[It was] Like, ‘Della, it’s not going to work for you to just stay so private. You’re going to have to put your whole self into this. … That’s just the call of this work. You’re going to have to come out.’   

UNC Professor Della Pollock in an interview, 8 October 2016

 

The story of how the Jackson Center for Saving and Making History in the Northside neighborhood in Chapel Hill came to be is best told by those who made the first moves to fix a broken relationship between the university and its African American neighbors. Recognizing the neighborhood’s historical importance and cultural value, a team consisting of university professor and a group of students began an effort to conduct oral interviews with Northside residents in 2007. When they first approached residents, a lot of history got in the way. Their efforts proved more challenging and more rewarding than they imagined. Right at the onset they discovered that historically unequal relationships have to be redefined before they can be fixed.

The following stories describe white people’s efforts to cross over into the black community. Some wanted to record people’s stories; one, a developer, just wanted approval, to hear that he was a good guy and to get a thumbs-up for decisions he already had made.

Luckily, UNC Professor Della Pollock figured out that building a good relationship meant listening very closely in a most vulnerable way and letting the words she heard really sink in. She was able to discover that African Americans’ place on the margins– literally and figuratively– of the university and its privileged campus community represents a critical vantage point, one that is founded upon notions of justice and equality and grounded in the history of struggle. Della’s story about her encounter with Ed Caldwell suggests that listeners must be prepared to leave their comfort zones, to relinquish a place of privilege:

Of course we were really shiny, bright academics and really committed to good and good liberals and we really believed– I’m making this a really gross caricature–that giving people the opportunity to tell their stories was giving them a big gift. So we talked with Ed Caldwell, at the time the head of the alumni association for the former black high school, Lincoln High, which we’ll hear more about– and we recently had an interaction with the head of that alumni association that was equally challenging, or similarly challenging. And Ed just said, and what I still experience as a slap upside the head, “Y’all have studied the hell out of the black community. Why should I help you?”And it took me about ten years to understand that by “y’all “he didn’t just mean me personally, but he meant the university. And I was the stand-in for the university. And “studying the hell out of the place” was just a nightmarish image, just [eviscerating] it and contributing to its disintegration, its disrepair, and creating a kind of hell for the people living in it. And then I learned right there one of the most defining lessons that I have ever learned, which was that I didn’t have any power whatsoever and that it’s an illusion that a lot of our academics hold that we should be so chagrined by our power and that we need to share it and distribute it. When Ed said to me, “Why should I help you?” he had the power. And he knew his neighborhood. He was the watchdog for his neighborhood. And I needed his help for my little project, as it were, the way he flipped it.

… [W]hat we managed to do was to conclude it at least with a major public event. And we used in that setting the model of performance that we will be experimenting with here next week which is a very low level of retelling what you hear in the first person and some of the students were working with– well, one of the students was working with–an interview she had conducted with an uncle who was the brother to a grand wizard for the Ku Klux Klan; somebody else was working with her mom, who she didn’t know was one of the first people to integrate her elementary school. And at the closing of this full day of presentations and conversations Ed stood up, and he was just weeping and just swinging his arm out kind of trying to embrace all the students and saying, “Y’all are missionaries. Y’all are missionaries.”And of course, I had been sweating bullets and I was just relieved mostly. But that gave me an opportunity to think about what that “y’all” was about, and how he had renamed and reclaimed and offered us a place in the community of faith especially of which he saw himself a critical part. And this work at least carried the seed of a paradigm of work and a kind of responsibility that could, if continually practiced with sustained effort over many, many years, begin to answer the question, “Why should I help you?”

 

Hudson Vaughan, at the time a UNC student activist, who grew up in a multiracial, low-income neighborhood in Memphis, describes a similar sort of calling out by the woman who ended up becoming the history center’s namesake, Marian Cheek Jackson:

So then my senior year, in the fall of my senior year, they said, I had a friend come up and was like, “I’m in a class. I’m probably going to have to drop it. But you should take it because it’s got your name written all over it.” And I was like, “Why?” And they were like, “It’s got the black church, desegregation, oral history, like it’s a combination of all these things that you love. And you love asking people questions, so you should take Della’s class.”… And we chose, we got to choose kind of, she had a list of folks we could potentially interview and we started to go to church on Sunday as well, but we chose Mrs. Jackson because she was the church historian. We were really interested in learning about the church history, and I was more fascinated because I, “There are actually churches here! Why didn’t I know this.” And so we showed up at Knotts funeral home– because she didn’t want us to come to her house– where she worked, which at that time looked out over the field where Greenbridge is now, and the first time we ever went in, Mrs. Jackson—we called her and called and called to set up a time—and so we finally went in and Mrs. Jackson said that she needed to go make a copy and didn’t come out for an hour. So we just sat there and she was fumbling papers in the back just really trying to avoid us. And she came back in and she was not interested in an oral history interview, and so we just decided we’d start hanging out. So we started hanging out and at one point she was writing the church history like a week later and she asked us if we could help type it up and we were like, “Sure.” So we typed up the church history and in that process she was making corrections so we started to learn church history. And then she started to share history and then we started to work, she started to point out and talk about the black community and how it used to stretch from McDonald’s down to the KFC is what she’d say. She’d say, “The commercial interests are pushing us out, and it’s not about us. It’s about them. But they keep saying it’s about us. They keep wanting to think, acting like all these buildings are for us. But you don’t see any of us in there. And she was saying, And people are losing our sense of history.” And that’s when we first heard that motto, “Without the past, there is no future.” It was like, young people aren’t learning the incredible history. This town doesn’t know the history of the people who have laid the bricks and built the buildings. And she started talking about her grandfather coming as a former slave and building the stone walls around the university, and her father starting the janitorial association, and the work that she had done at NC Mutual which was part of the black Wall Street in Durham. …

            And then my connection back is that we at the end of that semester, we had spent all of this time with Mrs. Jackson and just gotten to know her as somebody—I mean, if people meet her, she’s got this most incredible spirit you know this beautiful laugh and she tells amazing stories and she has the deepest faith and just this sense of why faith is so important to the struggle which connected with my history as somebody who’d come out of this faith tradition that was really about a faith that goes out and is less about the evangelical component and more about what does it really mean to be part of a ( ) community.

 

Both of these first encounters — between Della and Ed Caldwell and between Hudson and Marian Jackson– happened on terms that the Northsiders established, since they were the ones being asked to give something: their time, and, first and foremost, their stories. Normally, it’s unsettling to be asked to share your story with a virtual stranger. Add to that the loaded history of past encounters between representatives of UNC and Northsiders, between blacks and whites who historically have specified the terms of cross-racial interactions in minute detail in order to reinforce a power hierarchy and remind blacks of their “place,” and suddenly their effort to define the terms becomes a powerful act of resistance.

By changing the terms, by altering the usual discourse in which their subservience is assumed beneath a veneer of Southern politeness, both Mr. Caldwell and Mrs. Jackson sent messages that, fortunately, Della and Hudson were ready to hear. That’s what made them so different and that’s, ultimately, what made the Jackson Center possible. It would not have come about without the establishment of relationships of mutual regard and trust. And those relationships had to take place on terms set by the community. It helped that Mrs. Jackson’s terms were also defined by her commitment to reconciliation and love.

As Della describes it, the work with Northside involved “becoming close and vulnerable,” “being called forward.” Community on the “other” side may demand checking privilege and ego before crossing. And not many have been willing to do this.

The next story shows a more typical example of how members of the black community have been and, for the most part, how they continue to be approached. At the time Della was exploring her oral history project, a few developers had gotten permission to build a mixed-use luxury building in downtown Chapel Hill right in the middle of the former black business district, a building that would cast a shadow both literally and metaphorically over the mostly black residential neighborhood adjacent to it. By the mid-2000s, the Northside neighborhood was feeling consistent pressure from aggressive realtors and rising rents, and the university was doing nothing to preserve and protect its long-term residents.

When construction vehicles blocked the entrance to the popular black funeral home next door, neighbors, together with students, organized to challenge the project and were rebuffed. Community leaders called for a series of meetings, and invited the developers, who had been adamantly insisting they had the community’s best interests in mind. Hudson and Della recall it like this:

HV: And the steering committee was all of these African American pastors especially and he [developer Tim Toben] came in to this meeting … and the first thing he does is open up his laptop, and say, “I want to show you a video.” And he shows us this video–I think it was made for the Obama campaign. And it was saying community means, “Come into unity.”… So he like then went on a lecture like we need to understand what real community means. …So Reverend Royster then stands up and literally is like, “I cannot believe you would accuse our integrity. This is one of the things that all of us hold dear to ourselves and you have no right to claim this and you need to publicly apologize,” basically.

 

DP: And at that point he storms out—

 

HV: Slams the keyboard. And just walks out. Bolts.

 

DP: So instead of participating in any way in an ongoing dialogue—

 

HV: Walks out of the room.

 

As Della and Hudson tell their story to the Jackson Center staff on a Friday afternoon in 2016, one person in the room, a Jackson Center Board member, just listens. His name is Michael Campbell, a black man with lots of experience in local government and in dealing with the issues between Duke University and the Durham neighborhood surrounding it. On the recording, we hear him say he has to leave to go to another meeting. When Hudson asks Michael if he has any parting questions, Michael comments: “What this work exposes is that you got to get to know the people, the folks who are living the issue, that’s where the education is. And work up from that and see how do we come together to resource and address the issues that people live; in a way, that you get with them and with people you’ll understand those issues. And so it’s slower work, but it’s much more rewarding work. It’s much more progressive.”

It seems to me, not only is it more progressive but for Della, Hudson and the dozens and dozens of students, community activists, and other UNC folks who have crossed over the divide, it’s been both life-changing and life-affirming.