Oral Histories

“All God's people coming together and then you hear the voice that said, "I went to the mountain top and what did I see?" I saw all God's people coming together, black, white, red, holding hands and chanting "peace and unity. What do you want? Justice!" And just to hear that echo and look around and…

Min. Robert Campbell is a well-known local activist who was raised by his grandparents in the Northside neighborhood. He attended Northside and Lincoln and was in the first desegregated graduating class at Chapel Hill High School (Class of ’67). He moved to Rogers Road in the 1970s where he has been…

“Because usually it ended up, truly, even though the schools were integrated, the classrooms were segregated, because whites were on one side and Blacks were on the other. Same typical thing, if you think about now, if you go into integrated situations, that people tend to migrate toward people that…

"We’re the Southern part of heaven, but that’s only for white folk. That’s not for the blacks." - William Carter William Carter discusses the movement and his background. He was born in the Bronx, New York in 1949 and discusses his heritage with a grandma being a Lumbee Native American and father…

The interview includes discussions about growing up in Chapel Hill during the Civil Rights era and highlights traits of early Chapel Hill life for African American families prior to integration. Both discuss the availability of medical facility access for blacks, how the community operated as a…

Linda Carver: We trusted him. So when, during Civil Rights, we found out that he was so racist. It was just such a shock. And when we were little, my father, he and my father were good friends. And so we could go into his drug store and he would say, you know, “Ah, y’all could sit there”. You know,…

Self-described transplants Chaitra Powell and Marvin Chambers have lived in the Northside Community since 2016. Marvin runs a massage therapy company and Chaitra works as an archivist in the Wilson Library. Her work focuses in particular on the telling of black stories and history. They have 2 kids,…

"They were devout Christians...and so, we survived. We survived by faith. They had a lot of faith." - Dolores Clark This interview is part of a series on Black builders in Orange County. Dolores Clark, a long-term resident of Chapel Hill, explains how her family has a history of building several…

Dolores Clark: Well I’ll start first with the Strayhorn family because I was raised in the home that my great grandparents Toney and Nellie Strayhorn built in 1879. And I was born in 1933 and lived in that home for about maybe 20 years or 18 years, I would say, until I left and went to college and…

Dolores Clark: Tony was separated from his mother. His mother was taken from him to Hillsborough and put on the block in Hillsborough when he was only 7 years old. And after that, he stayed on the plantation until he was about 16 or 17, and left the plantation, did some work around. He learned how…

Dolores Clark: My grandfather was very active, like I said, in the masons. He was a mason, very active. He has built so many things around in the community, the First Baptist Church in Carrboro, he was a part of building that. And I understand from recent information that he and one of my uncles…