[Scrapbook Assembled by Willia Lucille Pettiford, an African-American Student at the Mary Potter School]

[Oxford, N.C., 1939. Very good.. [32] leaves, illustrated with many dozens of ephemeral items, mostly school-related printed materials, newspaper clippings, and greeting cards pasted in or laid in. Folio. Contemporary dark green cloth backstrip, light green boards with floral illustration inset into front cover, string tied. Moderate scuffing and edge wear to boards. An intriguing scrapbook assembled by a young Black woman named Willia Lucille Pettiford of Jamaica, Long Island while attending the African-American Mary Potter Academy in Oxford, North Carolina in the late-1930s. The scrapbook is populated with dozens of newspaper and magazine clippings (truncated) of notable African Americans, as well as famous performers, a combination of Black and white stars of the stage and silver screen. Willia pasted in excerpts about W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Bentley, Florence R. Beatty, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, and others. Willia also included several printed event programs, invitations, and notices from the school, including a hand-made program for the Mary Potter Athletic Banquet on April 25, 1938; a May 3 violin recital sponsored by the Oxford Music Lovers' Club; a May 13, 1938 "Oratorical Contest" at the school; an April 17, 1939 performance of the "Oxford Music Lovers' Club;" a May 13, 1939 meeting of the Young People's League of the Cape Fear Presbytery; and the Mary Potter School's baccalaureate exercises for both 1938 and 1939. She also cut out portions of the school newsletter or yearbook and used them in the scrapbook.

"Mary Potter Academy was launched in 1889 with George Clayton Shaw as principal, a post he held until 1936. Shaw was born to slaves in Louisburg in 1863. His mother, Mary Penn Shaw, had been provided what he described as 'a fairly good education' and she instilled the importance of education in her six children, all of whom became educators. George Shaw graduated from Lincoln University (in Pennsylvania) in 1886. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary before completing studies at Auburn Theological Seminary (New York) in 1890. While in New York, Shaw met Mary Potter, secretary to the Presbyterian Freedmen's Board and benefactor of the educational improvement of freedmen. Potter provided funding to establish the first school for African Americans in Granville County (Oxford), where in 1888 he founded Timothy Darling Presbyterian Church. Called Timothy Darling (for Shaw's teacher) until 1892, the school was funded by the Board of Missions for Freedmen, New York Synodical Society, and Albany Presbytery. It would later serve as a private boarding school, until the 1950s, then as a public high school until 1969. In 1970 Mary Potter became an integrated middle school" - NC.gov. (Inventory #: 5499)