“We Must Situate Race”: Bobby Wilson’s Black Geographies

Bobby McClain Wilson was born on April 18, 1947, in Warrenton, North Carolina. His upbringing reflects the politics of Blackness and a Black sense of place in eastern North Carolina. His early life was situated on the family farm in Warren County, a place central to North Carolina’s tobacco empire, impossible without slave and tenant farmer labor. Wilson’s obituary states that he “learned from his parents the value of discipline, focus and a strong work ethic” (Warren Record 2021), which were central ontological tenets to Black survival in socio-economic life still shaped by plantation power relations. He was educated in Black schools with Black teachers until he left the South for Clark University in Massachusetts. He grew up in a Black church. He was engaged in the Black liberation struggle as a young person, often recalling the times his grandfather would pull up at his home in a pickup truck, exclaiming, “Come on. Get in. We’re going to march today!” His life-long engagement with questions of race, economy, labor, and place were shaped by these early experiences, which he traced across his scholarship, from the late 20th century until his death in 2021. Bobby Wilson laid much of the groundwork for Black Geographies of the US South on which we stand today.

We enter this reflection as two Black geographers with North Carolina roots and familial ties. As we write, we think of Wilson’s urgent provocation that

We must situate race, not only in a historical context, but also in a historical- geographical context. We must expose the skeletons of places and plant the flesh of black experiences on those bones as well

(2002, 37).

We assert that we must understand the context of Wilson’s own Black sense of place in order to situate his work on race “in a historical-geographical context.” We emphasize these key places and experiences above to begin doing so. Now, we engage briefly with important influences before ending with what Wilson’s life and work open for us.

Ora Virginia Wilson

Bobby Wilson’s mother, Ora Virginia Wilson, was born May 19, 1926, in the Coley Springs community in Warren County, North Carolina. Like her children, she grew up and spent her life in the Black Church, first at Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church then Greenwood Baptist Church. She was educated in Black institutions — Coley Springs Elementary School and then Warren County Training School, the only school providing secondary education to Black youth at the time and from which Mrs. Wilson graduated as valedictorian of the school’s first 12th-grade class. She married Bobbie Henderson Wilson, “a union that lasted 65 years” until Mr. Wilson’s passing (Warren Record 2017).

Like many Black women (including those in our own families), Mrs. Wilson went to work in support of her family. Black women have always worked outside of the home, “transubstantiated into property” (Gumbs 2020) during chattel slavery, forced to produce and reproduce for global empires, the overwhelming majority doing so as field workers even after emancipation (Davis 1981).

For a while, she worked as a domestic in Scarsdale, NY, until she returned home and worked at Harriet and Henderson Textiles¹ to help her oldest child, Bobby, go to college

(Warren Record 2017).

Mrs. Wilson’s life exemplifies the complexities of Black women’s lives — their simultaneous roles as mothers and community leaders within Black communities and Black homes while largely being relegated to the servant class in the economy. Mrs. Wilson served as a Sunday School teacher, deaconess, member of the missionary circle, church choir, and the women’s ministry in her church, and highly respected leadership roles in southern Black communities. Yet, she had to leave her family for New York, temporarily, an economic migration reality familiar to many Black families in the South, with echoes of plantation relations that Wilson traced through his work, most notably in his 2000 book America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham.

It is from the context of his mother that we can begin to understand...