A New Radical Arts Movement Emerges From The Birthplace of Funk

Suggested music for your reading.

Kinston wasn’t always desolate as it is today. 

In 1913, a Black man named Lincoln Barnett purchased a tract of barren land in the floodplain of the Neuse River and named it Lincoln City, which would eventually become the segregated Black neighborhood in Kinston, North Carolina. 

White developers had passed on the opportunity to set up a community there a few years prior, when they found that not too many people were eager to build in a swampland that was designed to flood. That left it to Black residents to build up a fully self-sufficient community, complete with its own thriving economy, unique architecture, and “private beaches.” 

A floodplain isn’t meant to hold a people, but for Black folks it did far more than that. Lincoln City was everything. It was the original Black Mecca in the South.  

I’ve listened to elders reminisce for hours about a time when people would travel from all over the state to party in “the K,” the birthplace of funk, sporting real fur coats that dragged to the floor, top hats with matching leather loafers that only your great-grandfather could shine better. 

Shotgun houses built by Kinston’s elders themselves lined narrow dirt roads along the railroad tracks in the eastern corner of Kinston. Peace. Privacy. Safety. Their own place. There were community gardens in many folks’ backyards: tomatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, pecan trees. All free with a fair trade (or a growling stomach). Everyone knew everyone. Really. They were all related through blood and mutual survival. Godmamas, cousins, godsisters, aunties, big bros, uncs, play cousins, godbrothers.

Black ritual. 

This was community, the very essence of it. I guess there were a few benefits to a segregated society: safety, community, familiarity, privacy, self-governance, community education. The list could go on.

To understand Kinston’s music legacy, you have to go back in time to when Black Kinston was thriving. Before the floods washed Lincoln City away.

Kinston was a popular stop on the famed “Chitlin Circuit,” which provided a safe, alternative touring route for Black musicians in the Jim Crow South. Elders from the community can go on for hours about how jumpin’ the town once was.

“Folks used to put on their good furs to come to Kinston,” they would say. “They weren’t going to Raleigh or Charlotte, they were coming here.” 

In addition to the vibrant nightlife scene, elders also speak of a time when Black-owned businesses and homes lined the streets of what used to be Lincoln City. Things would drastically shift for Kinston’s Black community in 1999 when the catastrophic Hurricane Floyd ravaged the coast of North Carolina. 

The storm left most of Kinston, and all of Lincoln City, underwater — 22 feet to be exact. The city would opt for a buy-out, mandating the historic area return to its natural state. 

Kinston native Nathaniel "Nat" Jones was just 17 when he landed a gig with James Brown after an impromptu audition in 1964. He would go on to play a vital role in creating the sound of the band, eventually linking with brothers Maceo and Melvin Parker, Levi Rasbury and Dick Knight and bringing them on the road with the legendary band.

What these five young Black men did from their garages and living rooms in Kinston, NC should be studied in universities around the world — I believe it to be some form of alchemy. However, their history remains largely overlooked and under-reported. 

“When James first was playing, he was playing more simple chords, but when we got into the band the level of music changed,” said Knight. “It got a little harder and it sounded much better because we were using more chord progressions, better chord progressions, and it was carried to another level. It’s definitely a Kinston sound.”  

Kinston is a small, country and poor place — one of the most impoverished cities in the state of North Carolina. And yet, through a rich legacy of grit, resilience, and Black ingenuity, it has produced greatness regardless.  As if creating funk weren’t enough, Kinston remains the single greatest per capita producer of NBA talent in the world. This town makes legends — in music, athletics, culture. 

I woke up on July 18, 2025, on what would’ve otherwise been a normal, hot, NC summer morning, if not for the viral video from my hometown, Kinston, NC, on which I dared to click play: 

A white Kinston police officer, Andrew Beck, body slamming and punching an 18-year-old Black boy, Cameron Williams, for no other reason than walking down the street and appearing "suspicious."

Without noticing, my nervous system went into defense, my eyes welled with tears and my entire body proceeded to shake, not unlike the seizure the young man eventually would have by the end of the beating. 

Within two weeks, I was standing at a lectern in front of the 6-person, majority-Black Kinston city council. I only had three minutes to speak. 

“I came here with a 12-page PowerPoint of all of the ways you could invest in our young people and yet I am back today not because someone called me [about that] but because I saw a video of a child seizing under a grown man’s body,” I yelled, before my own body began to shake and I stormed out of the assembly hall.  

It wasn’t my first time. I am a filmmaker — an artist, a creative, and a communicator with spiritual forces — first and foremost. But secondly, I am an abolitionist who organized against police terror in 2020, after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I can still recall a power — one that I can only decipher or describe as an ancestral energy — that erupted through my body at that time. I started moving, plotting, organizing with my comrades: folks who were in this fight long before I moved to Chicago from North Carolina in 2017. 

We immediately launched an emergency mutual aid tent that gave free, fresh vegetables, produce and meat away on the corner of 95^th and Roosevelt (along with other tents by other organizers) for a month straight, as well as a mass movement now known as DEFUNDCPD. 

Kinston’s Black community never recovered from the floods of 1999. Today, Kinston is an overwhelmingly poor and uneducated community that has never imagined public safety beyond aggressive policing and harsh punishment. But I demand change, in this lifetime, not the next.

We organized actions, dropped banners demanding our collective freedom and fought police officers who maced, body slammed and harassed us at otherwise peaceful protests. It felt like a revolution camp. I created and directed a film series with my comrades about that beautiful, unusual time, titled The Black Archive Project: The Chicago Uprisings.

Now, just five years after failing at what I’d hoped would be the last mass movement required to spark a real change in the justice system, I found myself watching a video just like that of George Floyd’s final moments, but this time it was a child. In my hometown. (By God’s will, he survived.) 

After my bodily reaction, I took a few deep breaths, and then got active like I learned how to do in Chicago with my folks. 

This time was different: I was in the rural, conservative South, and I was alone. 

In my small town, showing up to city council to demand they defund the $15 million annual police budget and reallocate those funds to community programs that address crime at its root is a radical ask.

In fact, when I showed up — in a Black Malcolm X hat with "by any means necessary" embroidered across the back, handing out DEFUND KPD campaign propaganda, and wearing a yellow DEFUND THE POLICE shirt along with 10 or so other community members sporting yellow in support — I all but launched an full-on assault against one of the oldest police departments in the state.  

I would go on to help a community organizer, The People’s Witness Spunk Moore, file a campaign and run against the longtime mayor and police ally Don Hardy, who had barely blinked an eye at the viral video.

Kinston’s Black community never recovered from the floods of 1999. Today, Kinston is an overwhelmingly poor and uneducated community that has never imagined public safety beyond aggressive policing and harsh punishment. But I demand change, in this lifetime, not the next.

The same rural town that birthed funk music just gave birth to the latest piece of a larger national movement against police violence — the most radical political action our city has seen since the '50s. The same film series that garnered my first solo exhibition invitation in Chicago [Black Archive Project: Chicago Uprisings 2020] was the film series I used to host the first DEFUNDKPD movement meeting in Kinston.

We view and understand the world through art, so I decided to become an artist. Tonight you’ll binge a series on Netflix or Hulu. Tomorrow you’ll share a reel with a friend to reconnect. We see the world in film, so why can’t we use it to fuel the movement? 

This is all connected. Everything is always connected. 

Another history lesson: Kinston, Lenoir County, founded in the 1700s by ten wealthy white families, was founded with more enslaved Africans (69) than free people (38). 

By 1820, the number of those enslaved in Kinston were equal to the number of whites; and by 1850 there were 3500 whites and 4100 enslaved Africans. Of the thousands of enslaved counted in the slave schedule of 1860, only one is listed by name, Sukie, owned by Jesse Lasseter, who was 100 years old. 

By the 1970s and '80s, Jim Crow terror still gripped the South, especially rural areas like Kinston, which were often overlooked by the media. One sweltering hot, NC afternoon, my grandfather, Saturn Auto James, stood among over 500 Black North Carolina residents, demanding an end to racial terror in the 1980s. Saturn shouted so loudly, he could be heard over a nearby megaphone.

Decades prior to my grandfather demanding justice, my elders and ancestors would organize what would be the first unequal education protest in the South by walking out of class in 1951 in demand for better learning facilities. To everyone’s surprise, after 700 students went on strike for three days, the county delivered a brand new gym building for Adkin High School. The students had been forced to play in a barn with no gym floor, bleachers or A/C until the mass action took place.

Although Saturn passed exactly one month after I was born in 1994, this movement work in Kinston has brought me a closeness to him that I’ve never felt. Today, my power is fueled by him  — and Nikki Giovanni; and James Baldwin; and Fred Hampton; and so many freedom fighters who gifted me the blueprint for revolution. I know this work is simply a continuation of the work they touched. 

As Octavia Butler so profoundly told us: there is nothing new under the sun; but there are new suns.

Change is possible and movements work. When we fight, we win.

A month into the fight for DEFUNDKPD, the second oldest police department in the state, the cops in Kinston have: handcuffed and roughed up a 9-year-old girl; murdered an elderly suspect on a DV call; and fired a Black officer (my former classmate, DeQuante Jones), for stealing almost $1,000 from a fatal car crash scene and suppressing evidence. They are making the fight easy. Ase. 

I've since returned to the biweekly city council meeting in Kinston, armed with facts and data about real crime reduction methods and accompanied by some of my radical youth film students from the annual Freedom Hill Youth Media Camp I founded in 2022.

“I am a product of Ms. Resita’s film camp, where they took me to BlackStar Film Festival in Philly, where I had no money but I came back with $20 from the $40 they gave me while I was there,” said Javani Jones. 

“They made sure we ate every night and provided transportation. I was also able to make $1,000 for just doing the camp. This camp changed my life, so it makes me sad that you denied this program, because this is what Kinston needs, something for kids like me to do. Not more police.” 

I’ve confirmed and leaked that Andrew Beck, the officer who beat Cameron Williams, was found guilty of falsifying 911 calls to enter homes illegally in Durham in 2014. He lied on the stand, stating that making up 911 calls was department policy.

After I spoke about the $270 million city debt to power giants and soaring light bills in Black communities, just last week at City Council, the city announced it has worked to dismiss its high debt. 

When we fight, we win. 

Join the DEFUND movement here. More resources to join the fight:

• DEFUND THE POLICE INFOMERCIAL
• JOIN DEFUND KPD
• "WATERS STREET" FILM (FOR PEOPLE’S CANDIDATE SPUNK MOORE)
• BLACK LIBERATION TRAINING WORKSHOP

Resita Cox is a writer, Emmy-Award winning documentary filmmaker and community organizer. She holds an MFA in film from Northwestern University and was named an Esteemed Artist by the City of Chicago. Her debut memoir, MUD MADE, about her family’s life & legacy in Kinston, is set to release in 2027. She can be reached at workwithresita@resitacox.com.