Oral Histories

This interview provides background of interviewee’s connection to Chapel Hill. She shares her experiences as a youth leader in the community. She describes the changes of the community over time (gentrification). Her ideas of safe places for young POCs in Chapel Hill are provided. She talks about…

Alexander Stephens: How have you seen it [the community] change? Chelsea Alston: I’ve seen it change from—Well, like I was saying a lot of my friends live in close proximity of each other. It’s changing to where that it’ll be more of my friends living in the neighborhood than it is now. A lot of my…

The interview includes the history of the Hargraves family: her great-grandfather, Jerry Hargraves had a role in the founding of St. Paul's. Nineteen children were born to her grandparents, Della Weaver and Luther Hargraves, the first black mortician in the area. He also built houses in Northside.…

Alex Biggers (AB): I'm Alex Biggers, this is Hudson Vaughan. We're here with Janie Alston on Lindsey Street. It's April 20th, about like, 10 o'clock in the morning. Hudson Vaughan (HV): Awesome. We're just going to put this down, and then, let's just keep going. You just forget about that. At any…

HV: What do you think, like, stands out most about, like, what do you like most about your home? JA: Because I grew up here, and I grew up in the area. See, my kids don't have any connection, because they grew up in Connecticut. But, you know, we could walk – I'd come by here every morning and wait…

Janie Alston describes nursery school and Girl Scouts at Hargraves and talks about a going-away party held for her there when she was 14 and moving out of the area.

Jerdene Alston is a Chapel Hill native that was born in 1944. She grew up having no issues with others regarding race, but when she learned about racial injustices facing fellow Black Americans across the country, she joined the civil rights movement. This was after graduating second in her class in…

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,…

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 (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 (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 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…

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…

"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…

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…

“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…