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Register 49 Seats Remaining
Join Dr. Willa Cofield, co-author of The Nine O'Clock Whistle in conversation with Kellia Sweatt.
This event will take place at 12 p.m. in the Auditorium of the Montclair Public Library, 50 S. Fullerton Avenue. After the discussion, there will be books for sale and signing by the author.
Between the years of 1963 and 1965, civil rights protests rocked rural communities like Enfield, a small North Carolina town where segregationist and white supremacist attitudes prevailed. Whites in Enfield enforced a variety of racist norms and employed a range of racist practices, including the sounding of a siren on Saturday nights meant to order Black residents to leave the downtown streets at nine o’clock. On August 31, 1963, hundreds of people, including Willa Cofield—an English teacher in the Black, segregated high school—and two of her students, Cynthia Samuelson and Mildred Sexton, protested these conditions as masses of Black people ignored the whistle.
The Nine O’Clock Whistle covers a range of historically and contextually significant stories, including details from Cofield’s grandfather’s early life as an enslaved person and her family’s rise to prominence in the Enfield Black community, to the roles the authors played in the local protest movement during the 1960s. Ultimately, Cofield, Samuelson, and Sexton squarely repudiate the assertion that the civil rights movement bypassed communities in northeastern North Carolina, and prove instead that the movement drastically changed the lives of people in towns like Enfield forever.
Dr. Willa Cofield is a retired educator with a deep devotion to community uplift. She previously held positions at the North Carolina Fund, Livingston College, and the New Jersey Department of Education. She produced the documentary films The Brick School Legacy, and, with Karen Riley, The Nine O’clock Whistle.
Kellia Sweatt is a grassroots community activist, Black parent organizer and former Civil Rights Commissioner.
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