Wilson Mirror, 9 May 1888.
Twenty-five year-old Samuel H. Vick had been teacher and principal at the Colored Graded School since shortly after his graduation from Lincoln University. A year after this graduation, he was appointed by President William H. Harrison to his first stint as Wilson postmaster, a highly sought-after political patronage position. Vick hired his old friend Braswell R. Winstead, with whom he had attended high school and college and taught at the Graded School, as assistant postmaster. Teacher A. Wilson Jones was married to Vick’s sister Nettie Vick Jones — and murdered her in 1897. Annie Washington was about 18 years old when this article was published. She and Samuel Vick married almost exactly four years later.
The gall of the writer to suggest that we, as a brilliant African people who were captured from the land of plenty- against our will – were an ignorant people. Surely we were only ignorant to the cunning tricks of the captors since history shows that our brilliance in the arts and sciences when they found us was astonishing, even in today’s standards, which we helped to shape. Furthermore, to suggest that we had to be ” rescued from the galling slavery of darkness, error, and superstition” was a direct result of our being enslaved , at the time of this article, for 300 years. Anyone who had been tricked into slavery then misused and abused had all the right to be superstitious among many other things!!!