By Jaymie Baxley 

An unassuming brick building in the shadow of Raleigh’s ever-rising skyline was once home to a trailblazing doctor who made North Carolina history several times over.

Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope spent most of his remarkable life in the house. He was the state’s first licensed Black physician and the only Black man to run for mayor of Raleigh during the Jim Crow era.

Those milestones would have been enough to secure Pope’s place in the pantheon of great North Carolinians, but they are just part of a larger legacy of service that had a lasting effect on the state’s health care culture.  

A series of firsts

Born before the onset of the Civil War to free parents of color in 1858, Pope grew up in Northampton County near the Virginia border. 

He left his rural family home in 1874 to attend Shaw University, a then-fledgling college for Black men in Raleigh. The capital city had begun to establish itself as the “epicenter of the hopes, aspirations, and political activism of North Carolina’s African American citizenry in the post-bellum period,” according to historian Kenneth Zogry. 

“The scope of Pope’s world widened exponentially once he arrived in Raleigh,” Zogry wrote in a 2008 UNC Chapel Hill dissertation about Pope. “The education he received at Shaw, the students and faculty he came to know, and the introduction to urban life would define him as an adult.”

After completing his undergraduate studies, Pope enrolled at Shaw University’s newly established Leonard Medical School — the first four-year institution of its kind in the state, created at a time when such medical colleges were being established across the country. He received his medical degree in 1886 in the school’s inaugural graduating class. 

Pope then made history by becoming the first Black person licensed to practice medicine in North Carolina. James F. Shober, a Wilmington physician widely acknowledged as the state’s first Black doctor, held a medical degree but was unlicensed.

Despite holding a valid license, Pope was denied membership to the influential North Carolina Medical Association because of his race. He responded by partnering with other Shaw alumni to form the Old North State Medical Society, a nonprofit that continues to advocate for the advancement of Black doctors.

Pope later married and briefly lived in Henderson before moving to Charlotte, where he found success as a physician and businessman in the 1890s. During this period, he co-founded Queen City Drug Store, the first Black-owned pharmacy in Charlotte, and played a key role in the creation of the People’s Relief and Benevolent Association, which predated North Carolina Mutual as the state’s first Black-owned insurance company. 

When the U.S. declared war on Spain in 1898, Pope enlisted as a volunteer surgeon with the all-Black 3rd North Carolina Regiment. The regiment never saw combat, and its troops were mustered back home after less than a year.

Still, the cohort’s willingness to serve “made a strong statement about the character of North Carolina’s African-American population,” according to the National Park Service, which compiled a biography of Pope as part of its Teaching with Historic Places program. 

The Pope House Museum is at 511 S. Wilmington St. in downtown Raleigh. It is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sundays. For tour information, call 919-996-2220.

Political awakening 

Pope cemented his already-remarkable legacy after moving back to Raleigh in 1899. 

That year, he opened a medical practice in the city’s segregated Third Ward. Construction of his two-story brick home on nearby South Wilmington Street was completed in 1901. 

He outfitted the house with the latest available technology, installing electric light fixtures, doorbells and a telephone. His was one of only 467 residences with phone service in Raleigh, which had a population of more than 13,000. 

Even rarer: Pope was one of only seven Black men with legal standing to vote in Raleigh at the time.

In 1900, state lawmakers passed a constitutional amendment designed to disenfranchise Black voters. The amendment required prospective voters to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test, which was almost always administered by a white registrar. 

White men were mostly exempt from the requirement thanks to a “grandfather clause” that allowed them to skip the test if they or a direct ancestor had been registered to vote before 1867. Because his father had been a free man with voting rights, Pope was one of the few Black men in the state eligible to cast a ballot. 

The experience galvanized Pope, who became increasingly active in politics. He ran for mayor of Raleigh in 1919, making him one of the first Black men to appear on the ballot of a major city in the Jim Crow South. 

His friends J. Cheek and Calvin Lightner ran for other city offices as part of a slate of all-Black candidates. The men lost their respective races, but their candidacy made an important statement. Lightner, whose son went on to become Raleigh’s first Black mayor in 1973, later recalled that the trio ran “to wake our people up politically.”

After the election, Pope went into retirement. He died in 1934 at age 76. 

Preserving Pope’s legacy 

In 1999, Pope’s home on South Wilmington Street was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The doctor’s notability  continued to grow after his death, as his former residence became the state’s first African American home museum. Artifacts and mementos from his storied medical career are displayed in glass cases throughout the century-old building. 

Visitors will find Pope’s framed medical degree hanging in a hallway near the home’s entrance. An Army satchel filled with bottles of medicine from his time in the Spanish-American War is in the kitchen. A shelf in front of the staircase is lined with books about medicine, psychology and childhood disease.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Hazel Boomer explained the significance of the items to a group of curious children, whose parents had brought them on a tour of the home. She manages the museum for the Raleigh Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department.

“We have local people who come in and say, ‘I pass by this house every day or park near here when I’m going to events, and I didn’t know this place was a museum,’” Boomer said. “Then they leave here totally amazed by the amount of stuff that Dr. Pope did.”

Pope’s legacy continues to grow through the existence of the Old North State Medical Society. The organization co-founded by the state’s first licensed Black doctor now represents more than 3,200 African American physicians in North Carolina, according to its website.

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