History is ‘his-story.’ And until we start getting some publicity, it’s going to stay like that.
David Caldwell, Jr.
I told her, proudly, that I was born and raised in Chapel Hill. I knew what was coming next: “Reeeeeaaaaallllly?! I didn’t know there were any Black people from Chapel Hill.”
Cynthia Edwards-Paschall
The town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the place I’ve called “home” for more than a decade, has a reputation as an unusually progressive university town, but in many ways it is a southern town like any other. Its standardized history and the monuments enshrining that history focus on the white elite who’ve always run things. By those accounts, the place is a “southern part of heaven.” From phrases celebrating the town’s liberal exceptionalism to “10-Best” lists hailing it as one of America’s “most livable places,” misrepresentations old and new obscure the presence and experience of its African American population. Chapel Hill has been home to African American population. Chapel Hill has been home to African Americans since the founding of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), which they built, and many Black residents today can trace their roots in the area back many generations. The Histories of Black and white Chapel Hill—separate and unequal—have been intertwined from the beginning. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, Confederate heroes, slave cemeteries with unmarked graves, segregation, white supremacy, lynchings: all are part of the local history. Despite courageous efforts to provoke public reckonings with the town’s racial and economic inequalities in labor, schooling, and housing, Chapel Hill’s reputation as heaven-like persists.
Most towns—and not only in the South—present a whitewashed self-image by burying or distorting past injustices and current sites of struggle. In college and university towns in particular, the story of the “town” is typically told from the perspective of the “gown.”
Mighty provides an example of how, inherited and inadequate versions of local history can be rewritten through the gathering of individual stories. Thanks to brave and defiant people, a more accurate history has been passed down and is not forgotten. Together, the diverse stories in this volume paint a picture of life as defined by the inescapable limitations of Jim Crow segregation but also by the abundance found in a self-sustaining African American community. Mighty draws on the over 200 oral histories archived and hosted online in “From the Rock Wall” by the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History. The voices captured in this collection demonstrate the resilience of local Black communities (now referred to collectively as “Northside”) in the face of racist perils awaiting them when they crossed into the neighborhoods, business districts, schools, churches, and UNC campus that together made up white Chapel Hill. The stories of the members of the Northside community are Chapel Hill stories, and they are also southern and national stories, reflecting the lived reality of segregation and institutional and everyday racism.
Mighty retells extraordinary stories of ordinary people involved in the civil rights movement, the desegregation of the schools, and our contemporary often partisan battles around social and economic equity. The words to the civil rights song, “We shall not be moved,” take on new meaning today for African American families fighting marginalization and displacement. For some readers, the voices in Mighty will be a source of empowerment; for others, they will encourage reflection on the privilege that results from centuries of injustice. These reflections can lead to honest reckoning with the past, a prerequisite for advancing racial justice.
The idea for this book began in 2015 with a storyteller and his stories. At the time I was a high school German and history teacher. Always on the lookout for affecting materials for my students, I visited a traveling exhibit about the experience of African American GIs in Germany during and after World War II. It hit me then and there that surely someone in my own town could speak to this experience. I contact the Jackson Center and a staff member pointed me to David Caldwell, Jr., whose family goes back about two centuries in Chapel Hill. Caldwell had served in the military police in West Germany at a time when domestic terrorism there was on the rise. He graciously agreed to speak with me and my students. One story led to another, then another, and on and on, from Europe back to the Piedmont of North Carolina. His stories were my introduction to the African American community in Chapel Hill. Once I had the privilege of listening to them, I was hooked.
Oral history interviewing began as something I did in my free time, outside the classroom. But when the opportunity arose, I took a position as Education and Communications Director at the Jackson Center, located in the heart of Northside, and was able to devote myself to making sure as many people as possible heard the life stories I was hearing. This book explores those stories, as well as my own experiences working with a team of Community Mentors—elder leaders from Northside—teaching local history workshops in K-12 classrooms.
Mighty‘s storytellers and history-makers illuminate local struggles today and the pertinacity, vision, creativity, and courage of those who continue to fight for their rightful piece of their town’s abundant resources. In the words of the late Reverend Troy Harrison, former pastor of Northside’s St. Joseph CME church, “the decisions in politics that we make ought to embrace dreams, dreams of a better place and a better time and a better situation for all of Chapel Hill.” Stories of struggle can be found in every town, and in every town, those who have little power are denied genuine chances to participate in decision-making. By listening to personal accounts of struggle we can begin to imagine and then to build communities all can proudly call “home.”
MIGHTY 