am, for whom the city is named, provided land for a railroad station.
Due to a disagreement between plantation owners and farmers, North Carolina was the last state to secede from the Union. Durhamites fought in several North Carolina regiments. Seventeen days after Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, the Union's General Sherman and the Confederacy's General Johnston negotiated the largest surrender and the end of the Civil War at Bennett Place in Durham.
After the ceasefire in Durham, Yankee and Rebel troops celebrated together and discovered Brightleaf tobacco - a taste that led to the success of Washington Duke and his family and spawned one of the world's largest corporations (which included American Tobacco, Liggett & Meyers, R. J. Reynolds, and P. Lorillard). Tobacco soon inspired other Durham developments. The first mill to produce denim and the world's largest hosiery maker were established in Durham during this time.
In 1887, Trinity College moved from Randolph County to Durham. Washington Duke and Julian Carr donated money and land to facilitate the move. Following a $40 million donation by Washington Duke's son, James Buchanan Duke, Trinity College expanded into Duke University in 1924. In 1910, Dr. James E. Shepard founded North Carolina Central University, the nation's first publicly supported liberal arts college for African Americans.
After the Civil War, the African-American economy progressed through a combination of vocational training, jobs, land ownership, business ownership, and community leadership. In 1898, John Merrick founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, which today is the largest and oldest African American-owned life insurance company in the nation. With its founding in 1907, M&F Bank became one of the nation's strongest African American-owned and -managed bank. So many other businesses joined these two in Durham's Parrish Street neighborhood that the area became famous across the country as Black Wall Street. Learn more about Durham's African-American heritage.
The Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, organized in 1935 by C. C. Spaulding and Dr. James E. Shepard, has been cited nationally for its role in the sit-in movements of the 1950s and ‘60s. The committee also has used its voting strength to pursue social and economic rights for African Americans and other ethnic groups.
In the late 1950s, Reverend Douglas Moore, minister of Durham's Asbury Temple Methodist Church, along with other religious and community leaders, pioneered sit-ins throughout North Carolina to protest discrimination at lunch counters that served only whites. A sit-in at a Woolworth's counter in Greensboro, NC, captured the nation's attention. Within days, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. met Reverend Moore in Durham, where Dr. King coined his famous "fill up the jails" rallying cry during a speech at White Rock Baptist Church.
Advocating nonviolent confrontation with segregation laws for the first time, Dr. King said, "Let us not fear going to jail. If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South." Learn more about Durham's African-American heritage.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, what is now the world's largest university-related research park and namesake for the vast Triangle region was carved from Durham pinelands as a special Durham County tax district. Research Triangle Park (RTP) is encompassed on three sides by the City of Durham, with a small portion now spilling into Wake County toward Cary and Morrisville. RTP scientists have developed everything from Astroturf to AZT and won Nobel Prizes in the process. Now, over 170 major research and development companies, including Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Underwriters Laboratories, and agencies such as the EPA, employ more than 39,000 full-time employees.
Learn more about the history and architecture of Durham by consulting the North Carolina collection at the Durham County library.