Reginald Hildebrand - Family Land (clip)
Interviewed by Rob Stephens on April 21, 2010
Reginald Hildebrand (RH): My grandmother’s parents, my great grandparents, on my father’s side, were slaves. Often heard stories of him coming out of slavery and his master providing some land that was actually in the family until like the 1980s. It was not common, but it happened enough that it was not an aberration. Yeah.
Rob Stephens (RS): And, so I bet the civ–kind of, it seems like that was a step at that point in Emancipation, for many people I guess [who] went straight into farming and sharecropping.
RH: Absolutely. Absolutely.
RS: Where did the Hildebrand family, or your family, have that land.
RH: You know, Rob, that’s an interesting connection that I hadn’t made until you're mentioning it just now. But there is probably a connection of some sort between that act of my grandmother’s father getting that land, and getting an education, and becoming a preacher.
RH: All of which, in terms of class, is giving him a distinction of some sort, as probably some sort of connection, more or less direct between that in my being a professor at UNC Chapel Hill.