Oral Histories

Rev. Mark Royster is the minister of Cedar Rock Missionary Baptist Church in New Hill, NC. He has spent decades working as a banker (VP of SunTrust), minister, school board member (leader of the Blue Ribbon Task Force), and community developer and activist in Orange County, and has strong ties to…

This interview begins with the background of Mark Royster. Royster grew up on his father’s farm in Granville County which is north of Durham County. His father’s farm was government subsidized. He was the youngest of twelve children. His sister is the eldest and would be 100 years old at the time of…

"I watched her. I watched her wash linen and dry it, make up the beds and everything. And I mean that stuck in my mind because I did not know she did that kind of work. I just knew she put on a uniform and she left. But I never knew what the uniform was for or what it meant or anything. - Dorcas…

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.

“We don’t have integration, we are desegregated, but aren’t integrated yet. I don’t know if we’ll ever be. We get closer, but it’s a slow process, but I felt very strongly that we needed to do that.” - Mary Scroggs Mary Scroggs grew up and attended high school in Nebraska and worked as a chemist for…

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.

“I was going for my education, I was really going to make a statement that I’ve integrated this school–or desegregated, it was never integrated–desegregated the school. That was my goal.” - Clementine Self Clementine Self is a former student of Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill, NC. She discusses…

Principal Coretta Sharpless retold the past of Northside Elementary School (NES) and discussed the re-opening of NES. She proudly highlighted how students carry out NES values through community engagements and commemoration. The Northside Timeline and preservation of archival materials from OCTS,…

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.

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…

“What we had students don’t get now as easily. There’s something missing now for many of the kids…when I attended Lincoln there were Black role models around me everywhere…there were Black people around you, which you always had a sense of family, and a sense of community, a sense of safety, and a…