Freedmen's Colony/First Light of Freedom Memorial
North Carolina
1229 US-64
Manteo, NC 27954
United States
This heritage site is a part of the American Battlefield Trust's Road to Freedom: North Tour Guide app, which showcases sites integral to the Black experience during the Civil War era. Download the FREE app now.

Upon the U.S. Army’s liberation of Roanoke Island from Confederate troops in February 1862, enslaved African Americans flocked to the region for asylum.
Similar to the Port Royal Experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, newly emancipated people sought the freedoms they had been denied for generations, which included paid work, education, land ownership and the chance to assert their status as citizens.
With a friendly foothold established on the island and its surrounding environs, the Black community also claimed autonomy through the management of their own affairs. In June 1863, Reverend Horace James of the 25th Massachusetts Infantry, who had helped establish the colony near the northern end of Roanoke Island, recognized the importance of “giving them land, and implements wherewith to subdue and till it…making them proprietors of the soil, and by directing their labor into such channels as promise to be…self-supporting.”
Through their own agency, the Black population of the Freedmen’s Colony founded schools, built homes, and erected the foundation for a successful post-war society. Among those who found sanctuary on the island was Marie Ferribee, who, along with her mother and sister, escaped the bonds of slavery in Elizabeth City. The education she received on the island set Marie on a path toward becoming a teacher — an opportunity made possible by her eventual admittance to Virginia’s Hampton Institute.
Those men who desired to pick up the rifle to fight for this newfound freedom were enlisted in the 1st and 2nd North Carolina Volunteer Infantry (Colored), which were later designated the 35th and 36th United States Colored Troops (USCT). Their families comprised a majority of Roanoke Island’s Freedmen’s Colony while they served in the U.S. Army along with approximately 180,000 other African American men across the country.
At its peak, the freedmen’s colony on Roanoke Island consisted of 3,000 people. From the second year of the Civil War through post-war Reconstruction, the colony thrived and eventually waned when the federal government began to pull its resources from the region. By 1867, most who sought refuge in the once thriving community had moved on. Although the colony no longer exists, many descendants of these freedom seekers continue to live in nearby Manteo and surrounding locales.