This story is part of an ongoing INDY series on libraries in the Triangle. You can read the rest of the stories here.
A library can be a place to borrow the latest bestseller or use the internet, but it can also be a living archive—a place where a people remembers itself. In this sense, a very special one is growing in a little brick house with white lacework columns on the Rosemary Street boundary between downtown and Northside.
The Marian Cheek Jackson Center, a nonprofit, works in many advocacy areas. They’re all connected by From the Rock Wall, a website containing hundreds of interviews and counting with residents of Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top—three historically Black neighborhoods in Chapel Hill and Carrboro just west of UNC-Chapel Hill, whose fates have been shaped by the university’s fortunes.
“These aren’t neighborhoods that are of the past or dissolving in front of us,” says Kathryn Wall, the center’s co-director of public history alongside Anna Spencer. “They’re always growing and changing, and we hope to continue to record oral histories that amplify new kinds of stories.”
In 2007, Della Pollock, a UNC professor, and Troy Harrison, then the pastor of St. Joseph C.M.E. Church, partnered to record oral histories of the Northside neighborhood. Marian Cheek Jackson was the church’s historian and had lived in Pine Knolls all her life. Her father helped form the first janitorial association at UNC.
With her deep roots in the community, the church, and the college, Jackson gave interviews that helped shape the vision for a documentary effort led and owned by the community, not spirited away to academia. Thus she became the center’s namesake and the source of its motto: “Without the past, you have no future.”
The Marian Cheek Jackson Center, a nonprofit, was officially established in 2009, upstairs at St. Joseph, and now rents the church’s former parsonage as its office. After more than a decade of gathering interviews, it launched From the Rock Wall in 2021, forming a community review board in the process.
“Everything was done in collaboration with the community, from the colors of the interface to how it works,” Wall says. “You don’t interact with it like a finding aid for an academic library. When you click on somebody’s name, the first thing you see is a photograph and their own words, not somebody else telling their story.”
William Gattis, born in Tin Top in 1946, is a community review board member. When he steps outside of the Jackson Center, he sees the remnants of an older world, especially in historic churches that have withstood more than a century of torrential change.
But in his mind’s eye, he can still see a self-reliant city that’s still just a lick away from country. “Right down from the house, we had a spring where we’d go get water, and Grandpa must have had some pigs and cows there too,” he says, recalling the Chapel Hill of his youth.
He also sees the Midway, the Black business district that bloomed around Rosemary and Graham in the mid-20th century. He sees Charlie Mason’s grocery, the Hollywood Theater, and the Lincoln Car Center, where he used to check out his reflection in the big picture window as he walked by.
“We had the culture right here in the community, and that’s what I miss now,” he says. “To grow up where you have your own house, your own businesses, you have she-roes and heroes. You could imagine who you wanted to be like, you see. We get to remind people of once upon a time—but not necessarily in a storybook, but real life and real people and real possibilities.”
Northside’s Black population has been heavily displaced by student rental properties, dropping by almost half from 1989 to 2010 before beginning to regrow in 2017, according to an interactive timeline on the center’s website. This attrition has been driven by property taxes that are too high for fixed incomes and values that bring pressure from outside developers.
“If you walk through the neighborhood, you’ll see big two- and three-story houses with nine cars parked out back, right next to a single-family home that somebody’s lived in for 60 years,” Wall says. “A story was related to me of a student living in one of these rental houses asking why there were so many older Black people living in a student neighborhood.”
Raising this awareness is part of the Gateways Project, a collaboration with the Northside Neighborhood Initiative. The Freedom Fighters Gateway has stood before St. Joseph since 2017: a low wall with the pictures and words of local civil rights heroes on black granite slabs in Chatham stone.
Building is a prominent thread in From the Rock Wall, and a second gateway for builders is currently being planned. Enslaved people laid campus fixtures like Old East, Gerrard Hall, and the stone walls lining the paths, and “after emancipation, many of them took the skills that they had learned and turned them into their own entrepreneurial pursuits,” Wall says. “So there’s a huge tradition of building and masonry in the community.” Gateways for educators and faith leaders in historically Black neighborhoods are envisioned for the future.
These projects just scratch the surface of the Jackson Center’s activity. Other programs with separate staff work to promote affordable housing and curtail development more directly, educate the youth through programs like the summer Freedom School, or engage UNC students—who are not, after all, the enemy.
“Students don’t know the history of the house they’re renting, but when we reach out to them about it, they’re fascinated by it, and very often they want to get to know their neighbors,” says Wall, who throws transcribing parties with pizza for big groups of students. “We hear a lot, ‘That was fascinating; can you give me more clips by that person?’ It’s become a great way to get students involved.”
The idea of From the Rock Wall as a library resonates with William Gattis because, in the 1970s, he was the bookmobile librarian for the Chapel Hill Public Library, and he believes in the power of stories that Wall’s example demonstrates—not just to preserve the past but also to shape the future.
“If I can whet your imagination, as this history does, then you can soar like Jonathan Seagull,” he says. “You can soar as high as you want to and be as sharp with your eyesight as an eagle, because my hope is that you will be able to see further than me and accomplish more than me.”
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