Papers Documenting Raleigh's First Black Mayoral Candidate Turned Over To UNC

The Manassa Pope papers are considered the largest and most significant collection of documents from a North Carolina African-American family from the post-Civil War and pre-Civil Rights era.

However, the accomplishments of Pope are not in the history books. Those accounts were lost.

"That is why we are here today, because it is so important that these documents and 3,000 others that we found here in this house need to be properly preserved and need to be available to both historians and the general public to use, so that we can fill in the missing gaps," Ken Zogry of the Pope House Museum Foundation said.

Pope was a practicing physician in Raleigh from 1901 to 1934. A guest of honor at Thursday's ceremony was Clarence Lightner, Raleigh's first-elected black mayor.