Northside News Volume VIII, Edition 9

To learn more about the erasure of Black people and history from Chapel Hill, read "Black History, Our History" by Cynthia Edwards-Paschall for Chapel Hill Magazine.

Lillie recounts on her first experiences with cooking bread as a young girl. She was the designated cook of the family. She also talks about her mother’s cooking style since her mother does not use standard recipes to cook. Juanita speaks about Mama Dip (her aunt) being the head cook in her family.…

"I would always look as I would walk down the corridors of the hall in Lincoln, and I could still hear some of the teachers speaking now. Giving guidance, giving direction, giving praise, and all the motivation we would need to excel as students, excel as athletes." - Fred Battle Fred Battle was…

This interview is part of an oral history project called Southern Communities: Listening for a Change: Mighty Tigers--Oral HIstories of Chapel Hill's Lincoln High School. The interviewes were conducted from 2000-2001, by Bob Gilgor, with former teachers, staff, and students from Chapel Hill, N.C.'s…

“I would preface that by saying that our school was again so small that practically everyone had to do, I could say, had to play multiple roles because we simply did not have enough people to go around and to have the kinds of programs that we wanted to have.” - James Atwater James Atwater grew up…

This interview is part of a project conducted by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate and undergraduate students in a 2001 oral history course. Topics include Chapel Hill's efforts to end racial segregation in the public schools; the process of creating integrated institutions; and…

Gwen Atwater came to Chapel Hill, her husband’s hometown, after he got out of the military. Following a brief stint in customer service and time working in the school district’s administrative offices, she took a job teaching at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in 1973. She became an FPG…

Freda Andrews (FA): It wasn’t Durham Public Schools, it was Durham City Schools. I had my first teaching job at Fayetteville Street School in Durham. The ironic thing is, about that, as a Black teacher, I had to learn the culture of my own people because of the difference. When I was in Person…

Freda Andrews: Everything was like, all the children wanted to do is to grow up and be farmers. They had no aspiration other than that. Drive a big tractor. They could describe that tractor and tell you what it was going to be like because they worked on the farm. That was all they knew. I felt so…

Freda Andrews: I realized that for my children to feel what I felt, I had a couple of poems that I remember the most. I would have them learn and recite. Poems like “Harriet Tubman”.Harriet TubmanDidn’t take no stuffAnd wasn’t afraid of anything either. Didn’t come into in this world to be no…

Freda Andrews (FA): Folk like me, they don’t have to pay us full salary. They hire us to come in and do remediation for a grade level to help them because many of the students don’t do well on the End of Grade tests. We are like a faux tutor in the public schools. We remediate them. I work four days…

Freda Andrews: The schools were, as I said, full of caring teachers and the reason I chose to be a teacher today or an educator was because of some of those teachers then that taught me and instilled in me that you want to be somebody. So, when you want to be somebody, you have to grow up and watch…

Freda Andrews: I grew up walking to Northside Elementary School because that’s the mode of transportation in those days. And I would cross a little branch everyday going to Northside, which was 20 minutes from my house, if that much. The only difficulty with that sometimes, the little water would…

Freda Andrews is a daughter of the Northside. Notably, her primary and secondary school education transformed her life immeasurably. Her teachers, especially at Northside Elementary, created a classroom setting that directed individual attention to each student. Fostered by these nurturing teachers,…