Undying Yearning includes short films, visual art, community events, and interviews with graduates of the "Big Four" and "Katie B." Video by Julia Wall.
Project statement
Carl W. Matthews, a 28-year-old Winston-Salem native, was tired and inspired in February of 1960. He was tired of the unfair treatment Black citizens endured in public places and inspired by a group of college students from Greensboro who had staged a protest a week earlier.
A historical marker in downtown Winston-Salem on West 4th St. recognizes the protest in which Carl Matthews participated in 1960.
A loading dock worker with a college degree, Matthews walked into S.H. Kress & Company during the lunch hour on February 8 and took a seat, a seat he would occupy for roughly five hours, only to be served a cup of water. Matthews had a longing, an "undying yearning" as he later wrote in the Winston-Salem Journal, "to be free."
Black residents of Forsyth County and the Twin City long had a yearning for fair wages, better working conditions, and adequate healthcare facilities dating back to the late 19th century when they began to arrive for jobs in one of the roughly 35 tobacco factories. Both inside and outside those factories, they fought for the rights they deserved; they had this yearning to serve, to uplift, and to educate their community through institutions of learning and with pathways to entrepreneurship.
The self-determinism of Black citizens was revealed through their institution-building and creation of social movements and enterprises that served Forsyth County and global communities. Whether it was medical practices of people like Humphrey Haynes Hall and the global social activism of his daughter, Madie Hall Xuma, educational institutions like Slater Industrial Academy and the "Big Four," or the 1940s union movement at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Black citizens built the institutions they needed.
Matthews' actions in 1960 continued to advance the advocacy present generations earlier. Undying Yearning peers into the past of an "All-America City" to understand how and why its Black institutions — from Depot Street Graded School to Scales Bonding Company to Katie Bitting Reynolds Memorial Hospital School of Nursing — thrived. What was at the heart of the nurturing that took place at these institutions? Through interviews, community conversations, and visual and performing arts, Undying Yearning aims to interrogate this inquiry.
“No single individual or organization is responsible for this accomplishment, but the masses of Negroes that were inspired by desire and an undying yearning to be free men and serve as least common denominators to the Constitution of [the] U.S.A. and the efforts of the open minded white people whose prayers were to see justice triumph are the unsung heroes.”
This project is a partnership between consultant and Black On Black Project founder Michael S. Williams and the North Carolina Museum of Art. It is made possible through funding from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust.