“I have lived here all my life. My daughter grew up here. We went to school here. She went to UNC-Chapel Hill. … This is MY town!” Pat Jackson
In 2017, sitting next to a group of high school students in an African-American history class at Chapel Hill High, I had the privilege of listening to Northside resident Pat Jackson talk about her experience growing up in Chapel Hill– first under segregation, then in the early days of school integration—at the very same school she began attending exactly fifty years ago when it opened its doors to the town’s first integrated high school classes. She credits a community support system for helping her to get through those years; the same community also helped her raise her daughter. That daughter, she stated ever so proudly, graduated from Chapel Hill High School, UNC, with a degree in psychology.
To get Ms. Pat’s message, you’ve got to experience her in person. Looking straight at her audience of high school history students, Ms. Pat states emphatically: “This is MY town!” Her simple statement is a battle cry for her and for the other Northside residents who have always had to fight for visibility and voice in the university town in which they have lived their entire lives.
Ms. Pat is a woman on a mission, willing and very able to connect with students sitting in classrooms in the same school she helped integrate fifty years ago. When asked last week by students about her childhood, Ms. Pat began with anecdotes and observations about segregated Chapel Hill. “It was always clear: there was White Town and Black Town.”
And it was in the all-black Northside (or, as it was called then, Pottersfield) neighborhood – the churches, the schools, the Hargraves Community Center, the homes of her friends and relations– where she and the other kids found sanctuary.
During the school week, her teachers (also members of the Northside community) taught and disciplined students as if each child were their own; on Sundays, everyone she knew went to church and “everything that happened in the community came to church.” In other words, your business was their business. Familiarity was a source of strength for the kids of Northside. Support was freely given, and expectations were high: “You didn’t even think of stepping out of line back then.”
They also were taught the rules of segregation: don’t ever be where you’re not supposed to be: the university after work hours; in the whites-only stores on Franklin Street; in residential neighborhoods where white people lived and where the fraternity houses were; and, pretty much anywhere in white, working class Carrboro.
Most Northsiders worked for the university. And yet, they were prevented by the color of their skin from claiming that part of town as their own: “We worked ‘over there’ but we couldn’t live or go there outside of work.” Nevertheless, similarly to most other Northsiders, she describes certain downtown landmarks as part of her daily routine. Her narrative, especially of the heady days of the sit-ins, illustrates the perilous terrain they traversed when they left the relative safety of Northside. In an oral history interview, Ms. Pat describes some of her childhood experiences on Chapel Hill’s iconic main drag, Franklin Street. Known for catering to the needs and whims of university students, this street is at the center of many alumni’s fond recollections of their idyllic college days. Ms. Pat remembers it differently: “I spent many times at St. Joseph’s [CME church on the corner of Rosemary and Roberson] when all of that activity was going on, it being the hub and headquarters for all sorts of meetings. And then you make your way from St. Joseph’s on to Franklin Street at the same time that the demonstrations were going on. … And then there’s policemen there with huge fire hoses with water spraying on you! What was that all about?” Ten-year-old Pat was used to going to Franklin Street with friends to get a snack at places like Colonial Drug, also known as “Big John’s,” where they were served as long as no white customers were in the store. But once the sit-ins began, the police were called frequently, and they often dealt with demonstrators – including children like Ms. Pat—aggressively.
Since then, I’ve heard Ms. Pat mention the fire hose incident on a few occasions, and the memories are still fresh. She carries the memories of these experiences—the humiliations and injustices—with her. She also recalls vividly how her plans to attend Lincoln High School changed when Chapel Hill finally implemented school desegregation; how, in 1967, facing white students and white teachers at Chapel Hill High School brought on new struggles for her and her black classmates for whom school had been an extension of their community, a place they were known. In 2017 it’s still easy to hear the emotion in her voice: “No one wanted you there.” But she found comfort and support in Northside: “Without our community, we would not have made it.”
The wounds have left scars, but the anger has been transformed into a strong will and commitment to social justice. Some of her Northside neighbors left Chapel Hill for good; she left, too, for a while. But she came back because she missed home. And it seems her message is that you define what home means to you, not accepting others’ versions of what it is or should be, owning it even if others make you feel as though you do not belong. In that Chapel Hill High classroom in 2017, the heads nodding in the room seemed to indicate that even fifty years later, black and brown kids can relate to feeling out of place. Her message resonated and sparked intense interest, curiosity, and engagement, just as Ms. Pat knew it would.
Because of lessons taught in the tight-knit Northside community, she tells her audience, she was determined not to feel like an outsider but to “want to be in the mix.” She tells the rest of her story with a deep sense of pride. After returning with her husband to her hometown, she raised a daughter who also graduated from Chapel Hill High and was accepted to UNC. After growing up on the edge of the campus, Ms. Pat became “a UNC mom.” With a wry smile on her ageless face, she described how she crossed the campus, proudly wearing a UNC sweatshirt. Rather than feel marginalized, Ms. Pat staked her long overdue claim: “I got a piece of the University.”
She reminds people that the history of black Chapel Hill is a long one, one that will go on, since local leaders, especially in the black church, are not going anywhere. Speaking a few days later of the corner of Rosemary and Roberson Streets, the site of St. Joseph CME church, and, since 2017, also the site of a marker dedicated to local civil rights activists, Ms. Pat is emphatic: “We’re not on that corner by accident. We have a purpose there, and it’s to bridge the community, to be able to always have as a safe haven, always have a safety net there in Chapel Hill. It just has to be.” And as far as I can tell, she will be in the mix, mixing things up, holding her ground, and speaking her truth about the town, about her town, as long and as often as she possibly can.
MIGHTY 