Why you should know James E Shepard!

James E Shepard 

November 3rd of 1875 the eldest of 12 children were born of Hattie Whitted and Augustus Shepard.  James E Shepard the son of a Baptist minister in Raleigh, North Carolina.  James graduated Shaw University with a pharmacy degree.  In 1895 he married Annie Day Robinson, a cabinetmaker.  She birthed their children Annie Day and Marjorie Augusta.  James Shepard established himself among North Carolina's leading black entrepreneurs.  In 1898, he became one of the first seven investors in the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham which eventually became the largest black-owned company in the South.  In 1907, he helped incorporate the Mechanics and Farmers Bank.  All along James Shepard kept one foot in the world of politics.  Shepard an active member of the Republican Party, appointed the clerkship in the Recorder of Deeds Office in Washington D.C from 1898 to 1899 and Raleigh's deputy collector for the Internal Revenue Service from 1899 to 1905.

From 1905 to 1909 James Shepard served as a field superintendent for the International Sunday School Association and was the only African American to address the World Sunday School Convention in Rome in 1907.  James raised money for the National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race, which opened in Durham in 1910.  He won endorsements from local and national white leaders including Theodore Roosevelt.  In the 1920's James E Shepard served as president of the state's black teachers association and as Grand Master of the Prince Hall Free and Accepted Masons.  In 1935, he became one of the founding members of the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs.  During the 1940's James took the air to urge blacks citizens to vote. 

James Shepard did not live to see his school The North Carolina College for Negroes attain university status or witness the civil rights movement that fundamentally changed education in the south.  At the age of 71 in 1947, he suffered a stroke in Durham.  Two years after his death, students from The North Carolina College for Negroes picketed the state capitol and protested conditions at the unaccredited law school.  Their demonstration helped pave the way in 1951 for integration at the law school of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A local white columnist commented that "James E Shepard was regarded by many legislatures as the best politician ever to come before them."