I was having tea with a teacher-friend, and we got to talking about teacher salaries in our district. The Republican governor and his Tea Party pals are often blamed by the many liberal voices in Chapel Hill for the decline in teacher pay. And yet if anyone had listened to teachers in Chapel Hill last year (and for the last few years) they would know that the district had a chance to do right by us and significantly raise the across-the-board supplement… and they didn’t.

We got raises (I should say, “They” since these raises did not apply to the many part-time teachers in the district) but not as much as teachers in the neighboring county did. Instead, our school district leaders opted to institute a program in which teachers compete against each other for raises which are only awarded to a small percentage of teachers each year. In a rare

Last week I saw the movie, The 13th. If somehow you don’t know how to make sense of the wave of police brutality against African-Americans or reports on the mass incarceration of Black men, this documentary is the one to see. 

As a social studies teacher, I have become very aware of, as James Loewen put it, the “lies” history teachers tell.  And, by not always pointing out to my students that their history textbooks present a narrative of “our” history filled with skewed interpretations and omissions, I guess I’ve been lying too.

That said, it has become patently clear that the meta-narrative of American history found in our textbooks is a distortion of the historical record since it averts our gaze from the experiences of whole classes and groups of people and focuses instead on the actions of a few powerful people. The message that students usually hear is that…

When Donny “Hollywood” Riggsbee tells his story about growing up in Chapel Hill in the years leading up to and following segregation and the civil rights movement, his story takes some unexpected twists.

Like when he remembers his interactions with white college students. He recalls when he was a housekeeper in one of the student dormitories fondly, chuckling as he describes how they would drink beer together on Friday nights.

Or like when he describes his reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and someone warns him that there’ll be riots in Chapel Hill:

“That ain’t nothing to do with us.” I said. He said, “There’s gonna be a riot, there’s gonna be a riot.” I said, “Oh, man, please, come on now. We ain’t about all that,” I said. 

Or when he says that his most important mentor was Big John, the owner of Colonial Drug. The…

For anyone who doubts the impact one person’s story can have, for anyone who thinks history is only about the past, I say, you should have been at Lakewood Middle in Durham yesterday.

The students had been learning about social movements and today were learning about the value of oral histories from our group from the Jackson Center in neighboring Chapel Hill, an organization dedicated to preserving the history of the historically-black Northside neighborhood whose residents had been at the center of the local civil rights protests and sit-ins.

After listening to a presentation about oral history and interviewing techniques, their assignment was to come up with questions to ask one of the four visitors we call “mentors.” I had the privilege of introducting one of those mentors, Miss Gwen. Miss Gwen, a retired teacher in the Chapel Hill schools, took a seat in front of twenty-five middle schoolers, who…

The best way to sense the power of a story is to hear the reactions of those who have the privilege of hearing a really good one.

I had the chance to return to Lakewood Middle, this time with Northside resident, Katherine Council, better known as “Mama Kat.” She talked about her experiences in segregated Chapel Hill, as well as during and after the Civil Rights movement, including the story behind this picture of her daughter (on far right) and future son-in-law (far left).

Reprinted in Jim Wallace, Courage in the Moment

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Rather than summarize my impressions of my morning with Mama Kat, I will just let the kids do that, each in his or her own way:

Recently I attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a new sewage system in the Rogers Road neighborhood of Chapel Hill. This moment was the culmination of decades of struggle and setback that began in 1972 when the neighborhood was promised a number of infrastructural equalizers. Rogers Road seemed to have been overlooked when the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, as well as Orange County claimed and serviced neighborhoods all around this one.

City council members and county commissioners were present at the ceremony, smiling for the cameras as they awkwardly inserted their gold-painted spades into the clay.

Those who led the struggle were acknowledged and held brief speeches thanking other members of the community who supported them. But they stood on the fringes as the groundbreaking proceeded. When I offered one of these men a congratulatory handshake, he said quietly, “I feel uncomfortable at these things.” He may have meant…

It was the end of our second interview, and I wanted to ask David Caldwell, Jr., something that would help me summarize the life stories of this remarkable man.

I glanced at my question sheet and asked: “When you look back at your childhood and everything, what do you think was the critical point where you really had your “Aha moment,” saying, “Okay, now I know what I want to do with my life”?

After, graciously, trying to answer the question, David took it down a different path altogether.

DC:  I don’t think I’ve had–. It’s like a cake. Eggs don’t make the cake. The batter doesn’t make the cake. Water, the margarine, the baking powder, it doesn’t –. You have to put it all together. And as you start putting those ingredients together, it’s “Oh, this is a cake! Let’s put some icing on it.” So then you…