William Gattis - On free people of color (clip)
Interviewed on March 26, 2025
William Gattis: I don’t know how you grade being hated, being enslaved. We get the Emancipation Proclamation. You get the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment and then after the 1870’s is when you start getting the pushback against a lot of things. For example, you could be in Chapel Hill, maybe live in these areas, but there were Black-owned businesses on the other side of Franklin Street, you see, but these were people who had name recognition in the town. Very prominent. And when we are talking about free people, we aren’t talking about a lot of them and they didn’t live just in this area because there was a family out on what is now Martin Luther King that had families, had owned land, and made sure their children got educated out near Eubanks Road somewhere out in that area, but these are an exception rather than the rule, and it didn’t mean that they were totally free because you could actually have freed people of color, catched and taken further south and end up as a slave again. So, it wasn’t like you have total freedom but you were freed or you were born freed and you had that status, but it wasn’t like you were all that, you see, because of your color you could be taken at any time. And because I think people were relegated to these areas that I have named you had a way of protecting yourself, you see, because you were grouped together but you also, as I said before, you have a way of writing your own narrative and being your own people in spite of the segregation that surrounds you. But you still had to go out into that world and live because like in the initial presentation [] some of them were self-sufficient but it wasn’t like they were put out initially in the Potters Field area or those other areas in nice houses. They pretty much, because of their skills built their houses.
