Established by Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration (PWA) was a massive U.S. government spending program aimed at improving the nation’s infrastructure. Though the PWA was not vested with the sweeping powers of the National Recovery Administration, it affected nearly every county in the United States and indelibly altered North Carolina.
The Bankhead Cotton Control Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on April 21, 1934. The act addressed an impediment to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s efforts to raise cotton prices. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), explicitly made farmer participation in AAA programs voluntary. Most AAA programs compensated farmers for leaving land fallow, reducing supply and triggering a corollary price increase. Nevertheless, as some agricultural economists (such as Mordecai Ezekiel) had foreseen, non-AAA farmers could prevent price increases by flooding the market with cotton.
On February 1, 1960, four African-American students of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at a white-only lunch counter inside a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store. While sit-ins had been held elsewhere in the United States, the Greensboro sit-in catalyzed a wave of nonviolent protest against private-sector segregation in the United States.
Thomas Carter Ruffin served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina from 1833 until 1852. Now regarded as one of the most important jurists in American history, Ruffin was a powerful exponent of judicial independence, though his renown stems largely from the reviled opinion that he rendered in the case of State v. Mann.
The 1829 decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court in State v. Mann declared that chattel slaves have virtually no legal rights from their masters. Thomas Ruffin authored the opinion of the court, in which he asserts the "full dominion of the owner over the slave."
Called by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1789, the Fayetteville Convention was the second meeting to consider ratification of the Federal Constitution in North Carolina. It followed the Hillsborough Convention, at which delegates, rather than rejecting the new Constitution, refused to ratify it.
Born in New Jersey in 1738, Alexander Martin was a politician and North Carolinian delegate to the Federal Constitutional Convention. He was the only delegate to the Federal Convention who sought election to a state convention and lost.
In addition to producing electricity that spurred industrial development in North Carolina, the Duke Power Company, now called the Duke Energy Corporation, has played important roles in several chapters of the state’s history.
In 1934, textile workers in North Carolina went on strike. Though they had many grievances, including long hours and low wages, the likely cause of the strike was the lack of labor representation in the textile code authority, the National Recovery Administration regulatory board that briefly oversaw textile manufacture in the United States.