Kenneth Mann

“Everybody knew everybody, and it’s just like anywhere else, you could walk away from your house and not lock the door. You would know the neighbor would watch your house, and you would hook the screen in the back, and you go on downtown wherever you are going and come back, and your house is ok. Nobody is in there waiting to bother you.”

- Marie Mann

In this interview Marie Mann paints a picture of what it was like to live in a Black household in Chapel Hill when segregation was still at large. During this time the lifestyle of white people and Black people were very different from one another, and Ms. Mann tells many stories about these differences. In addition to Marie’s portion of the interview, we hear from her son Kenneth Mann who talks about the era of integration in Chapel Hill. The interview shows the changing of times from generation to generation and the slow progress Chapel Hill made during the Civil Right Era. Lastly a performance by Kenneth’s band Liquid Pleasure is broadcasted from Bob’s restaurant in Chapel Hill.

This interview is part of a group of interviews conducted by Susan Simone exploring the lives and struggle of various members of the Northside community: a historically black and primarily residential neighborhood located immediately northwest of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and downtown Chapel Hill, NC. The community has long been involved in a struggle to prevent developers from buying up property to build new and expensive housing developments that would break up the black community and drive low-income residents out of Chapel Hill, as Northside contains the majority of the remaining low-income housing in the city.