Chatham County, Community at the Crossroads: A Southern/African American Oral History Seminar

Spencie Love

Teaching a variety of twentieth-century United States history courses has raised no more compelling question for me than this: How can history be taught most meaningfully at the university level? I found my answer in the fall of 1999 when I led a group of eighteen undergraduate and graduate students at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill in a hands-on exploration of the intertwined fields of southern and African American history since World War II. The course, "Introduction to Oral History," has been offered at unc for twenty-five years; each time, however, it is a new course, focused on a different aspect of regional history. Oral history as a methodology is best taught when it is grounded in a substantive, well-focused history course. Its special strengths, weaknesses, and complexities are most readily apparent when it is applied to meaningful historical research.	1
Prior to planning the course, I had learned that a vital chapter of southern/African American history was unfolding in Chatham County, a large and diverse rural county just south of Chapel Hill. Chatham was impossible to ignore: prominent members of the county's two local historical societies, one white and one black, had repeatedly issued calls for help in conducting a countywide oral history project. Key members of both groups were well aware that unless a significant project was undertaken, the county's recent history would slip farther away. Elderly members of Chatham's black and white populations were dying. Unprecedented economic development was engulfing the county, and newcomers, ranging from poor Hispanic immigrants to wealthy retirees, were arriving daily. Local people asked for help in collecting the remaining memories of important historical experiences.	2
Compared to its Piedmont neighbors, Chatham had remained a rural, blue-collar, and relatively undeveloped county until recently. Although very dramatic events occurred there—most notably the completion in 1981–1982 of Jordan Lake, a recreational reservoir, and the flooding of hundreds of acres of prime farmland that undertaking had required—Chatham remained rural despite proximity to the Research Triangle Park and Greensboro communities that have witnessed major urban transformations since the 1960s. Like members of all southern communities, Chatham residents had experienced school desegregation and other social changes whose cumulative effects only gradually registered as a watershed. Recent immigration to Chatham, however, has posed an unprecedented challenge. It has forced county residents to begin examining their history, their values, and their visions of the future as never before. (In the spring of 2000, shortly after my course ended, the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke led an anti-immigration rally in Siler City, drawing notice from the British Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, and the New York Times, among other news organizations. This event signaled to many local people that the changes Chatham is facing can no longer be ignored or wished away.)	. . .