Storyline
Chapel Hill’s road to its first public housing: the human relations committee’s call for action, the 1962 housing code and housing authority, the fights over sites in 1964, and the first units at Craig-Gomains and Lindsay Street.
In briefChapel Hill created a housing authority in 1962 to seek federally financed low-rent housing, and the choice of sites drew objections in which race was a factor. The aldermen acted after testimony about substandard housing before the Mayor's Committee on Human Relations in 1961 and a hearing of about 100 people, all in favor. In 1964 Vivian Foushee of the Citizens Committee for Progress led a Black delegation against placing most of a 60-unit project in the all-Black Gomains Avenue area, neighbors of a North Columbia Street tract petitioned against housing there, and two commissioners said 21 businessmen opposed the project. Craig-Gomains and Lindsay Street were built in 1967, and North Columbia Street in 1968.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Black Life & Civil Rights.
On August 29, 1961 Chapel Hill's Mayor's Committee on Human Relations, after testimony about substandard housing, asked for a minimum building code and a study of blighted areas. Twenty-seven citizens petitioned for a public housing authority in October, and in December Town Manager Robert Peck presented a draft housing ordinance. On January 23, 1962, after a hearing of about 100 people of both races, all in favor, the aldermen passed the ordinance and created a five-member housing authority to seek a federally financed low-rent project. Mayor Sandy McClamroch named its members, and on May 7 it met and elected Bill Cherry chairman. In September it applied for a $35,000 federal planning loan toward a 200-unit project. In May 1964 Vivian Foushee of the Citizens Committee for Progress led a Black delegation against placing most of a 60-unit project in the all-Black Gomains Avenue area; in July neighbors of Milton Abernethy's North Columbia Street tract petitioned against housing there, while Foushee and Hilliard Caldwell spoke for it. By November the authority had bought four tracts, including Abernethy's, and in December commissioners Harvey Bennett and Carl Smith told its chairman, Sidney Chipman, that 21 businessmen opposed the project, with race a factor. Craig-Gomains, with 40 units, and Lindsay Street, with 9, were built in 1967, and North Columbia Street followed in 1968.
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An Alex Cross thriller by James Patterson with Chapel Hill among its settings alongside Washington, D.C. Bombings, a kidnapping, a missing-persons investigation, terrorism and fathers and sons are its subjects; the Sampson of the title is Cross's longtime partner John Sampson. Published by Little, Brown in 2026.
Theodore Parrish's memoir of a Black life in Chapel Hill and of gentrification in the town, subtitled race, gentrification, and the path of my own life. Published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in August 2025, 243 pages with illustrations. Subjects include African Americans in Chapel Hill, race relations and gentrification in North Carolina.
Sylvia D. Hoffert's study of gossip, rumor and reputation in nineteenth-century Hillsborough, using the town as a case study of how talk shaped social standing and race relations in a small Southern place. Chapters take up the workings of idle chatter, people living on the edge of freedom under slavery, schooling, daily labor, and a period of fear over madness in the community. Published 2025 by the University of Georgia Press.
Beverly A. Scarlett's 2024 study of a free community of color in nineteenth-century Orange County, drawing on apprenticeship and freedmen's records among other county sources.
Brian Burns's collection of lesser-known episodes from Chapel Hill's past, published by The History Press of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2023. Topics include the town's history, its buildings and structures, and the history of civil rights in Chapel Hill. 158 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy novel set around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bree, an African American teenager with newly awakened powers she cannot yet control, learns that the leaders of the secret Order mean to hide the coming demon war, and she and her friends flee so that she can find her own training. Subjects include magic, secret societies, imaginary wars and psychic trauma. Published by Simon & Schuster in 2022, 561 pages.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2022).
Picture book by Courtney Soling Smith, published by the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 2022, about a collie named Minnie and an African American family in Cedar Grove Township. Twenty-nine unnumbered pages, chiefly color illustrations, with portraits that point to a real family behind the story.
Companion picture book about Minnie the collie by Courtney Soling Smith, again from the Orange County Historical Museum in 2022, following an African American farm family in Cedar Grove Township. Thirty-seven unnumbered pages, chiefly color illustrations, with a facsimile. Written for children, with the museum's local history interest behind it.
Adam Lucas's account of the 2021-2022 Carolina men's basketball season, Hubert Davis's first as head coach. Davis, appointed in April 2021, was the first Black head coach in the program's history, and the season ended at the NCAA tournament in New Orleans. Published 2022 by the UNC Department of Athletics, 155 pages with color illustrations. Topics include the Tar Heels, Davis, and college basketball in Chapel Hill in the twenty-first century.
A folded walking tour map of Northside, the historically African American neighborhood near downtown Chapel Hill, produced by Alexander Stephens for the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History in 2021. One illustrated sheet, 43 by 28 centimeters, folded to pocket size. The walk introduces the neighborhood through its residents' own histories of home.
Collected first-hand and second-hand stories from the Eno River valley as told from the standpoint of African Americans and Native people who have lived along the river in Orange and Durham counties, from prehistory to the present day. Issued by the Eno River Association in Durham as volume 10, number 2 of the Eno Journal, 2021, 106 pages with illustrations.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
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