Oral History

Virginia Carson - On fringes (clip)

Interviewed on March 26, 2025

Virginia Carson: I just want to add one thing. Hudson [Vaughan] told me that the town border between Chapel Hill and Carrboro was drawn in the Reconstruction Era, but carefully drawn so there weren’t too many Black folks in either town, because that would dilute the voting base from one or the other. And in terms of city services, you can still see it: there are no sidewalks, or many fewer sidewalks, or [they’re] broken and narrow and not very safe, actually. This was the pattern in all Southern towns, that Black folks were on the fringes of the larger towns.