David Caldwell Jr. - On Neighborhood Disappearance (clip)

David Caldwell Jr. (DC): And see back then, there were lots of entrepreneurs in Chapel Hill. I mean Merritt Mill Road, Franklin, Graham, Roberson, I mean there were movies and shoe stores, restaurants, barber shops, pool halls, stores that all these people owned and ran, and there were motels in the Black neighborhoods. I think - god my brother we were just talking about it - when like Tina Turner and they are called several other names, would come down and perform when they were traveling with what they called the Chitlin’ Circuit. Several times they stayed in Carrboro at the Mason Motel.

Blanch Brown (BB): Cool.

DC: And so those people…I remember I think Tina performed at what was called the Stallion Club that was in Durham. And I was a little kid but I remember that she - they would talk about her staying there. So they just, you know, started gradually drifting away.

BB: And why do you think that is?

DC: Sold out, change of the times, not enough foresight to see what was coming down the road. Just like anything else that disappears. The thing that I hate is that, I went to a meeting at Saint Paul’s last year and somebody brought up the comment that somebody had said, twenty years ago, that in twenty years there will be no Black people in Chapel Hill.

BB: I've heard that, yeah.

DC: And, no, there will be no evidence of Black people in Chapel Hill, and there will be none here, and of course it's been more than twenty years, but if you look around, Merritt Mill Road, which was totally Black is now no more. Graham Street, Roberson, all of that.

BB: Yeah.

DC: Tin Top, all the places like that are - we have the absentee landlords who've come in and taken over.