Teachers, Artisans, and Entrepreneurs: Black Community and Work in a Southern Town

FAIN: PY-263665-19

Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History (Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2303)
Della Pollock (Project Director: May 2018 to January 2026)

A community archives digitization day documenting work, trade, and mutual care in the historically black Northside neighborhood of Chapel Hill, and outreach programming including discussions of public history and curation.  The applicant would partner with the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina for a “history harvest” to scan and photograph materials, gather metadata, and record stories about the items.  With donor permission, digital items would be processed and made publicly available through an Omeka-based online digital archive.

Teachers, Artisans, and Entrepreneurs: Black Community and Work in a Southern Town (January 2019 to June 2020) will recognize the ingenuity necessary to creating and sustaining a thriving economy in the historically Black community known as Northside, in Chapel Hill, NC. Initially a labor enclave attached to a public university, Northside is both unique and exemplary in its history of interconnected byways of work, labor, and economy. Through the digitization of documents that reflect the full spectrum of community life, this project will preserve and advance the legacy of work in Northside. The documents will be shared at a public event through themed visual exhibits coupled with listening stations, interpretive commentary by scholars, and story circles. These events will help us to understand more about sub-economies, desegregation, and the connections between business, school, church, and family that have long distinguished Northside and similar communities across the U.S.