recover this history. Much of the exhibit draws on the Reynolda Oral History Project, which began in 1980, when former residents of Five Row like Miller and Pledger were interviewed about their experiences.

Archivist Bari Helms was the main curator of the exhibit which is located in the East Bedroom Gallery. She collected photographs, oral histories and assorted documentation of Black history at Reynolda. The exhibit, which will remain open until December 2025, also features various works by Black artists on a rotating basis.

“It’s history that can be hidden or protected. And I think that it’s foundational to the city, to the tobacco industry, to the South,” Archer says. “[The exhibit] has inspired us to approach other topics that are challenging.”

As the Reynolda House’s work began to shed light on the history of Five Row, Wake Forest University began a new chapter in its attempts to grapple with its legacy of slavery.

Joining over a hundred other universities, Wake Forest has had an active membership in the Universities Studying Slavery consortium since 2017. The collective created by the University of Virginia strives to reckon with the role slavery played in the founding of many institutions. Part of their initiative involved compiling known histories in conjunction with dialogue around the systemic issues.

“To Stand With and For Humanity” is a series of essays from the WFU Slavery, Race and Memory Project that were edited by Corey D.B. Walker, Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, and compiled into a book. The book details the University’s longstanding history of unjust treatment of African Americans.

Earlier this year, the Old Gold & Black reported that Wake Forest did not purchase or own enslaved people, “due to the institution’s financial instability in the period from its founding to the Civil War.” However, Wake Forest paid several slaveowners, some of whom were Wake Forest faculty and administrators, to contract enslaved laborers for construction, agriculture and domestic work. Other slaveowners’ wills left enslaved people to Wake Forest. The essay edited by Walker states “the college also benefited from the bequest of 16 enslaved people sold to fund the first major endowment.” 

Known names of enslaved individuals exploited by the university include: Ellick, Harry and wife, Charlotte, Johnson, Anderson, James, Lender, Mary, Sarah, Phillis, Mary, Lucey, Venus, Patience, Mary, George, Murphy, Ted and wife Amy Jones’ two children, Rose, Martha, Lexy, Mary Sherwood, Aggy and children, Maranda, Mary Harris, David, Anderson, Virtn, Betty, Inez, Harvey, Tom, Venus and child, Mary, Emma, Lettice, Isaac, Jim, Lucy, Caroline, Pompie, Nancy, Harriet and child, Joseph, Harry, Ann and two children and Thomas. 

“Our involvement in the institution of slavery is harsh evidence that our realities fell far short of our aspiration,” Former President of the university Nathan O. Hatch wrote in his essay, “An Apology.” “We acquiesced to the times and lacked the moral imagination to envision better for all. Like those who went before us, we can be blinded by our own privilege.” 

In April 2023, President Susan Wente announced the launch of a new effort to “honor the humanity of the enslaved men, women and children who worked for or were sold to benefit the University,” according to a message from Provost and Presidential Endowed Chair of Southern History Michele Gillespie and Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer José Villalba. The Campus Memorialization Steering Committee has guided this effort after the Wake Forest University Board of Trustees voted unanimously in favor of the memorialization. 

The multi-phase project began in earnest in April 2023 and is currently in its third phase. The first phase consisted of site visits with Baskervill, an architectural firm contracted for the project. The second phase started between late fall 2023 and summer 2024 with Baskervill convening 18 focus groups and meeting with over 100 students, staff, faculty and alumni. Members of the Association for Wake Forest University Black Alumni were consulted. This phase extended into the spring and early summer of 2024 with Baskervill analyzing the data generated from these focus groups. In June 2024, their findings were collected and transcribed into a report that can be found on the memorialization’s website. 

Now in its third phase, five conceptual themes for the memorial’s design and possible zones for its location have been shared with the community.

“Wake’s history is layered and complex, full of manifestations of our motto. It also includes failures to live up to our ideals and values. In many ways our institutional ties to slavery in the antebellum South is one of our first failures to stand with and for humanity,” Villalba says. “Interrogating this history, and specifically acknowledging all of our founders — the willing and unwilling — is a crucial step towards self-reflection and awareness.”

It’s uncertain when the memorialization will be completed as the design and location are still being selected, but the response from the community has been positive, according to Villalba. 

“The community has understood the gravity of this process, and has been appreciative and supportive of taking our time,” Villalba says. “It speaks to the community’s genuine interest in honoring and remembering enslaved individuals who founded our institution.”

It’s impossible to move forward as a community or institution without coming to terms and owning the complicated past and wrongdoing towards members of the Black community. Honoring their experience and being transparent when telling the history of Reynolda and Wake Forest University is not only important — but necessary.

“You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” 

–  Maya Angelou, from “And Still I Rise” (1978)