Two Young Afghan Sisters’ Journey Across Afghanistan to Escape the Taliban

Taliban fighters armed with AK-47s fired warning shots over the heaving crowd at the entrance to Kabul airport. Fourteen-year-old

Maryam Mohammadi

shuddered. Her 3-year-old sister, Mehrsa, started to cry. “Don’t be scared,” the older girl said. “It’s just a game.”

The sisters and their grandmother had been standing for hours on Aug. 21, part of a group that had been cleared to fly out of the Taliban-controlled Afghan capital. They would head first to Ukraine and then hoped to join the girls’ parents in the U.S.

They had been trying for days to get into the airfield, the hub of U.S.-led evacuation efforts. And now they were just a few yards from the gate. They could see the Marines and a group of Ukrainian soldiers waiting inside to help them to safety.

Maryam was sure this time they would make it. Earlier in the day, she sent a message to

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Marvin Jones’ Winton Triangle research a personal journey

The Pleasant Plains Baptist Church, founded in1851, is one of the oldest Black and multiracial congregations in North Carolina. The brick church, built in1951, replaced the original wooden church. Photo: Contributed
The Pleasant Plains Baptist Church founded in 1851 is one of the oldest multiracial congregations in North Carolina. The brick church, built in 1951, replaced the original wooden church. Photo: Contributed

NORTHEASTERN NORTH CAROLINA — In 1845, North Carolina passed a law prohibiting free people of color from selling liquor. Fourteen years later, the law was expanded banning the sale of liquor to “… any free person of color, for cash, or in exchange for articles delivered, or upon any consideration whatever, or as a gift …”

Almost immediately, 55 white men from Hertford County requested an exemption. There does not seem to be a record of why the exemption was requested, but in his University of North Carolina Chapel Hill 2012 doctoral dissertation, Warren Milner points out that “by 1860, approximately 1,000 free people of color resided in Hertford County, giving the county one of the largest free non-white

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