Listening to History: A North Carolina Mosaic

Race and Desegregation: West Charlotte High School

Race and Desegregation: Asheville's Stephens-Lee High School

Tobacco, History, and Memory: Storytelling and Cultural Grieving in Eastern North Carolina

Environmentalism: Forests and Communities in Western North Carolina

New Immigrants and Labor: The Case Farms Strike in Morganton

New Immigrants and Neighborhood Change: Northeast Central Durham

Voices After the Deluge: Oral History Investigations of the Great North Carolina Flood

Whole Lives: The Durham HIV Life Review Project

The Brown Creek Correctional Institute Life Review Performance Project

Chatham County at the Crossroads




SOHP Home > Research > Listening for a Change > Chatham at the Crossroads

Chatham at the Crossroads

In close proximity to the Research Triangle Park and the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, largely rural Chatham County, North Carolina, is facing the problems and the opportunities associated with social, economic, and environmental upheaval. Affluent commuters and retirees, many recently arrived from the Northeast, have been the catalyst for new development that often conflicts with the interests of longtime residents and traditional farmers, who find it increasingly difficult to hold on to their land or make their living in the county. Real estate prices continue to rise, subdivision threatens the county's remaining large farms and open tracts of land, older African American residents express lingering resentment over the fact that they were disproportionately affected by the creation of a recreational lake, and the county grapples with the potential environmental impact of a proposed nuclear waste dump. Meanwhile, Chatham's demographics have been drastically altered by an influx of Latino immigrants, who now constitute almost a quarter of the population in a county where race relations between blacks and whites have historically been strained. These issues - and more - make Chatham a microcosm for the dramatic changes underway in North Carolina and much of the South.

Coordinated by Spencie Love, the Southern Oral History Program's "Listening For a Change" project in Chatham County germinated in response to requests for an oral history survey from the Chatham Historical Association and Chatham's Black Historical Society, and grew as the focus of an Introduction to Oral History course taught by Love at UNC-CH in fall 1999. In order to understand recent developments in the context of history, the project has been conducting interviews that document life in Chatham County since World War II, concentrating on race relations (including the effects of desegregation), new immigration, land use, and ways of life. An overarching theme in the project's work is an exploration of the meaning of "community" in Chatham's past, present, and future.

Spencie Love, the former associate director of the SOHP, is the author of One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew. She is currently finishing a study of the role of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, tentatively entitled Present at the Crucifixion: James M. Lawson, Jr. and 20th Century Christian Nonviolence.



The Southern Oral History Program
Center for the Study of the American South
Love House and Hutchins Forum
410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info@sohp.org