The good folks on the Arts and Humanities Committee at the Weymouth Center will present "North Carolina Freedom Stories" Sunday, Feb. 26, at 3 p.m. Sponsored by Moore County McDonald's Restaurants, the program will feature scholars David Cecelski and Reginald Hildebrand.

Cecelski will lecture on the remarkable life of Abraham Galloway, a North Carolina slave turned Union spy. "I'll mostly tell stories about Galloway and his circle of African-American men and women from eastern North Carolina, based on their letters, diaries and other surviving accounts from the Civil War," says Cecelski.

The son of a white father and a slave mother, Galloway was trained as a brick mason and allowed to work for pay. He fled to the North in 1857 and, after a sojourn in Canada, became a prominent abolitionist and antislavery speaker.

Gen. Benjamin Butler recruited Galloway into the Union Army's secret service, and he gathered valuable intelligence on Confederate activities in Virginia and North Carolina.

Galloway initially refused to recruit blacks for the Union, citing racism in the North. He insisted that black soldiers receive equal pay as their white comrades and schooling for their children, according to Cecelski.

After the Civil War, Galloway was active in politics, winning election to the N.C. Senate and helping to organize the state's first black schools and civil rights groups.

David Cecelski is an independent historian and writer who has taught at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and East Carolina University, and is affiliated with UNC's Southern Oral History Program. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard.

A native of Craven County, he edits the popular oral history series "Listening to History," for the Raleigh News and Observer," and is the author of "Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South," "Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898," "Its Legacy A Historian's Coast: Adventures into the Tidewater Past," and "Recollections of My Slavery Days."

Reginald Hildebrand will discuss his work with the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project, a major work of public art to be placed in downtown Raleigh across from the Legislative Building.

Hildebrand is an associate professor of African-American studies and history at UNC- Chapel Hill. He is the author of "The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation" (Duke University Press, 1995). His research focuses on the period of Emancipation and Reconstruction, although he is currently working on a collection of essays titled "Engaging Blackness: Body, Mind, and Spirit; the Perspectives of Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Howard Thurman."

He has served as interim director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History and interim director of the Institute of African-American Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former co-chair of the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project, a trustee of the North Carolina Humanities Council, and a member of the board of the Paul Green Foundation.

In addition, he serves as a member of the North Carolina African-American Heritage Commission, and of the advisory board for the North Carolina Historical Review.

Hildebrand received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Howard University, and his Ph.D. from Princeton.

A reception will follow the program. Admission is free and open to the public.

Contact Stephen Smith at travisses@hotmail.com.