Echoes from the Sandhills

Series 5 - Echoes in Action

Echo 13 - The Man Everyone Thought They Knew - James Walker (J.W.) Hood

Depending on which nineteenth-century newspaper you read, James Walker Hood was either a visionary educator helping build schools for formerly enslaved people or a dangerous political agitator who deserved public condemnation.

Which version was true?

J.W. Hood—Reverend, Bishop, educator, Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina, and one of the most influential Black leaders of the Reconstruction era—was born free in Pennsylvania in 1831. He arrived in New Bern in January 1864 while the Civil War was still being fought. He did not come to North Carolina because of politics or in search of public office.

He came as an A.M.E. Zion missionary.

By 1869, Hood had become one of the leading figures in North Carolina's effort to educate formerly enslaved people. He traveled throughout the state organizing churches, encouraging the establishment of schools, supporting teachers, and helping build institutions that would serve generations to come. His influence soon extended beyond the pulpit. He served as Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction, participated in the state's Constitutional Convention during Reconstruction, and later helped establish what would become Livingstone College. Few individuals left a greater imprint on the educational and religious life of post-war North Carolina.

Although his work carried him throughout North Carolina, Hood eventually made his home in Fayetteville. That places him much closer to the communities I have been researching than many people realize. As I followed estate records, church registers, and Freedmen's school reports across Cumberland, Harnett, Moore, and Lee counties, I kept encountering people whose lives intersected the educational and religious movement Hood helped build. His story is not separate from the Sandhills—it is woven into it.

Yet Hood's growing influence also made him a target.

To many African Americans and their allies, he represented hope, leadership, and opportunity. To many of his political opponents, he became a symbol of Reconstruction itself. Newspapers hostile to Black political participation attacked him relentlessly, while later writers dismissed him with labels such as "carpetbagger."  Those labels, however, often reveal as much about the people using them as they do about Hood himself.

The contemporary record tells a more complicated story. It shows a man constantly traveling, preaching, organizing churches, supporting schools, mentoring teachers, and working to create opportunities for people who, only a few years earlier, had been denied education, citizenship, and the freedom to shape their own futures.

The deeper I dig into the records, the less interested I become in the labels. I want to know what J.W. Hood actually did, who he worked with, and how his work reached communities like those in the Sandhills. The answer, I suspect, is far more interesting than either his admirers or his critics were willing to admit.

This Echo offers only a glimpse of J.W. Hood's remarkable story. His work and the lives of many others whose names emerge from these records will be explored more fully in the Echoes from the Sandhills book series, debuting this fall.