Reginald Hildebrand - On women's roles at St. Paul AME Church (clip)

Reginald Hildebrand: When moving around the community when Ms. Perry’s name came up and she was designated a Town Treasure at one point. Again, the kind of respect and accomplishment she had—I think she spent one year at Bennett and then she had to come back and take care of her mother who was ill. But to see her operate in this community, and again thinking about what she could have accomplished if she just had an equal chance. And again, someone I got to know pretty well and had great affection for. I spoke at her funeral and it was very striking for me. There was one time I was serving on a committee to organize a program for the church anniversary. In those days it was a big deal, doing lots of things like that. I was chair of the committee because I was a professor at UNC who did history and they thought I ought to be. Members of the committee, among others, were Rebecca Clark and Velma Perry. At the end when I was making my report I thanked both of them for allowing me to think that I was the head of that committee. [Laughter] When I knew, and everyone else on the committee knew, that all I was doing was what that they told me to do, and I was afraid to do anything else. But it’s an indication of the kind of stature and affection that you can have. One thing that is distinctive about St. Paul is that people like Rebecea Clark and Velma Perry could have achieved the prominence that they did as members of St. Paul and members of this community in ways that would have been much more difficult in the Black community in Durham. Where there is North Carolina Central, Black banks, Black insurance companies, and newspapers and all that. There's a pretty defined social structure about who the big wigs were and who they were not. So if you were going to have the kind of influence that they had in this community you would have to have to be from the right family, have the right pedigree, have the right degree all that kind of stuff for people to take you seriously to be able to have that kind of influence and command that kind of respect, you’d have to belong to the right church and all that sort of things, there are two churches that you’d have to be apart of if you want to be part of the movers and shakers. So their lives, their success is something that reflects an atmosphere of this community and of St. Paul that is distinctive within Black communities, not just the difficulties you run into with race and racism, but also other kinds of social strata that can impede people and impact them. In Chapel Hill and at St. Paul. I doubt their careers if they had belonged to big AME churches in Durham, not to criticize them because they do absolutely wonderful things, but I doubt their lives would have been the same in that atmosphere.