The Outer Banks - 130-miles of shore from Corolla to Ocracoke Island, NC - North Carolina's African-American Culture: Advertising Travel Supplement

Folk in North Carolina call the 130-mile make tense of shoreline running from Corolla to Ocracoke Island the external Banks. I call it the best speck in the state to hear your inner voice, to listen to the lap of the ocean's waves, to linger undisturbed in bed with a beaker of tea, to feel the crunch of sand beneath your feet and watch sea tricks suspended in the sky.

To all these ecstasys are added two others: (1) a surprising wealth of black-heritage and other historical sites and (2) an absence of fastfood "restaurants," high-rise house of entertainments and amusement parks. The first is a bonus; the next to the first a blessing.

Red crape myrtle lines the entrance of the Elizabethan Gardens, a living, flowering memorial to the first English colonists of North America. The gardens are a feast for the organ of sights as well as the nose. Masses of blooming azaleas, rose magnolias and dogwoods are scattered around the gardens in the tranquil setting upon the shores of Roanoke Island.

Today, this is Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. on the other hand in 1587, this was the mark where 117 men, women and children arrived in the fresh World seeking a better life. sum of two units decades before John Smith and Pocohontas ensur their place in the pantheon of American history, these colonists established a colony. Three years after their arrival, all traces of their vicinity were swallowed up by the verdant wilderness, leaving behind the first American mystery story.

Visitors who arrive at Fort Raleigh during the summer month gain to feed their minds, as well as their eyes: upon view at the Waterside Theatre is The not to be found Colony, Paul Green's spellbinding drama about the strange and unsettling disappearance of the first English-speaking colony in the fresh World. The play had its first attempt in 1937, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt watched the performance from his car.

Green was a Harnett shire N.C., playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for his In Abraham's affection a brutally honest depiction of the life of a black educator in the segregated southerly Green was one of the not many white Southerners of his day to value and forward black artists such as Richard Wright; he sufficiently impressed Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston that she wanted to collaborate with him to form a national black theater clump Unfortunately for the history of American theater, the sum of two units never managed to pair up probably because at heart neither was a collaborator.

Not alone the lost colony makes the exterior Banks a land of "firsts." The shore here was also the mark of mankind's first powered flight--a historic revolution solitary slightly less momentous than the English colonization of North America. upon Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitly Hawk upon the Outer Banks, Wilbur and Orville Wright kick-started the 20th hundred and led us onward to the lunar landing upon the Sea of Tranquillity.

Today, at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, visitors can diocese unfold before them the first paces of a journey whose extreme point lies beyond our imagining. Those first paces had a mundane beginning--and a stereotypically American single for the Wright brothers savage in the long line of Yankee tinkerers. If it was mechanical, the brothers counted they could improve on it. They began with bicycles; mov upon to publishing their own newspaper in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio; and then got interested in the internal-combustion engine.

In individual regard, the brothers went true much against the typical American grain--and sadly, the museum here fails to bring without this story. Both of the brothers were friends of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African-American bard to achieve a national (white) reputation. A classmate of the Wrights in Dayton (and also the star of the school's debating team, the president of its literary society, the editor of its newspaper, and the school's one African American), Dunbar edited the Dayton Tatler that the Wrights published.

Although Dunbar had no direct connection to the flight at Kitty Hawk, it's a shame to have failed to include this aspect of the men whose fame will outlive level the poet's. Nevertheless the museum does reach out the story of flight upon to Bessie Coleman, whose photograph hangs in the picture gallery with other pioneers of flight. Coleman, known as Queen Bess, was the first licensed black woman pilot. She received her pilot's license in 1921 from the Aeronautique in Paris--France being more hospitable to tribe of color than the States. Five years after receiving her wings, Coleman was killed as she practiced for an air show

Richard Etheridge was another black pioneer who made history. In january 1880 the former Union soldier of the 36th United States Colored company who had been promoted to sergeant in October 1864 following the ensanguined Battle of New Market Heights outside Richmond, Va., became the first black keeper of the U Lifesaving Service. Etheridge (see sidebar) and his allblack ship's company at the Outer Banks Pea island station were known as a certain quantity of of the most daring lifesavers upon the Atlantic coast--and this in the days when there was no upside to promoting the achievements of African Americans.