It was a Tuesday night in August, and a group had gathered in the front room at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center. There was Mr. Earl, Mr. Ronny, Miss Frieda, Miss Lily, Miss Gwen, and the Reverend Williams, all connected to each other through a shared experience: growing up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s surrounded by a network of unofficial mentors in Chapel Hill’s Northside neighborhood. Now they were sitting in a circle, next door to the church many of them grew up in, because they are mentors to a new generation of kids, growing up in very different times, and, they feel, without the benefit of the tight-knit community they knew.
The kids they are mentoring live scattered throughout Chapel Hill, often far beyond the borders of the Northside neighborhood. They are usually kids who know very little if anything at all about the history of Northside or even about segregation, civil rights activism, and school desegregation in their own backyards. The mentors, armed with their personal histories, are changing that.
They tell kids about their own experiences in segregated schools and neighborhoods, in sit-ins and protest marches, and as some of the first black kids to attend integrated schools. But tonight they are here to share their stories with each other.
Very quickly, the discussion begins to focus on relationships. Relationships in the various Northside neighborhoods (Pottersfield, Sunset, Tin Top, Pine Knolls) between black kids “coming up” and a whole range of adults who all knew who they were and who their parents were. They were teachers, ministers, other people’s parents, extended family members, shop keepers. And sometimes, as Miss Frieda pointed out, it was an older kid who looked out for you or reminded you how to act. The others nodded and agreed emphatically. The stories just came rolling out, one after the other.
They also talked about relationships with white people in Chapel Hill—bosses, policemen, university students, politicians. And astonishingly, when talking about the people who so often looked down on them, they emphasized the importance of keeping the lines of communication open, of staying focused and developing long-term goals– most often very long-term goals– as well as acknowledging the small victories.
According to Reverend Williams, speaking with a knowing smile and slow nod: “Chapel Hill is a unique place. You could talk to the whites. It‘s unlike any other place.”
In the front room at the Jackson Center, most of those present echoed the sentiment that relationships between black and white people were unique in Chapel Hill, though not in the way many white people think. The stories the mentors tell about the tense years leading up to desegregation paint a picture of a racial order in which whites in power conceded very reluctantly to demands for equality. In the early 1960s, when white town leaders anticipated rising discontent with their reluctance to integrate the schools or the police force, they would make a step towards the black community, implementing a change in the right direction. White town leaders reasoned that by giving an inch, they would not have to give a yard. And the town of Chapel Hill was able to maintain its progressive reputation in the process.
Some of the assembled generously put a positive spin on those years, suggesting that black-white relationships sometimes were based upon mutual acknowledgment and even mutual regard; but the stories they told give little evidence of power-sharing, cooperation, or recognition of the value of different perspectives.
The town’s liberal reputation seems to rest on an unspoken paternalism. The relationships between whites and blacks in Chapel Hill both before and after segregation was officially outlawed, were based upon inequality, held in place partly by friendly gestures, partly by the threat of violence.
Reverend Williams recalled a relationship with a Mr. Pendergraft, the owner of a garage on Franklin Street. His uncle had worked for Mr. Pendergraft, a member of the local Ku Klux Klan, for decades. Somehow this relationship guaranteed his uncle that no harm would come to him, despite the fact that everyone knew he hosted weekly Klan meetings. When Reverend Williams was a young boy, he remembers looking for his uncle and instead running in to Mr. Pendergraft dressed in his Klan robes. The terror of that moment is still fresh in his mind. Mr. Ronny told the story of how he had to be counseled by elders in the Northside community to help him overcome the fear that gripped him whenever he had to leave the safety of his neighborhood and venture into white Chapel Hill.
Violence could be avoided if a person was not perceived as threatening the balance of power in which white people’s freedoms and privileges were accepted and unquestioned. Relationships with whites were possible, even encouraged, so long as everyone understood that the balance of power would remain firmly in the hands of white people. An occasional glimpse of a Klan robe was a clear reminder of how far some whites in town might go to see that the balance wasn’t upset. And so, as some of the mentors mentioned, parents would often tell kids to stay away from Franklin Street when the civil rights marchers came through. Those relationships their parents had established with white people in town could be seriously jeopardized if word got out that a family member was protesting.
The liberal traditions the university town celebrates are understood very differently by those who grew up on the “other side” of Franklin Street. Many black residents talk about scraping by, living, often fearfully, by a code—written and unwritten– that existed just as it did in the rest of the state. As Mr. Ronny put it, black people had to find a way to “not let your feelings get in the way of your spirit.” The feelings described by the mentors ranged from humiliation to rage. And a number of them talked about how they perceived the same feelings in the kids they mentor. “They have challenges we couldn’t even dream of,” said Reverend Williams. “And they don’t have what we had.” By that he means the sort of support that came from being part of a community.
Mr. Ronny told the story about how the constant pressure of racism—the insults and threats—led to an anger that made him take shots with his bb gun at a white postman passing through the neighborhood. When an elder in the neighborhood heard about this, Ronny was forced to confess and apologize in person, a lesson he shares with students today. He listens to kids and he understands the anger. In this way, he can build trust and, he hopes, help kids to stay out of trouble.
So many Chapel Hillians live in quiet neighborhoods, barely aware of the implications of the dwindling supply of affordable housing, well-paid jobs, educational support and business opportunities for many of the people who live or would like to live in neighborhoods like Northside. Economic pressure deprives families of essential resources for sustaining or building communities. This group of volunteer-mentors are offering their wealth of experiences, wisdom and love to kids and want to pass on the spirit of community they value strongly.
Every person in the room at the Jackson Center that night had experienced segregation in Chapel Hill. And everyone in the room seemed to agree that things haven’t gotten easier just because segregation no longer officially exists. And every one was fully committed to sharing the tradition of relationship building they learned growing up in Northside.
MIGHTY 