Sampson County NAACP

08/19/2026

Chief Justice Newby Appoints Judge Mario White as Chief District Court Judge for New District 5A
(Press Release NC Judicial Branch)

Chief Justice Paul Newby has appointed the Honorable Mario White to serve as chief district court judge for the newly created District 5A, which consists of Duplin, Jones, and Sampson counties. The appointment is effective January 1, 2027.

The appointment follows the division of District Court District 5 into two districts under the state budget. Beginning January 1, District 5A will serve Duplin, Jones, and Sampson counties, while newly created District 5B will consist of Onslow County. The budget provides for an existing district court judge position in District 5 to be elevated to chief district court judge as part of the split.

“Judge White's experience as both a practicing attorney and district court judge, along with his knowledge of the communities he serves, make him well suited to provide leadership for the newly established District 5A,” said Chief Justice Paul Newby. “I am confident he will continue to uphold the judiciary’s constitutional responsibility to provide justice without favor, denial, or delay.”

White was appointed to the District Court in 2020 and has served the counties that comprised the former District 4, including Duplin, Jones, Onslow, and Sampson. Before joining the bench, White was a solo practitioner at the Mario M. White Law Office in Clinton, where he practiced beginning in 1993. He also taught criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and business law at Sampson Community College from 1994 to 1998.

White earned his Bachelor of Science degree from North Carolina Central University and his Juris Doctor from North Carolina Central University School of Law. He is a member of the North Carolina Bar Association and the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers.

08/13/2026

FYI

08/09/2026

08/03/2026

In 1867, just two years after the end of the Civil War, a small group of Black leaders in Fayetteville pooled together thirteen hundred dollars to buy a lot and build a school. 🏫 It opened as the Howard School, one of the first state-supported institutions in the country dedicated to training Black teachers, at a moment when formal education for Black North Carolinians was still a genuinely radical idea.

The school grew steadily over the following decades, eventually becoming Fayetteville State University, but its earliest years were defined by scarcity, determination, and a fierce belief that literacy and teaching credentials were tools of real freedom. Students who trained there went on to staff classrooms across the eastern part of the state, multiplying that first small investment many times over.

It's one thing to gain freedom on paper. It's another to immediately start building the institutions that make it real. 📚

What role did a school or a teacher play in shaping the direction of your own family's story?

08/03/2026

07/31/2026

Chicago, August 1912. Julius Rosenwald turned fifty. The son of German Jewish immigrants, raised in Springfield, Illinois, across the street from Abraham Lincoln's old home, he had never finished high school. Now he ran Sears, Roebuck and Company. To mark his birthday, he did something strange for a tycoon of the Gilded Age. He announced he was giving away close to $700,000, and challenged other rich men to do the same.

The country he was giving to was rigged. Across the Jim Crow South, Black families paid the same taxes as their white neighbors and got almost nothing back. Their children walked miles to one-room shacks with no windows, no books, no heat. White school boards provided token funding or none at all. An entire generation was being deliberately locked out of literacy.

A year earlier, Rosenwald had read Booker T. Washington's memoir and then met the man himself at a Chicago lunch. Among his birthday gifts was $25,000 to Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Washington quietly set aside $2,100 of it and built six small schoolhouses in rural Alabama. Then he mailed Rosenwald the photographs and the ledgers. The tycoon studied the numbers, and the faces, and understood what he was being shown. This could scale.

But Rosenwald refused to simply write checks. Every school required a three-way match: his fund, the local white school board, and the Black community itself. So sharecroppers pledged portions of their cotton crops. Washerwomen gave pennies. Families donated land, lumber, and labor, raising roofs with their own hands. Between 1912 and 1932, the program built 4,977 schools, plus teachers' homes and workshops, 5,357 buildings across 15 states, educating more than 660,000 children.

By 1928, one in every five rural schools for Black children in the South was a Rosenwald school. At the program's peak, roughly a third of the South's Black schoolchildren learned inside one. Rosenwald himself stayed deliberately in the background, refusing perpetual endowments and monuments to his own name. He died in Chicago in January 1932, having given away some $62 million, most of his fortune.

The schoolhouses kept working long after he was gone. John Lewis, Maya Angelou, and Medgar Evers all sat at Rosenwald school desks. His fund's fellowships bankrolled Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, and Dr. Charles Drew, and financed early NAACP legal work that led, eventually, to Brown v. Board of Education. Following his own philosophy, the fund spent itself out of existence by 1948, exactly as he intended.

Today, only about 600 of the schoolhouses still stand, and America is finally building the monument he never wanted. In February 2026, legislation was reintroduced in Congress to create the Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Schools National Historical Park, linking restored schools in Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia to a visitor center in Chicago. Aging alumni are leading the restorations themselves, and a National Building Museum exhibit on the schools runs through January 2027.

He asked for no monument. Five thousand communities built one anyway, with their own hands.

07/04/2026

Medgar Evers was more than an activist. He was one of the leading voices fighting segregation and racial terror in Mississippi during one of the most dangerous periods in American history. As the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, he investigated lynchings, organized boycotts, challenged segregation laws, and helped Black citizens register to vote despite constant threats against his life.
At a time when speaking publicly for civil rights in Mississippi could get someone beaten, jailed, or killed, Evers continued organizing anyway. His home itself became a target. The family lived under constant surveillance and intimidation, yet he refused to stop the work.
His assassination happened just hours after President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationally televised speech calling civil rights a moral issue for the nation. For many Americans, Evers’ murder exposed how violent resistance to equality still was in the South.
What also stands out in this story is the long delay in justice. Two all white juries failed to convict Beckwith during trials in the 1960s despite strong evidence. It was not until 1994, after decades of pressure and renewed investigations, that Beckwith was finally convicted of murder.
Medgar Evers’ death became a rallying point for the Civil Rights Movement. Songs were written about him, marches were organized in his honor, and his sacrifice helped push the country closer toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Today, his legacy lives on not only in history books, schools, and memorials, but also in every conversation about voting rights, racial justice, and equality under the law.
His story reminds us that progress in history is often paid for by ordinary people willing to risk everything for future generations they may never meet.

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