I have been living in Chapel Hill for over a decade now and am continuously awed by the history of this place. Its reputation as an enlightened, progressive university town attracted me, but in so many ways, Chapel Hill is a southern town like most other southern towns. Slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, monuments to confederate heroes, slave cemeteries with unmarked graves, segregation, white privilege– it’s all here. Thanks to so many courageous and defiant people, this history is not forgotten, though it has been much too easily overlooked. The history of Chapel Hill’s African-American population is not a part of the lore of the place (“Southern part of heaven,” etc.) nor is it featured on the town’s or university’s official webpages and in the monthly bearing the town’s name.

Many white Chapel Hillians will tell you proudly that Chapel Hill is nothing like the rest of the rest of the state or the rest of the South; it’s somehow more enlightened, more progressive, much less racist. And at the same time, Chapel Hill is less diverse (racially and socioeconomically) than neighboring Durham and many of the small towns in the rural parts of the state. And as far as racism goes, Chapel Hill has much more in common with the rest of the South than the mythology surrounding the home of the nation’s first public university suggests.

And just like many people in other southern college towns like Charlottesville, many Chapel Hillians insist that public monuments to the Confederacy represent a proud tradition and have nothing to do with slavery. While we now have a national public debate about these monuments, our local monument to “Silent Sam,” who towers above a beautiful memorial to the slaves who built the university, still stands in the center of the campus green. His days may be numbered but he has weathered many a storm, bolstered not just by KKK sympathizers but countless university alumni and local residents.

I only recently discovered that a few neighborhoods very close to the center of the UNC campus were designated “black only” under segregation until more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Neighborhoods, business districts, schools, churches, recreational facilities– all were entirely segregated and neglected by the town and the university. And the oldest public university did not admit African Americans for its first one hundred and seventy years even though African Americans worked first as slaves then as indentured servants as the university’s labor force.

Local history also is not a part of the curriculum in the schools here, and even when kids learn about the civil rights movement, the closest they get to home is usually the Greensboro lunch counter and Greensboro four who tried to get served there. There were lunch counters and sit-ins and riots here, too. Desegregation came very slowly and with much resistance. To this day, separate and unequal persists in the schools’ classrooms, in cafeterias and in neighborhoods.

The Marian Cheek Jackson Center came into existence with the mission of bringing the history of these African-American communities to light. In the process, history is being rewritten. This website is an effort to spread the word, to lift up the voices of the people of Pine Knolls, Sunset, Pottersfield, Rogers Road, Merritt Mill Road, and Tin Top. They show the resilience of these communities in the face of the racist peril that awaited them when they crossed into those areas that most people think of as “Chapel Hill.”

When I began to listen to the voices of those who lived and live in these neighborhoods, my picture of Chapel Hill changed, and, if you think of it as the Southern piece of heaven, so will yours. Thank you for joining me on the journey. And thanks to Marian Cheek Jackson for paving the way. Click here to find out more about the work of the center.

 

Andrea