Collene Rogers

Collene was born and grew up in her family’s home on Merritt Mill Road. Her mother, Mary Neville Riggsbee, grew up on the Neville Farm in Orange County and her father, Walter Riggsbee, grew up on the Riggsbee Farm in Chatham County. In the mid-1930s, they each left home to work for the University laundry in Chapel Hill, where they met. After graduating from Durham Business College in 1965, Collene accepted a job in New York, later joining First National City Bank then retiring from Citibank in 1999. She returned to North Carolina and built a home on the land her grandmother, Nancy Mebane Neville, fiercely refused to sell, despite threats and intimidation. “She was a very strong woman and she wasn’t going to give in,” Collene recalls. As a child, Collene attended both her mother’s family church, Hickory Grove Baptist, and her father’s, First Baptist: “It was always church!” She is still a dedicated member of FBC.

Collene attributes her community commitment—including twenty years of service with the NAACP, and Women of Distinction—to her father who embodied a communal ethic she saw everywhere around her growing up: “they took care of each other.” Her father worked at the laundry to save enough money to buy a truck that would allow him to bring carpentry, wiring, and plumbing services to families in rural Chatham and Orange. But when management refused to give him his savings, he left anyway and, with the help of friends and family, began providing every kind of trade service. He left a powerful legacy of self-determination and care: “He taught himself everything and he helped everybody.” “That’s the thing I respected him so much for,” Ms. Collene notes. “He put other people before himself and never had any regrets.” As long as someone would drive, he continued to do the work after he lost his sight. He couldn't see but he said he could feel.