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 Freda Andrews - on her work as a remediation specialist (clip)

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 - On poetry she would always read to her students (clip)

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 - teaching during the civil rights movement (clip)

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 - on early experiences teaching and cultural differences (clip)

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…

 Amanda Ashley - On food during her childhood and learning to cook

Amanda Ashley describes her experiences with food in her childhood as the interviewer introduces the Food Ministry. Amanda shares how her mother’s occupation as a nutrition teacher influenced her food intake. Food in her household was less processed. Amanda describes her learning experiences in…

Amanda Ashley

Amanda Ashley grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother was a home economics teacher, and so she grew up with a strong understanding of nutrition. In the summers, they would sometimes visit her grandmother who had a farm in Georgia, where they enjoyed fresh pecans, corn, and scuppernong…

 Gwen Atwater - On family, faith, segregation, and Frank Porter Graham Elementary School

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…

Gwen Atwater

Gwen Atwater came to call Chapel Hill home after moving here with her husband, who had spent his childhood playing in these streets. She began teaching at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in 1973, where she spent the next three decades engaging with bright, young minds. To this day, she is…

 Gwen Atwater - On the importance of planning (clip)

 Gwen Atwater - On taking care of students (clip)

 Henry Atwater and Charles Weaver - On the African American freedom struggle and Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill

"Chapel Hill and Carrboro have been fighting each other for a long time. Ever since I was born. About where the city limits are, what they do, and how they’re going to do this. That’s why you’ve got the mayor of Chapel Hill and the Mayor of Carrboro. Chapel Hill has been trying to take over Carrboro…

Henry Atwater

"I told them that the Orange County Training School was the only school that Black people had...I was the only one to kick when they built that train that went by the back of the school." - Henry Atwater

 Isabel Atwater - On growing up during World War II, Black businesses, and Civil Rights

Ms. Atwater speaks about life growing up in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area during World War II. She shares her experiences with her husband, Roy Atwater and her education at the rural Merritt School and Orange County Training School. She was familiar with food rations throughout the time and had…

Isabel Atwater

Born in 1925, Isabel Atwater has near a century of lived experience in Orange County. A self-described “country girl,” she grew up raising animals and building gardens. Atwater remembers growing up in the Jim Crow South and finding strength in the Black community and the Black-owned businesses that…

 Isabel Atwater - On her family's laundry business (clip)

James Atwater

James Atwater grew up on Church St. as one of five siblings. Before working for the hospital at the University of North Carolina, his mother was an insurance agent for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham, the oldest and largest African American life insurance company in the…

 James Atwater - On Pottersfield and influential teachers at Lincoln High School

“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…

 James Atwater - On how the memory of desegregation shapes local schools

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…

 Kathy Atwater - On food

Ms. Atwater gives an overview of food access in the community when she was growing up and how her family’s attitudes toward food have developed over the course of her life. Starting with a discussion of her mother’s kitchen and garden, she describes the role of food in her family and in the…

 Kathy Atwater - On home, community, and Northside

In the beginning of the interview, Ms. Atwater describes the history of her home, growing up in her neighborhood, and the significance of keeping her home in the family in order to continue an ongoing legacy. To Ms. Atwater, a home is more than a place of residence; it is a memorial, it is the…

Kathy Atwater

"There would not be a University if there had not been the Blacks in this community to help build the University." - Kathy Atwater Kathy Atwater is a native of Chapel Hill and has lived in the Northside Community all of her life. Having retired from the State of NC after 30 years of service, Kathy…

 Kathy Atwater - Everybody was just family (clip)

Kathy Atwater: Everybody was just family. I mean even in the neighborhood with the families that were in the neighborhood we all looked after one another- nobody was left to themselves. If I did something wrong, of course the neighbors would, you know, tell me “Kathy you shouldn’t do that,” and then…

Dorcas Saunders

 Kathy Atwater - On the kitchen (clip)