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Oral History

Hilliard Caldwell - Shifting from First Baptist to St. Joseph CME to United Church of Christ (clip)

Interviewed by John Kenyon "Yonni" Chapman on March 26, 1991

John Kenyon “Yonni” Chapman (YC): That’s okay because it’s all related, but let me get back to church. Again, here we have a situation. Ministers are talking about what’s Christian and Christianity and teaching people lessons and talking about things in church and yet, living in a segregated society. What ways would the ministers of your church, and can you tell me which church you went to…?

Hilliard Caldwell (HC): My church career started off at First Baptist Church which is now and was then pastored by J.R. Manley. That was way back.

YC: How old were you when you first went to church?

HC: I was ten/twelve I remember. Our mom made us go to Sunday school and in 1955 I pulled away from First Baptist Church. I was a high school junior in 1955 and I felt there was not enough activity there for young people and so I walked across the street to St. Joseph in 1955 and attended that church service that Sunday, the next Sunday.

YC: Is that Reverend Foushee?

HC: At that particular time that was Reverend W.R. Foushee. The next Sunday I went back to their Sunday school and then I informed the powers to be there that I wanted to join. I liked the Sunday School program and I liked the church service.

YC: That’s when you were a junior in high school?

HC: Uh-huh. I denounced the Baptist Church to my grandfather. My grandfather and his brothers all were pioneers of the First Baptist Church. The Caldwell name is very prevalent there in the history of First Baptist. And of course I immediately became the scum of the family because I denounced the Baptist Church and went Methodist. There are very few Caldwells that are Methodist, very few. You can count them on one hand probably.

YC: That sounds like a big step.

HC: Yeah, it was a big step for a young teenager just 18 years old. I stayed at St. Joseph from ’55 to just almost two years ago and, as you know, Reverend Roosevelt Wilkerson, because of disagreement with the state bishop, pulled away from the Methodist Church and I went with him. We’re now…we have our own congregation. We’re now part of the United Church of Christ denomination. Ben Chavis is part of that. Our sister church is the United Church on Cameron Avenue and Damascus Church out on Damascus Church Road. Those are our sister churches. I went with Roosevelt Wilkerson and am now Chairman of our Board of Trustees. I’m Superintendent of our Sunday School. We meet at the Y. We just acquired a twelve-acre tract of land up on Smith Level Road at the red light at Culbreth School Road right there on the corner and we are in our capital campaign to get our first building going, hopefully by October.

YC: Great.

Oral history interview of Caldwell, Hilliard conducted by Chapman, John Kenyon "Yonni" on March 26, 1991 at Chapel Hill, NC.

Citation: The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, “Hilliard Caldwell - Shifting from First Baptist to St. Joseph CME to United Church of Christ (clip),” From the Rock Wall, accessed September 13, 2026, https://fromtherockwall.org/oral-histories/hilliard-caldwell-shifting-from-first-baptist-to-st-joseph-cme-to-united-church-of-christ-clip.

Rights: Open for research. The Southern Historical Collection (SHC) welcomes non-commercial use and access that qualifies as fair use to all unrestricted interview materials in the collection. The researcher must cite and give proper credit to the SHC. The SHC requests that the researcher informs the SHC as to how and where they are using the material.

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In this Oral History

Back to Hilliard Caldwell - On the African American freedom struggle and Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill (Interview One)

Hilliard Caldwell - Shifting from First Baptist to St. Joseph CME to United Church of Christ (clip)

In this Oral History

Hilliard Caldwell - On the African American freedom struggle and Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill (Interview One)

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