Oral Histories

The interview includes discussions about growing up in Chapel Hill during the Civil Rights era and highlights traits of early Chapel Hill life for African American families prior to integration. Both discuss the availability of medical facility access for blacks, how the community operated as a…

Linda Carver: We trusted him. So when, during Civil Rights, we found out that he was so racist. It was just such a shock. And when we were little, my father, he and my father were good friends. And so we could go into his drug store and he would say, you know, “Ah, y’all could sit there”. You know,…

Self-described transplants Chaitra Powell and Marvin Chambers have lived in the Northside Community since 2016. Marvin runs a massage therapy company and Chaitra works as an archivist in the Wilson Library. Her work focuses in particular on the telling of black stories and history. They have 2 kids,…

This interview is part of a series on Black builders in Orange County. Dolores Clark, a long-term resident of Chapel Hill, explains how her family has a history of building several structures, including university buildings, homes, and churches in the Chapel Hill area. Clark describes how her…

Dolores Clark: Well I’ll start first with the Strayhorn family because I was raised in the home that my great grandparents Toney and Nellie Strayhorn built in 1879. And I was born in 1933 and lived in that home for about maybe 20 years or 18 years, I would say, until I left and went to college and…

Dolores Clark: Tony was separated from his mother. His mother was taken from him to Hillsborough and put on the block in Hillsborough when he was only 7 years old. And after that, he stayed on the plantation until he was about 16 or 17, and left the plantation, did some work around. He learned how…

Dolores Clark: My grandfather was very active, like I said, in the masons. He was a mason, very active. He has built so many things around in the community, the First Baptist Church in Carrboro, he was a part of building that. And I understand from recent information that he and one of my uncles…

Dolores Clark: So my great grandmother and great grandfather had two children, Sally and William. Okay, the two children. And that’s when they added on to their house after they built the log house, because they started a family. Sally married a Barbee. She married Fred Barbee and he was down there…

Doug Clark: Friday and Saturday all Black kids on Friday and Saturday- you couldn’t go to the movies when you were young in the middle of the week- Friday and Saturday, Friday mainly, you could go to the movies. You didn’t want to get a punishment because a punishment meant you can’t go to the…

Describes her gratitude for the pool, which is named after her great uncle, Uncle Dot.

This interview is part of an oral history project called Southern Communities: Listening for a Change: Mighty Tigers--Oral HIstories of Chapel Hill's Lincoln High School. The interviewes were conducted from 2000-2001, by Bob Gilgor, with former teachers, staff, and students from Chapel Hill, N.C.'s…

Audio recordings of interviews conducted by Yonni Chapman with participants in the African American freedom struggle and the civil rights movement in and around Chapel Hill, N.C.

Doug Clark, Sr., a musician, was born in Chapel Hill in 1936, where he lived in a close-knit Black neighborhood and attended Orange County Training School, which became Lincoln High School. He reflects on his family life and experiences growing up, such as seeing lines of Black children walk to…

Doug Clark describes attending a holiday party at a UNC fraternity where he got the idea to start his band, which eventually became Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts.To hear more from Doug Clark, listen to his full oral history "Doug Clark, Sr. - On growing up in Chapel Hill and high school."