Carolyn Briggs

Carolyn Briggs describes writing essays in school to convince people to build the pool. She also describes being saved from drowning in the pool and remembers several of the lifeguards at A.D. Clark Pool.

Carolyn Briggs: Most of the students that were in there, they- we- were like fourteen, fifteen years old. So, you marched, demonstrated, it wasn’t – the older ones I think experienced some hostilities- but the younger ones, it was fun to work, to grow, and know that you could make a difference, that you could do something that would make a change. And with the movement, the marching, the sit-ins, yeah I did, and well saying trouble- I didn’t consider it trouble- but yeah you were arrested going to some of the sit-ins, but we were too young so, they’d take you in and kind of scare you- you’ve never been to a jail- but then they’d let you go because you were just a child.

In this interview, long-time local Chapel Hill resident Carolyn Briggs discusses her experiences growing up in Chapel Hill. While her family moved a couple of times during her childhood, Carolyn developed strong relationships with her family, friends, and mentors. Carolyn discusses the challenges of growing up during the long period of desegregation in Chapel Hill, as well as being among one of the final graduating classes from the historically black high school Lincoln High. Carolyn takes time to comment on her siblings and their different occupations they took once grown up; coming from a large family during a period of scarce resources, they took to growing most of their food to remain largely self-sufficient. Although they lived lives that seem foreign to modern observers in their relative difficulty, Carolyn and her community found time to participate in community cookouts, dances, and other events that kept them connected. Growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, Carolyn discusses how her and her classmates were taught to largely ignore counter-protesters and police violence through non-violent peaceful resistance, along with the community’s support of the younger generation coming together to directly confront the lingering effects of segregation.

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, we couldn’t, kids, they don’t know nothing about it.

LC: You can’t sit down at the counter. So we would jump up ‘cause we would go in there and get cherry coke or something like that. We’d get up on the counter and he said, “Well you all can sit here, but if you see some other white come in, you all gotta get up, you know, ‘cause you can’t stay here, I can’t… I can’t let them see you sitting there”.

LC: And so, we would sometimes forget and somebody came in and they said something about us sitting there at the counter. He said, “What are y’all doing up there at the counter?” You know, when… trying to act like, you know, play it off like he didn’ know we were there.

LC: But, so that was, to me, one of the hardest things. But he, at the end, he ended up having a nervous breakdown.

Shinese Purnell: Wow.

LC: Mhm. Because it was just so much with us, and he fought it and followed it, and his children followed it. His wife would stand over people when they were going to jail. And she would urinate on them. Is why we do that.

SP: Oh wow.

LC: Mhm. But, they were the ones that were, one of the places that was the hardest to get to change, because he would just not going to lift. And it was just a little counter lift that people just could get like a hotdog. Not a restaurant, but just a little small counter, just to, to fight that.

LC: And his business went completely down because his business was mostly Black, more than the white. And so that made a big difference for him. But that was when I knew about segregation the most was during the Civil Rights movement. Before I had not.