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MidPenVOTE speaker: Gloucester’s blacks and whites have tradition of ‘getting along’

"This is Gloucester. We have a tradition of getting along," the Rev. Fred Carter said during a Black History Month program on Saturday afternoon, summing up the county’s history of mostly peaceful race relations.

Carter, pastor of Gloucester’s Shepherdsville Baptist Church, addressed a small group at the Gloucester Library’s Community Room in a program sponsored by the Middle Peninsula League of Voters.

To illustrate his point, Carter told the story of an attempted Klan rally in Gloucester. It was in the early 1960s and the Ku Klux Klan decided to flex its muscles by staging an event on a field in Guinea. The local community got wind of it, including members of the Gregory family, a black family that owned the field directly across the road from where the Klan was going to set up shop.

The Gregory family decided they weren’t going to take this intrusion lying down, so they and their friends hastily scheduled a "turkey shoot" on the op...

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