Patricia "Pat" Jackson and Others - Conclusion (clip)
Interviewed on March 26, 2025
Dr. Courtney Rivard (CR): Pat, did you want add some other things?
Patricia “Pat” Jackson (PJ): I’m just going to thank you guys for these pages because I’m going to get some notes from my elders, some of the people that could not be here to, you know, help with getting the information that we need to see on Wikipedia. Because when our house was on the page, everybody was furious and sending out their information to make sure that it got right, so I’m going to remind them that they should have been here tonight and to get some information on these pages to help out.
Kathryn Wall (KW): And, Miss Pat, if it would be easier for anybody to come to the Jackson Center and just let us record while they talk rather than have to mark up the pages themselves?
PJ: Yeah.
KW: Any day. You know I’m there.
PJ: Okay, yeah, any day.
CR: If y’all have ideas about how this conversation can … because obviously, like this was amazing and we only covered one. It makes me think that the team here probably needs to go back and look at each of the pages with attention to this type of writing that doesn’t gloss and that might mean going back to the primary sources again. And so, if you have more edits, it’s just like Kathryn said, if you want to go to the Jackson Center, if you want to reach out to me, or … there is a phone number that we had on the flyer and you can call that at anytime and leave a message and we’ll come back to you if that feels easier than other ways.
Katherine Stein (KS): If you guys have any ideas too or preferences about how best, like if the space of sort of a community meeting where we are all gathering and looking page by page feels the best. We’ve had some ideas like you’ll see Hargraves is one of the pages. We’ve thought about maybe having an event like this at Hargraves to make it a little bit more location specific and have those vested interests of the community who know the most about Hargraves to be there. But If you have ideas or a sense of sort of what feels the best to go page by page to make sure that these narratives are truthful and getting at the essence of these stories, let us know that too.
Alexandra Odum (AO): Absolutely. Because I definitely I think you’ve been…all of the sources combined that are available, there is still an element of this conversation that’s not represented in any of them, right. So, even if the students are looking at everything they could possibly find because of who has written it, because of when it was written, a lot of times there’s elements that are still going to be missing if it’s not paired with some element of an oral history in a community conversation, so I think you are right that this is a really great starting point, and then we can use this as a way to kind of beef up those histories and make sure they are more comprehensive and adequately represent the community’s memory of what actually happened and how it all went down.
KW: When Anna and I were making the places page too, we were making them in one summer and just trying to quickly get the, “Where is it?” What is it?” the end. And This now gives us some specific starting points where we can go pull from the oral histories and have the kinds of personal narratives that everybody shared here tonight. You know we can start beefing up those source pages, so that there is more for the students to draw on, that’s more rooted in the community’s history as the community wants it told.
CR: I just want to thank y’all. (Echoes from others in the room:Yes, thank you so much. Thank you.) Thank you for your time and sharing your knowledge and your patience with us as we learn.
PJ: I know, it’s great. Great.
CR: I feel such an immense privilege for getting to hear these stories and to try to share that in a profound way. Thank you.
William Gattis (WG): And what you have to understand to is that we don’t have all the answers and I don’t know if I could write it much better because of… I might not be able to find the right words or the right expressions and how could I duplicate a feeling with words because the words fall short, so we keep tweaking what we have and move forward and hope we get the essence of the life of the people who lived it.
PJ: The passion that we have for this town, for all of these areas is almost… well it is really sacred to us and it’s when it’s talked about, it brings up all the feelings, all the emotions of all the people that we know, you know, bled and died for us to still be right here. And it’s crazy, we won’t ever, you know, not share, not get the word out, not let our story be told about this area that we live in because we know that people have come to our town centuries and centuries and will come, you know, forever and the first question when you ask somebody, “When you went to Chapel Hill, what did you do?” “Well, I went to the University.” But there’s a whole world in the place that you didn’t get a chance to go to, so we just want you to know that as well.
KS: Thank you so much. We do have extra copies, some large print, some smaller print, as well, so let us know.
AO: Feel free to take your copies home with you.
