Meet the Families Represented in ‘Tobe’: A 75th Anniversary Event

Happy seventy-fifth birthday to Tobe, a children’s book about life in rural North Carolina. Published by the UNC Press in 1939, Tobe was one of the few children’s books at the time to feature realistic images of African American children. Through a series of stories and photographs taken near the Hillsborough and Greensboro areas, Stella Gentry Sharpe and photographer Charles Anderson Farrell tell the story of a little boy and his family who were tenant farmers in North Carolina.

To celebrate Tobe‘s seventy-fifth anniversary, historian Benjamin Filene, director of public history at UNC Greensboro, will moderate a panel called “Voices of Tobe,” featuring special guest appearances by several individuals from Tobe, their descendants, and members of their community. To find out more about Filene’s research, see a previous blog post about Tobe.

The Tobe anniversary event will take place in the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill on Tuesday, 21 October from 5:00pm–6:30pm. For more information, check out event details on the UNC University Library page.

Guests at Tuesday’s event will also have an opportunity to view the special exhibit: “Where is Tobe? Unfolding Stories of Childhood, Race, and Rural Life in North Carolina.”

A fully digitized collection of Farrell’s photographs can be found at the University of North Carolina’s Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.

Originally published in 1939, Tobe is now available as a UNC Press Enduring Edition. UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.