Late February in North Carolina’s Piedmont can feel like springtime. Trees aren’t yet in bud, but vibrantly green grasses carpet the riverbanks, and frogs sing in the creeks. The air is softer, and the extra minutes of daylight seem like a promise of good things to come.
On February 25, 2021, sunset in the small town of Saxapahaw, North Carolina, was at 6:09 p.m., and a group of thirty people, mostly longtime residents of Alamance County, had been invited to a short outdoor play, The Spirit of Wyatt Outlaw: Final Peace, scheduled to begin at dark to take advantage of projected light and shadows. The guest list was small because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for most of the audience, it would be the first live performance they’d seen in a year.
The play had been rescheduled just days before—it was supposed to premiere on February 26, the 151st anniversary of Wyatt Outlaw’s death, but that day called for steady rain. February 25, a Thursday, was clear, the high temperature nearing seventy degrees. By the time audience members began making their way into the riverside amphitheater at 5:30, it was starting to get cool, but the long cement benches still radiated the sun’s warmth.
Most of the audience, a multiracial, multigenerational group, would have also been there in the rain. For eight months, these individuals had marched on freezing days, blazing days, and everything in between. After the January 6 insurrection, they had stood every night in the park they call Wyatt Outlaw Park, holding signs reading GOOGLE WYATT OUTLAW and TRUMP IS A TRAITOR and JUSTICE FOR GEORGE FLOYD in sleet and snow.
In many ways, they were like Black Lives Matter protesters across the country, bringing attention to national and local cases of police brutality as well as to the urgent need to remove Confederate monuments from public land. But they also had a secret weapon—emphasis on “secret”—which was the Reconstruction-era true story of Wyatt Outlaw, a voting rights crusader, education leader, and the first Black elected official in the small town of Graham.
Both because he dared to oppose the growing terror of the Ku Klux Klan and because he was a prominent example of Black political power, Outlaw was kidnapped from his home by a group of white men, dragged down Main Street, and hung in the public square on February 26, 1870. The mob who lynched him pinned to his clothes a warning for all to see: Beware you guilty, both white and black. His death touched off what became known as the Kirk-Holden War and led to the first successful impeachment of a sitting American governor. Attempts to hold the Klan accountable were widely weaponized by the conservative press, precipitating vast Republican losses.
Outlaw’s story doesn’t appear in textbooks, and as of yet, there is no public marker recognizing his accomplishments or the significance of his life. Few learn about him in public schools, though his story is one of the most historically important in the country.
The audience members who waited for the play to begin knew more than most, because they had learned about Outlaw at marches tracing his final steps and because they had repeated his name alongside recent victims of police killings and white supremacy. But there was plenty they didn’t know, too—when, exactly, Outlaw was born (because his mother was enslaved, no such records were kept), whether he was born enslaved or free, and how he came to prominence and power.
What they knew, and why they identified with Outlaw, was more gut-level. He was a Black political leader who cared deeply about voting rights and education. He founded a school and a church and encouraged voting and political participation by other Black men.
He was a coalition builder who worked with white and Black citizens and believed in justice and the rule of law. He discouraged citizens from taking up arms against the Klan and cautioned them to allow law enforcement to do its work.
His opposition to violent white supremacists was met with disproportionate force. Historical records show that about 100 men were present at his lynching, and armed guards blocked every exit to the town square. His murder sparked a statewide battle, and sensational, incorrect stories printed by right-wing papers and spread by orators fanned the flames of racism and white supremacy.
The end result was the disenfranchisement of Black voters and the entrenchment of segregation.
All of that sounded familiar to the audience members waiting for the play to begin.
They cared deeply about voting rights and education.
They worked in multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational coalitions.
They’d been met with disproportionate police force at marches, rallies, and protests. They’d been pepper-sprayed and arrested on their way to the polls. They’d been smeared by right-wing media. They’d been in shouting matches with neo-Confederates and shoved to the ground by police.
Their determination to learn and retell Outlaw’s story reflects an outrage that is being felt across the country as communities reckon with untold BIPOC histories and, especially in the South, what to do about Jim Crow era “Lost Cause” iconography, like the 1914 Confederate monument that stands outside the Alamance County Historical Courthouse.
That statue was erected and dedicated by some of the same people who killed Wyatt Outlaw—but few in the county knew that, until they started digging deeper.
Many say that they have been robbed: of a full historical and cultural education, of a sense of pride in who they are and where they came from, and of a spark that might have invested them in further learning. “I felt cheated,” Dreama Caldwell said about the experience of learning about the county’s hidden histories, especially the story of Wyatt Outlaw.
It inspired her to run for a seat on the county’s board of commissioners—a race she lost, even though she raised more money than any of the other candidates. Dreama would have been the first Black woman commissioner in county history. Instead, in 2021, the county commissioners, members of the Graham City Council, and the Alamance County sheriff—all elected officials—remained 100 percent white and Republican.
None of these elected officials sat in the audience, but Dreama was there, masked against COVID-19. Members of Forward Motion Alamance, a local activist group, stealthily monitored the play’s perimeter, protecting the introduction actors and audience from disruptors. Behind the scenes, actors drew deep breaths, paced back and forth, adjusted their costumes.
Chorus frogs called; geese honked across the sky as the light slowly faded. At full dark—nearly an hour after sunset—the play began.
Sylvester Allen Jr.
The idea to write the play came from my good friend Walter Boyd, a local historian. Walter had tracked Wyatt’s story for some time, despite the attempt by locals in the Reconstruction era to bury and disown not only his murder but also his significant impact on the rebuilding of the Black community in Alamance County after slavery’s end.
Walter—he saw something in me that I didn’t, not yet. He urged me to write my own play about Wyatt. So I did.
Opening Night
In the darkness, and as the prelude music played, audience members, in their concrete seats, saw a noose hanging over a tree branch, displayed on a lit screen. There was an atmosphere of solemnity and solace. As the lights on the noose faded and the final note of the recorded music played, I, as the narrator, came out onstage wearing a black dress coat, black slacks, and a blood-red cotton turtleneck.
Standing behind the podium, I stared down at my script in silence, as if in prayer. I took one more beat, one more breath. Finally, I looked up and recited the first line of the play: “You may have heard by now the legend of Wyatt Outlaw.”
Right here. At this exact moment, time stopped. And everything that happened in the last year flashed before my eyes, right there on the stage.
The space between the first and second lines of my play could be its own story. I thought about everything that had happened to get us to this moment in time.
The police killing of Jaquyn Light on a Graham front porch on January 28, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and the hundreds of unmasked white people who gathered at Ace Speedway, a local racetrack, in defiance of the governor’s shutdown orders. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. The peaceful but anguished protests that followed, circling the Confederate statue that stood in the middle of our county seat. The unconstitutional laws against protest in Graham. The threats by Proud Boys and KKK members, the doxing and harassment of activists. The threats against Black children, against disabled people. Good ol’ boys parked outside my house. Buying a handgun for protection.
The hundreds of arrests and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on arrests, surveillance, and court cases. The sting of pepper fog in my eyes, the bitter taste of it in my mouth. “. . . the legend of Wyatt Outlaw.” I realized the importance of those words only when I spoke them for the first time in front of an audience—in front of my fellow activists—in front of people who understood how the past and present were connected.
I wasn’t even sure what it meant to me. But I knew that Wyatt Outlaw represented something bigger than any one of us. And I wanted to chase it.
Belle Boggs
When I first met Sylvester, I was learning about Wyatt Outlaw. I’d been reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement in Alamance County and saw how many activists had taken his 150-year-old story as inspiration for their work.
“Wyatt’s story is a microcosm of everything Alamance County has been,” Sylvester told me.
Idealistic, hardworking, faithful, patriotic. Racist, violent, anti-democratic.
More than four years later, I’m still learning about him, because a figure like Wyatt holds many secrets. The historical record is scanty. We don’t have any writing by Wyatt, though his life was the inspiration for characters in two best-selling novels by the writer, judge, and carpetbagger Albion Tourgée, an ally and close associate of Wyatt’s. There are no known photographs of Wyatt, and his burial site is still unknown.
In Alamance County, most non-historians have learned about Wyatt Outlaw from the activist movement or from news reports about lynching victims in North Carolina. Before meeting Sylvester, I’d spoken to Alamance County activists, pastors, politicians, historians, and teachers about Wyatt.
Most discovered Wyatt Outlaw in adulthood, outside the classroom, and each person had a slightly different take on the man: a heroic figure, a formerly enslaved person who fought for the North, a victim of racist violence.
A mixed-race freedman and skilled carpenter. A father, a son, a peacemaker. A freedom fighter. A troublemaker. One person I spoke to, a white Republican county commissioner, mused that “as much as Wyatt Outlaw went through, he probably made some bad decisions too.”
Sylvester had been writing his play for several months and was in rehearsals when we first talked about Wyatt. I told him how I’d gotten interested: I wanted to tell a story, longer than the reported stories I’d done, about education and untold, deliberately hidden histories.
When I started interviewing people in 2020, Wyatt’s name came up again and again as the historical story they wish they had learned in school. Few people were taught much about Reconstruction. They learned about the Civil War through a Lost Cause, states’ rights lens—not as a fight over slavery versus freedom. They missed out, they told me. They were betrayed.
Sylvester said that he felt he’d spent his childhood not learning the most important stories about where he grew up. By the time he was in college, he said, “I felt like my time had been wasted. We were all sponges, but everything we learned was in a textbook, and it turned out that textbook left a lot of things out.”
After talking to Sylvester and watching his play that unseasonably warm February night, I began to see that the interpretations and reverberations of Wyatt Outlaw’s story—how his life’s work and the meaning of his life and death were covered up, forgotten, misinterpreted, reinterpreted, and rediscovered—were just as important as the historical facts.
“It’s one thing to hear about Dr. King,” Sylvester often reminds me. “It’s another to say, ‘I have a legacy right here.’”
This book is the story of “right here”: Alamance County, North Carolina, a battleground of ideas about who gets to tell historical stories, whose voices get heard at the ballot box and in the public square, and who gets to feel like they belong.
Sylvester Allen Jr.
Wyatt was a ghost. Maybe an idea. They had tried to erase the man, erase the story, erase the heinous lynching that was perpetrated by the townspeople in 1870. His murderers were never punished. Descendants of that mob still lived in town. How many would go to great lengths to stifle the story—to silence the storytellers?
I knew I had to bring Wyatt back to life. From the start of the evening, I could feel that the audience understood the importance of Wyatt’s story. It would be easy to assume that what hap-
pened in the Reconstruction era couldn’t and wouldn’t happen today. It would be easy to assume that the chaos of 2020 was America out of character and that our identity is much sweeter, much more civilized.
But on the day before our performance, as I was working on the stage set with a friend, a white man in a blue pickup truck drove by and yelled “N—–” out of the driver-side window.
“Did that guy say what I thought he just said?” my friend asked.
“Sure did. Not the first time; won’t be the last,” I said.
The legend of Wyatt Outlaw lives on in the local activists. That’s where the story is. And I wondered whether there were other Wyatt Outlaws from the Reconstruction era, in other towns across the United States.
I would get a chance to find out when Belle, whom I’d invited by letter to attend the play, came to me afterward about co-writing a book about Wyatt and about the work of local activists. About the lack of education surrounding local history. About the injustices committed toward the Black community in America’s history. About the lack of acknowledgment of their contributions to society.
I knew this book had to be written and that our different life experiences and vantage points would likely be a strength. I also knew I could never do it alone.
Wyatt was murdered for his audacity. But to be inspired by Wyatt is to be inspired by his courage. It would be up to me to find that courage. And so we set course, Belle and I, to tell the story of this community together.
From The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw: From Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter by Sylvester Allen Jr. and Belle Boggs. Copyright © 2026 by Sylvester Allen Jr. and Belle Boggs. Published by the University of North Carolina Press.
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