The Nine O’Clock Whistle: Stories of the Freedom Struggle for Civil Rights in Enfield, North Carolina

Between 1963 and 1965, civil rights protests rocked rural communities like Enfield, a small North Carolina town where segregationist and white supremacist attitudes prevailed. White residents in Enfield enforced a variety of racist norms and practices, including the sounding of a siren on Saturday nights intended to order Black residents off the downtown streets by nine o’clock.

On August 28, 1963, hundreds of people — including Willa Cofield, an English teacher at the segregated Black high school, and two of her students, Cynthia Samuelson and Mildred Sexton — protested these conditions as masses of Black residents ignored the whistle.

After firefighters used high-powered water hoses to drive demonstrators from the streets, the Black community continued to resist by organizing a successful three-month boycott of white-owned downtown stores. The movement quickly spread throughout the surrounding county, evolving into a voter registration campaign, a school integration effort, and a legal battle over Willa Cofield’s First Amendment rights after she was fired from her position as a public school teacher.

The Nine O’clock Whistle covers a range of historically and contextually significant stories, from details about Cofield’s grandfather’s early life as an enslaved person and her family’s rise to prominence within Enfield’s Black community, to the authors’ own roles in the local protest movement during the 1960s.

Ultimately, Cofield, Samuelson, and Sexton firmly repudiate the assertion that the civil rights movement bypassed communities in northeastern North Carolina. Instead, they demonstrate how profoundly the movement transformed the lives of people in towns like Enfield forever.