Reginald Hildebrand - Coming to St. Paul AME Church (clip)

Reginald Hildebrand (RH): The other connection I have, I developed in Chapel Hill around that time the church. And how that developed, I was living in Durham and had really wanted to attend a church in Durham, to establish myself in that community. I visited the best known AME church in Durham, which was the only one I knew anything about.

And it’s said something about the distinction between, which we may come to later, distinction between the sense of the Black community in Durham and Chapel Hill. Which explains in part why I made the choice I did. But, the church that I visited was very old, very prominent church, attended by very prominent people and when you came in that church, you knew.

This was a prominent church, attended by prominent people. And, you know, I visited a few times and nobody paid much attention to me, not that they needed to pay any attention to me, but they could’ve said hello. [laughs]

And so I decided I need to shop around; this isn’t exactly what I’m looking for. And wound up, not sure how I heard about this church, but wound up in St. Paul AME Church in Chapel Hill, which is a much smaller church. I visited once and found it to be very warm and liked the people and liked the range of backgrounds of the people who went that I could pick up from that visiting.

People seemed welcoming and so I wound up joining that church, which was really my, sort of, the only real connection I – ongoing connection I have to the Chapel Hill community, but it’s a pretty good connection. Yeah.

Rob Stephens: Yeah, I think so.