The Fight for Recognition

THE FIGHT FOR RECOGNITION
It is hard to believe now that the plain and forthright flatlands of Robeson County could have hidden an entire people for generations. Most every part of North Carolina used to be tobacco country. But many, perhaps most, of the tobacco fields are abandoned now. The generation that has gone off to work the assembly lines in the Converse plant down at Lumberton, at Kelly-Springfield in Fayetteville, or at Campbell Soup over in Maxton hardly even remembers the grueling work of plucking tobacco and twisting it up to dry in the gap-sided sheds that still stud the…