Darin J. Waters, deputy secretary of the N.C. Office of Archives and History and a well-known North Carolina historian, will deliver the Hari Jones Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. Monday at Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church, 1217 Murchison Road.
The lecture is sponsored by organizers of the proposed N.C. History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction, according to a news release.
Waters oversees the divisions of State History and Maritime Museums; State Historic Sites and Properties; Archives and Records; Historical Resources (including the State Historic Preservation Office, Office of Historical Research, and Office of State Archaeology); and commissions including Roanoke Island Festival Park and Tryon Palace.
He is also secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission and the state historic preservation officer.
An Asheville native, Waters was most recently an associate professor of history at UNC Asheville and executive director of its Office of Community Engagement. He previously held other teaching, research, and community-engagement positions at UNCA, UNC-Chapel Hill, and N.C. State University, the release said.
Waters received a bachelor’s degree in political science and government from Liberty University, a master’s in history from North Carolina State University, and a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served on numerous nonprofit and state boards, including the North Carolina Historical Commission and African American Heritage Commission.
In his role with the state’s history museums, Waters is working with other historians on the content of the proposed N.C. History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction, which will be built in Fayetteville’s Arsenal Park and replace the Museum of the Cape Fear.
Unlike other history museums, the facility in Fayetteville will be a “teaching” museum and not a “collecting” museum, the news release said. It will use scholarship from universities, coupled with first-hand accounts of North Carolina families, to examine what North Carolinians faced as a result of the Civil War.
The lecture will mark the history center organizers’ fifth commemoration of Juneteenth, a federal holiday observing the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War.
Hari Jones was a prominent African American historian whose area of expertise centered on the contribution of Blacks during the Civil War.
Organizers of the history center first heard Jones speak while visiting museums in Washington.
He later became a close adviser on the history center and spoke several times in Fayetteville.
In June 2018, he spoke for the last time in Fayetteville as part of a presentation about Juneteenth. Several days later, Jones died of a sudden heart attack in Washington, the news release said.
The lecture series was named for him to honor his memory and his commitment to raise awareness of the African American community’s contributions during the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.
The history center will be owned and operated by the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Design of the building is underway, and construction is set to begin soon. Completion is expected in the first quarter of 2027, the news release said.