Ammie McRae Jenkins, the first Black student to attend High Point University and an activist who dedicated much of her life to preserving land owned by Black families in the North Carolina Sandhills, died on October 25. She was 84.
“She was a genius,” Larry Dobbins, a member of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association, said of Jenkins, who founded the organization in 2001. Dobbins’ hand rested on a cane as he spoke about Jenkins, who was a few grades ahead of him at Anne Chesnutt High School, which served Black students during segregation.
After high school, Jenkins in 1962 became the first Black student admitted to High Point, a private university in Guilford County. In a 2023 short documentary, Jenkins recalled how people pelted her with spitballs and called her racial slurs as she walked through campus. But she kept going. “You’re not going to bother me by just calling me a name,” Jenkins said. “So I wasn’t afraid.”
But things changed for her when President John F. Kennedy, a strong advocate for the Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated in 1963.
“We were in the classroom, and an announcement had come through that Kennedy had been shot,” Jenkins recalled. She said some students cheered, and she was shocked that anyone would “rejoice in the death” of a president.
“That is the first time I felt fear,” Jenkins said.
She left school and built a successful career as a computer programmer and businesswoman.
But her High Point University story wasn’t over yet. The school awarded Jenkins an honorary degree in 2019, five decades after she first enrolled.
Stolen Land
Jenkins, whose great-grandfather was an enslaved person, grew up on a farm in Harnett County, just outside of Spring Lake on land now enveloped by Fort Bragg.
“Everything grew wild. Everything grew in abundance,” Jenkins recalled of her family home in a 2008 interview with The News & Observer.
Following the death of her father in 1954, Jenkins’ family endured intimidation and fear tactics from local white people—a story all too familiar during that time.
Following the end of the Civil War, Black Americans quickly began acquiring land. By 1910, Black farmers owned more than 16 million acres, according to the American Bar Association. But 90% of that land was lost by 1997, taken from families through violence and discriminatory practices by banks and the government.
“We didn’t leave because we wanted to,” Jenkins said in a 2007 interview with Under-told Stories, an international journalism project. “My mother didn’t know that people were working behind the scenes to take the land. So, we lost all of that.”
Jenkins said her family was never paid for the property.
“Lost by whatever means,” Dobbins said. “By hook or by crook, as we say in the country.”
The loss of her family’s property spurred Jenkins’ mission to protect Black-owned land.
The nonprofit Sandhills Family Heritage Association runs on a mission of H.O.P.E.—heritage, outreach, preservation of land, and economic empowerment. The group has worked with local law students in the past to host estate planning clinics, and it has expanded programming to include historical tourism opportunities, financial literacy, and health and wellness programs, and a theater group called the Sankofa Players.
Preserving the Past
The organization also operates the Spring Lake Farmers Market, a key part of its mission to promote entrepreneurship in the area, board member Janet Brower told CityView.
The organization acquired the Spring Lake Civic Center—a once-dilapidated building on Chapel Hill Road that once served as a key meeting place for Civil Rights activists in the 1960s—in a 2009 handshake deal, Brower said. Bringing new life to the building would be a tremendous task.
Repairs are still underway, and the goal is to transform the space into a community center and museum that will house historical artifacts and stories collected by Jenkins. The Sandhills Family Heritage Association has spent about $330,000 on the project so far, and remaining renovations are expected to cost about $150,000.
The association is the protector of several historical sites, including a brush arbor in Spring Lake. Brush arbors are small wooden structures, usually deep in the woods, where people who were enslaved gathered to practice their faith.
“It was a place they felt safe to worship,” Brower said.
The group maintains a portion of the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road, a stretch of flattened wooden posts that served as a roadway spanning almost 130 miles from the Market House in downtown Fayetteville to Forsyth County.
The organization also cares for the Deerfield Cemetery in Spring Lake. Myron Jones, who serves on the association’s board, said the cemetery was once part of a nearby plantation. Though the process is slow and painstaking, the association is working to clean up and maintain the cemetery and identify the people who rest there. Board members say the goal is to remove over 100 tree stumps from the area.
In November, the Sandhills Family Heritage Association and Sankofa Players presented The Chair, a one-act play written by board member Tonya Brinkley. The play reflects on the concepts of truth, healing, heritage, and the power in everyday stories.
The troupe dedicated the performance to Jenkins.
“Without her vision, determination, and faith,” the glossy page of the program read, “the Sandhills Family Heritage Association would not exist.”
Brower recalled visiting the land Jenkins once called home, where only a chimney remains of the house. Even then, Jenkins was determined to preserve history.
“She was saying, ‘See if you can find something that we can take back,’” Brower said. They left that day with a pile of rocks and an old shoe.
“She wanted to preserve the stories of the elders,” Brower said. “Those stories needed to be recorded, and they needed to be preserved for future generations.”
With the stories she collected, Jenkins independently published her book Healing From the Land in May 2021, adding the title “author” to a lifelong list of accomplishments and legacy.
White-Washed History
Some members of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association say the history of the region has been whitewashed. They say the sanitization of historical accounts—and erasure of Black narratives—paints an inaccurate picture of the area and skews the lens from which we view the past.
“It has a snowball effect because you’re starting out with a small lie, which grows to a big lie,” Jones said. “You’re going to have people that will never change their minds once they hear it. So at that point, it’s distorted.”
Board member Debra Clyde said she read a book about the history of Spring Lake and was shocked that it failed to mention the name of any Black people until the section about the 1970s. “It wasn’t just washed over,” she said. “It was buried.”
Dobbins said that when inaccuracies in history come from people in power, they become almost “gospel for folks.”
“You can destroy it, white-wash it, and then the attempt is to start all over again,” he said. “I pray to God that never happens.”
A Legacy Continued
Members of the Sandhills Family Heritage Association say they will take their time to find a new executive director.
The group’s members gathered around a table in early December, reflecting on what it means to continue Jenkins’ work and legacy as a mother, grandmother, author, historian, trailblazer, and fierce protector of Black voices.
“She laid a great foundation. She’s gone now, at no fault of anybody. That’s just God’s way of doing things, you know?” Jones said. “But if we don’t continue, her dream dies.”