Hilliard Caldwell - Violent August 1937 incident (clip)
Interviewed by John Kenyon "Yonni" Chapman on March 26, 1991
John Kenyon “Yonni” Chapman (YC): Let me backtrack here for a second. I want to pull something to see if you have any memory of something that happened the year you were born. You might have heard some talk about it. In 1937, in August, summer night, Saturday night somewhere on the line in between Carrboro and Chapel Hill. There’s a newspaper story in the Chapel Hill Weekly that talks about a Black person at a gas station got hit over the head by a white gas station attendant. A Black crowd gathered. Police took the white man and put him in the Carrboro jail for his own protection. The Black crowd gathered around the jail. Menaced the jail. They took the white guy and took him to Hillsborough for his protection. The crowd stayed in the street, stopped automobiles, threw rocks, shot off fire arms, sirens were sounded. Some white guys came out in a pick-up truck, barricaded with railroad ties, shot into a crowd of Black people. Shots were exchanged. Eventually the police came. The six police that they had on the force at that time. Whatever. Somehow or another brought it under control. Do you have any recollection? Anybody ever talk about that?
Hilliard Caldwell (HC): I don’t. I’m sorry. That’s the first I’ve heard of that. Probably you need to talk with people and I will ask my own two brothers if they remember that but I don’t remember and I never heard anybody say anything about that.
YC: I think that it was a fairly important event in the community because it was a big article in the Chapel Hill Weekly by Louis Graves. There was a lot of changes that took place after that including, seems like a lot of white support for the development of the Community Center.
HC: Ok. That’s something I was not…
YC: I know that’s back a little bit. I know that’s sort of early. I just wondered if there was any tradition of talk about that.
HC: No.
YC: Did you ever hear tale about Grandma Flacks?
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 - Violent August 1937 incident (clip),” From the Rock Wall, accessed September 13, 2026, https://fromtherockwall.org/oral-histories/hilliard-caldwell-violent-august-1937-incident-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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