Unpermitted action: a Civil Rights activist reflects on her time in NC

Ora Mobley Sweeting never asked for permission.

She did not ask when, in 1964, she laid in the middle of a busy Harlem street with kitchen chairs bracketing her body to draw attention to the fact that her children and others in the area did not have crosswalks, crossing guards, or even street signs to help them safely get to school. The year before, she did not ask when she saw John Hancock’s name assigned to the neighborhood school, called the principal, and eventually helped establish Public School 154 as “The Harriet Tubman Learning Center.”

And she did not ask when, as a teacher in Whiteville, NC in the early 1950s, she taught her students Black history during the height of Ku Klux Klan activity.

Mobley Sweeting is a foundational Civil Rights leader you have never heard of, because aside from not asking for permission, she never received much recognition outside of Harlem.

“Seeing how Miss Ora did all this, I consider her to be a pioneer, and a kind of hidden figure of sorts,” says Nicholle Young, a library technician and archivist at Fayetteville State University. Young is part of a team of academics working to document Mobley Sweeting’s life and role as a Civil Rights activist, both in Harlem and in her brief periods as a North Carolinian.

Mobley Sweeting grew up as Ora Mae Williams in Monroe, NC, during the Jim Crow era. She was raised by “Mama Cora,” her father’s aunt, alongside 18 other children. Mama Cora made sure that the children in her care knew Black heroes, like Mary McLeod Bethune and Harriet Tubman.

“She wanted us to realize and to know that we were somebody because of our contributions in this country,” Mobley Sweeting told me.

After graduating from Charlotte’s Johnson C. Smith University in 1947, Mobley Sweeting joined some family members in Harlem a few years later to look for a job. In a post-Renaissance Harlem, she had the opportunity to connect with other Black visionaries at the Harlem YMCA. It was in her time out of North Carolina where she met the principal of a Black school in Whiteville. He offered her a job as a teacher, and soon she was back in her home state teaching fourth- and seventh-grade students. She says that her role at the time was teaching them everything — so she threw in some lessons about the Black heroes she’d heard about from Mama Cora. When the man who hired her found out about this, he told her to stop.

“The principal was probably afraid,” says Candida Mobley, Ora’s daughter and caretaker. “Think about it: if the Klu Klux Klan found out that he was allowing somebody to teach Black history in his school, he might have been afraid.”

At the time, the Ku Klux Klan was a strong force in the area — in 1952, the Grand Dragon of the local KKK was sentenced to prison for kidnapping and assaulting a Black woman from nearby Chadbourn, leading to the group’s investigation by the local, state, and national governments.

Mobley Sweeting says the reprimand upset her students, who ended up protesting. The police were called. She fled to Fayetteville, but her dad felt that the entire state was still unsafe, and told her to go to Harlem. She stayed until the 1990s. It was there that her organizing for Black liberation took off.

About six years ago, Candida Mobley got connected to Orville Allen, an LA filmmaker, who began documenting Mobley Sweeting’s story. Then, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Candida and Ora moved from Los Angeles back to Ora’s childhood home in Fayetteville so they could be closer to family. By happenstance, Candida met faculty from Fayetteville State University, who started helping her and Allen document her mother’s story.

“God just said, ‘Let me take over, because you are just taking way too long,” Candida Mobley says.

Now, Mobley Sweeting hopes she can make sure that future generations are able to organize and work toward Black liberation.

“I want others to do great things without permission from anyone,” she says.

This story was originally published February 7, 2022 at 5:00 AM.

Sara Pequeño

Opinion Contributor,

The News & Observer

Sara Pequeño is a Raleigh-based opinion writer for McClatchy’s North Carolina Opinion Team and member of the Editorial Board. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019, and has been writing in North Carolina ever since.