Oral Histories

“All God's people coming together and then you hear the voice that said, "I went to the mountain top and what did I see?" I saw all God's people coming together, black, white, red, holding hands and chanting "peace and unity. What do you want? Justice!" And just to hear that echo and look around and…

Min. Robert Campbell is a well-known local activist who was raised by his grandparents in the Northside neighborhood. He attended Northside and Lincoln and was in the first desegregated graduating class at Chapel Hill High School (Class of ’67). He moved to Rogers Road in the 1970s where he has been…

Virginia Carson (VC): Some piece of this also goes back to Reconstruction. The church archives at Chapel of the Cross, there were free people of color in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill was a really small place and the University, but there were free people of color who were skilled workers of one kind or…

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…

“Because usually it ended up, truly, even though the schools were integrated, the classrooms were segregated, because whites were on one side and Blacks were on the other. Same typical thing, if you think about now, if you go into integrated situations, that people tend to migrate toward people that…

"We’re the Southern part of heaven, but that’s only for white folk. That’s not for the blacks." - William Carter William Carter discusses the movement and his background. He was born in the Bronx, New York in 1949 and discusses his heritage with a grandma being a Lumbee Native American and father…