African American Community Gains Prominence

The brownstone quarries, the Sanford Sash & Blind factory, and other industries provided an economic foundation for Sanford’s African American community. The core of Sanford's African-American community developed to the South of downtown near these major employers during the late nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, African-American subdivisions with names such as Blandland, Lincoln Heights, and Bluefield had been established south of the downtown. At least one African American businessman, John A. Womack, managed to overcome Sanford's spatial segregation by operating a bakery on South Moore Street in the heart of the town's white business district during the 1890s. Another member of Sanford's African American community, P. H. Holmes, served as a town alderman in 1902.

The period's most successful black businessman was Arnold Lincoln Boykin (ca. 1870-1943). At first working as a carpenter with the Seaboard Air Line, by 1910 "Link" Boykin established himself as a general contractor in Sanford, and in the 1920s his payroll numbered as many as fifty carpenters, brick masons, and other tradesmen. Boykin built several prominent buildings in Sanford, including the Fair Promise A.M.E. Zion Church at 712 Wall Street and the Lee County Training School, and his houses throng the older neighborhoods of Downtown Sanford.

Other African-Americans also figured prominently among the county's commercial brick makers and brick masons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contractor David W. Womack operated a clay pit and brick plant south of Pearl Street in Sanford in the late 1880s, providing the bricks for the Scott Building, Downtown Sanford's first brick commercial block.

Churches and the schools formed the social bedrock of Lee County's African-American community. In 1889, the Rev. F.L. Montgomery, laid the foundation for the Blandonia United Presbyterian Church south of downtown. In 19l5, three churches stood on or near the street, and businessmen Dr. D. L. Bland, A. Lincoln Boykin, and J. S. Phillips formed the Phillips-Boykin Drug Company, which later sold drugs, tobacco, soft drinks, and other merchandise from a two-story building on the corner of Pearl and South Moore Streets. By the late 1910s, Pearl Street had developed as the commercial and institutional heart of downtown’s African American community.

While the city's early black churches are relatively well documented, little is known about early black schooling until the establishment of the South Sanford Graded School in the 1910s. At first housed in a two-story, five classroom frame building on Washington Avenue, the South Sanford school remained poorly equipped and understaffed until 1924, when William Bartelle Wicker took the reins. The dynamic new principal increased the number of students enrolled in the high school curriculum from nine in 1924 to fifteen during the 1925-26 school year and to over thirty in 1927-28.

Wicker used these statistics to lobby the Rosenwald Fund, a fund conceived by southern black leader Booker T. Washington and supported by northern philanthropists, chiefly Julius Rosenwald to provide a new high school building for Sanford and Lee County's African American community. The result was the Lee County Training School in the heart of the City of Sanford, a ten-room brick building based on a design by architect H. B. Hunter and built by A. Lincoln Boykin in 1927. By 1947, enrollment at the school had grown to 828 students, and a gymnasium, cafeteria, and agricultural building had been added to the campus. The Lee County Training School was one of five African-American high schools in North Carolina to meet the full requirements of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for the 1946-47 school year.