When I was in education school, we had to observe teachers in the classroom and write up our observations, like educational anthropologists. I observed a teacher who later became a colleague, a very well-respected veteran teacher. He knew what he was doing– he was enthusiastic about his subject, related warmly to students, engaged students. My notes from eight years ago read:

He is very skillful in making kids feel at ease; relates to students in personal and humorous ways. Also tries to draw out more reticent and ‘nerdy’ kids. Told me he thinks each student is gifted in some way and this seems genuine.

This was an AP history class in one of the highest scoring schools in the state, and I began wondering about equity in a competitive school culture where the playing field is not level. I saw very few kids of color in these classes. And so…

Even before they came out with the slogan of the Army, “Be all that you can be” was something that we heard in our community.

Rev. Robert Peter Campbell, July 2017

Mr. Robert Peter Lee Campbell, known to many today as Reverend Campbell but known to those who grew up with him in his Northside neighborhood in Chapel Hill as Peter (or, to some in Northside, “Peter Rabbit”), has lived by these words. On a very hot and humid July day in the community center that resulted largely from his decades-long, unrelenting activism, he talked candidly about his life in Chapel Hill and far beyond:

RC: So I went on to the Job Corps [in 1967] and … I graduated from auto mechanics cluster division and from the food service—what do they call it?—the food service, food handling personnel.

AW: So you did both at the same time.

RC: I…

“The problem, then, is not the stories we tell; it’s the stories we don’t tell.”

Kathryn Schultz in the New Yorker, 22 August 2016

I just finished reading Colson Whitehead’s stunning new novel, Underground Railroad. It was a birthday present, and once I began reading, I couldn’t put it down. It’s fiction, but it is so real. The humanity and the brutality. It’s all there, told through Cora, a slave who takes on a trek north toward freedom in which she experiences and witnesses every horrific act humans are capable of. And for some reason I found myself not turning away or putting the book down. Because I cared what happened to Cora. And because the book was just that good.

Though there have been many powerful movies and books about slavery, I admit that I avoided most. I haven’t seen 50 Years a Slave. I told…

“The conversations were great and I think that’s where I got my knowing there’s two sides to every story. And I’ve carried that up through my kids and my grandkids.”                      

                                                                                      David Caldwell, Jr., June 9, 2017

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have spent time getting to know a man whose family seems to represent what it has meant to be black in Chapel Hill over time.

David Caldwell, Jr., is, at about six and a half feet, an imposing figure with a warm smile and easy laugh. Since the founding of UNC…

I’ve often walked from Franklin Street to Rosemary Street, down Roberson or Church or Graham Street and never realized I was crossing a former color line.

There are no obvious markers, just a few remnants of what used to be the Black business district on Rosemary, where the Northside neighborhood begins.

There’s First Baptist church, St. Joseph’s AME and its parsonage (now the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History). They all were centers of Northside life during the long era of segregation, when these churches, though open to all, were attended only by black residents of Chapel Hill.

When I was teaching at East Chapel Hill High, I was not aware of any classes in which students learned about segregation right here at home. The Jackson Center’s staff has developed numerous educational programs in which Northside residents come to classrooms and tell their stories.

This past week…

There was Earl and Ronny. Miss Frieda, Miss Lily and Miss Gwen. And the Reverend Williams. All sitting in the front room of the Marion Cheeks Jackson Center. Connected to each other through a shared experience: growing up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s surrounded by a network of unofficial mentors in Chapel Hill’s Northside neighborhood. They were gathered recently on a Tuesday night in August, next door to the church many of them grew up in, because they are mentors to a new generation of kids, growing up in very different times without the benefit of the tight-knit community they knew.

The kids they are mentoring live scattered throughout Chapel Hill, often far beyond the borders of the Northside neighborhood. Kids who know very little if anything at all about the history of Northside or about segregation, civil rights activism, and school desegregation in their own backyards. The mentors…