Pope family.

M. T. (Manassa Thomas) Pope, physician, businessman, and politician, was born near Rich Square in Northampton County, N.C., on 24 August 1858. Both of his parents were free people of color. Pope's father, Jonas Elias Pope (1827-1900?), was a carpenter, farmer, and landowner. Jonas Elias Pope remarried late in life and had another son, Jonas Elias Pope II, who was born in 1898 and died in 1977.

M. T. Pope went to Raleigh, N.C., in 1874 to attend Shaw University. He finished his undergraduate education in 1879 and then studied at the Leonard School of Medicine at Shaw, graduating in 1886 in its first class. On 23 February 1887, Pope married Lydia Walden, who died on 10 September 1906. Pope lived and worked for a few years in Henderson, N.C., before settling in Charlotte about 1890. In Charlotte, Pope not only practiced medicine but also was a very active businessman, helping to establish the Queen City Drug Company and the People's Benevolent and Relief Association of North Carolina, an insurance company.

During the Spanish-American War, M. T. Pope served as first lieutenant and assistant surgeon in the Third Regiment of North Carolina Volunteers, an all-black volunteer regiment. After mustering out in February 1899, Pope moved to Raleigh where he established his medical practice on East Hargett Street, and, in 1900, built a substantial brick residence at 511 South Wilmington Street.

After the white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 and the passage of the suffrage amendment to the North Carolina Constitution in 1900, Pope was one of only seven men of color in the entire city of Raleigh to be eligible to vote and one of only 31 in Wake County. His political activity reached a high point in the April 1919 primary, when he ran for mayor of Raleigh at the head of a non-partisan African American slate of candidates along with Calvin Lightner (whose son, Clarence Lightner, became the first black mayor of Raleigh in 1973) and J. Cheek.

In 1907, M. T. Pope married Delia Haywood Phillips, who was born in 1880 and thus was 22 years his junior. To the couple two daughters were born: Evelyn Bennett Pope in 1908 and Ruth Permelia Pope in 1910. Both daughters received degrees from Shaw University and both went on to earn Master's degrees from Columbia University in New York, Evelyn in library service and Ruth in home economics. Evelyn also earned a Bachelor's degree in library science from the Hampton Institute.

M. T. Pope died in 1934 at the age of 76, and his wife followed him in 1955. Evelyn was by then on the faculty of the School of Library Science at North Carolina College at Durham (now North Carolina Central University), and Ruth was a home economics teacher in Chapel Hill. The two sisters, neither of whom married, kept up the family home in Raleigh and retired there in the 1970s. Evelyn died in 1995 and Ruth in October 2000.

From the guide to the Pope Family Papers, 1851-1983, (Southern Historical Collection)