Thomas Merritt

MCJC Staff: “At the same time, kids in town were fighting for civil rights?”

Thomas Merritt: “Yes. They were fighting for civil rights because they wanted to go places and to be free to go places and do things. Dairy Queen [chuckle]. Down at the bottom of Franklin Street, in the dirt parking lot down there. You had to go around the back because they wouldn’t serve you in the front – ‘colored and white’ water, bus stations, all this stuff. Nobody had put it out there, it had never blown up like it did. You were separating people and it was intentionally done. See when you understand how the system is run, this whole country was set up that way, to keep you at each other’s throats. So, the divide and conquer type thing. We’re fighting each other’s throats, not realizing we look like one another. Yet still we have been torn and just pitted [against] each other. So now we look at, why was that? In order to put us in bondage, we’re all in bondage not realizing it. We’re all enslaved.”

MCJC Staff: “Say more about how the system is set up that way, where do you see that happening?”

Thomas Merritt: “The system is a slave-mentality government. What they’ve done, in order to keep us in poverty – you can only make so much money, they would only allow you to make so much money, teach you so much. But when you understand what’s being taught, it’s not what should be taught to you. You don’t know the history of the Black man, you don’t know the history of the Indians. All of what we know what they told us. When you get out of your box and do your research, you’ll find out it’s an entirely different story…it’s an evil system to keep us at each other’s throats. So now we’re fighting amongst ourselves, we’re angry at each other. And now we see black and white crime, a lot of this stuff was started by the government. Whether you believe it or not, check it out. A lot of this stuff was done to keep us at each other’s throats – divide and conquer.”

MCJC Staff: “So, could you tell us what [growing up on Church Street] was like - sisters, brothers?”

Thomas Merritt: “Oh one sister older, one brother younger. We were pretty well off back then. My mother she worked for Danziger’s Old World gift shop. My father worked at different restaurants, and he brought food home so you could tell [laughter]. So, we were not underfed, we were pretty well off. He worked also at the School of Public Health and then he left there and went to the US Forestry Service.

MCJC Staff: “Oh the forestry service! What did he do for the forestry service?”

Thomas Merritt: “He did research. They went out into the field and took samples of trees in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and places like that, the western part of the state…He was pretty handy…The people that surrounded him, you know, encouraged him to move up. He was encouraged not to just sit in one place, but to move on. One year they offered him a job at the CDC. But he didn’t take that because he would have to move to Atlanta and he didn’t leave the family…He was good. He was good. He liked business, he liked to work with his hands. The house that we lived in, he built. Yes, he built that. Started that the year before I was born, and we’re still holding onto it.”

MCJC Staff: “That explains to me, or at least that gives me context, as to why he held on to like [reference to stolen land].”

Thomas Merritt: “So he bought the lot next door from us and that was left for my brother. And then he bought five and a half, six acres, down in Durham County – down near Barbee’s Chapel. And that was left to my sister. You know, he encouraged us to buy, buy. Buy land so we can hold on to it.”

MCJC Staff: “So what happened to the land?”

Thomas Merritt: “Well, a lady came by and she had some papers and she tried to get my grandmother to sign them. So she forged her signature on them and she took the land. And I think she felt guilty. And my brother knew the whole story about what had happened, and how she had taken the land and had donated to the university. And so, I mean, it was painful even until the day my dad died, you know, he talked about that all the time. Because they, the people that gave them the land, thought he sold the land. And he tried to tell them ‘no’ he didn’t sell the land, but they didn’t want to hear that, they just knew he sold it. But he didn’t sell the land, didn’t sell it (). They were holding on because they knew the value they had and everything like that. But until he died, I mean, the tears. We’d get together at Christmas, he had pulled out a map. We’ve been looking for that map of the land and the story behind that. But when he died he was still angry about that. ‘We didn’t sell that land’. It was ingrained in his heart to lose something that big and things like that. So it was a pain to him, a pain to us, [chuckles] you know. You still have a lot of other people in this area that held on. But back then, thievery. You come down, you do whatever you can to steal land…take what we had.”

MCJC Staff: “Can you tell us more about that – back then there was a lot of thievery, that this was a common practice?”

Thomas Merritt: “From what I understand, yes. The key to that is knowing that Blacks were not educated to the point of understanding the laws and things of that nature. So, trickery and thievery through laws, a lot of it was taken that way. Some of it was just plain stolen. They’ll come and give you one hundred dollars; say they’ll just pay you for the land. There were some things you hear about from other people, the things they had gone through.”

"Know what history really is. Know what history is all about. Dig deep."

- Thomas Merritt

In this interview, Mr. Merritt gives an overview of his family history in Chapel Hill and Carrboro by sharing memories of his childhood while discussing larger social shifts at work. Starting with a description of his family’s land, he explains the practice of land theft and its later influence on his father’s insistence on land ownership. He reflects back on the Black-owned businesses that used to thrive in the community like Bill’s Barbecue, M&N Grille, and Danziger’s Old World Restaurant. He recalls how race relations seemed peaceful prior to the integration efforts of the late 1960s. Yet his childhood memories with white friends contrasted his experiences of hatred at Chapel Hill High School. He notes that this division was intentional and meant to reduce communal power. While reflecting on his own spiritual and political journey, he encourages listeners to seek the truth and find their freedom.