Storyline · 1987–1988
In 1987 and 1988 Northside residents spoke against a mental health day center on Carr Street, a proposed Pittsboro Street extension and a rezoning off West Rosemary Street, saying such changes threatened their neighborhood. After a Black child drowned at the A. D. Clark pool in 1987, the Concerned Black Citizens pressed the town to hire Black lifeguards, and the council agreed to changes.
On March 16, 1987 the Orange-Person-Chatham Mental Health Center asked the Chapel Hill Town Council for a special use permit to turn a house at Carr and Church streets in Northside into an adult day center for people with chronic mental illness. All 41 speakers agreed such a program was needed, but Northside residents said the change could raise their taxes and push them out. In August a five-year-old Black boy from Hillsborough drowned at the A. D. Clark pool at the Hargraves center while white lifeguards were on duty. The Concerned Black Citizens wrote to the town charging negligence and asking it to recruit Black lifeguards; town officials said no Black applicants had come forward.
On September 12 and 13 the Northside Neighborhood Association questioned mayoral candidates Julie Andresen, Jonathan Howes and David Lineberger and four Town Council candidates on special-use permits, growth and the proposed Pittsboro Street extension. Residents said developers buying parcels for denser use threatened the integrated neighborhood. On September 22 nearly all of the 30 speakers before a joint University-Town committee opposed running Pittsboro Street through Little Fraternity Court to Airport Road, which an association member said would destroy the century-old neighborhood. On October 12 the council agreed to work on changes at the pool, among them a minority pool manager and lifeguards and a junior lifeguard program, and both sides said they had reached agreement. On February 15, 1988 residents told the council that a developer's proposal to rezone six lots off West Rosemary Street for town-center uses would uproot their community, and Town Manager David Taylor recommended denial.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Lori Diane Ungemah's 1997 undergraduate honors thesis in cultural studies at the University of North Carolina, on the Literacy Through Photography program. The work concerns the Hargraves Center and African American neighborhoods in Chapel Hill, which places the program among the town's Black communities. The essay was also submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies.
Report of a survey of Chapel Hill and Carrboro made in 1966 by a group at a workshop on neighborhood centers, sponsored jointly by the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers and the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina. Subjects include the Hargraves Community Center and the Northside neighborhood, and the topic is community center planning and social conditions in the town. Forty-six leaves.
Mittie Frank Mason's 1943 study of the Negro Community Center in Chapel Hill, treating the center as a case in community organization and describing social conditions for Black residents of the town. It runs 107 leaves with illustrations and a map at 29 cm and closes with a bibliography.
Two 1940 photographs of Chapel Hill's Black community center: the outside of the building with two people on the porch, and an interior room where Black band members lived. From the Chapel Hill Life: General binder of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, the decades before and after the Civil War, tracing family ties and neighborhood networks through the county's records. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1987, 251 pages with illustrations, maps, portraits and a bibliography. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods and social conditions in the county in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1988), Journal of American History (1988), The American Historical Review (1989), The Journal of Southern History (1989), Civil War history (1989), Journal of Social History (1989).
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Neighborhood history of the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek area of Chapel Hill, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2020. The project started in June 2014 when neighbors were asked over the community email list to share memories of life there, and replies came from current residents and from former residents raised there who had since scattered across the country. 268 pages with illustrations, color maps and portraits.
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Robert E. Seymour, a Baptist pastor in Chapel Hill associated with Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, looks back on segregation and race relations in the South from the pulpit. A clergyman's memoir covering church history in the town, Baptists in North Carolina and the segregation of African Americans. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2011, 204 pages.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
Sara Regan Lachenman's 2005 thesis on how the people living in Carrboro's company built housing altered it to suit themselves. It takes up domestic architecture, working class housing and the social side of the textile industry in the town, with 158 pages of text and illustrations.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of family, kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, covering the county's households from the late antebellum years through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Completed in 1982 in 248 leaves with maps. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods, race relations and social conditions in the county during the nineteenth century.
Public relations material on the Orange County Commission for Women, 1989 to 1992, from the files of the North Carolina Council on the Status of Women, 26 images, with Judith M. Messenheimer named as creator. Issues include child care, teenage pregnancy, abortion, older women, low-income housing, taxation, AFDC, and women's education and employment.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Material on the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek neighborhood of Chapel Hill, 2003 to 2019, gathered from residents and the neighborhood association while The Copperline Chronicles (Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2020) was being prepared. Three boxes, collection CHHS.017.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Northside residents and the town, 1987–1988.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/northside-residents-storyline-1987/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
