UNC didn’t want to show this exhibit. Now it’s at the National Civil Rights Museum. | Opinion

A line about two hours long was outside the National Civil Rights Museum on Jan. 16, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. People were there, of course, to celebrate the legacy of King, whose life was cut short on that same site almost 55 years ago. But visitors also came to celebrate the opening of an exhibit by Durham-based photographer Cornell Watson — an exhibit that almost never happened because of disagreements with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“This whole thing was supposed to be about sacred spaces, and it was centered around sacred spaces,” Watson tells me. “And for everything that happened, and now for it to be in one of the most revered, sacred spaces in the country, is mind blowing.”

The Unsung Founders Memorial, a memorial to honor the free and enslaved Black people who built The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was surrounded by barricades several weeks after white supremacists gathered at the memorial and sat on it with Confederate flags.
The Unsung Founders Memorial, a memorial to honor the free and enslaved Black people who built The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was surrounded by barricades several weeks after white supremacists gathered at the memorial and sat on it with Confederate flags.

“Tarred Healing” should have debuted a year ago at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. Right before the exhibit opened, the Stone Center canceled the show due to “disagreements over content and scope,” as well as the series’ appearance in the Washington Post prior to opening, which the Stone Center said was unexpected. The content in question were photos that showed some of the university and UNC System’s recent decisions that harmed Black students, staff and townspeople.

One of the most striking photos from the exhibit is a photo from the UNC-CH Board of Trustees meeting in June 2021, in the midst of the argument over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure application. Clayton Somers, the university’s vice president for public affairs and a longtime fixture in Republican politics in the state, is front and center, side-eyeing the camera as members of the UNC Black Student Movement crowd the background. Another photo captures the Unsung Founder’s Memorial, attribute to the enslaved Black people who built the university, acting as a pedestal for a silhouette of a man holding a noose at eye level. It represents the legacy of Silent Sam, the Confederate monument whose shadow still lingers on UNC-CH’s campus, despite its removal in 2018.

“The healing isn’t quite done, even though that statue is gone,” Watson tells me. That also summarizes the aim of the exhibition — to remind viewers that the trauma of slavery and the Jim Crow era is not yet resolved. The wound is still there, and Watson captured moments it reopened from the perspective of the Black residents of Chapel Hill.

Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, both freed from slavery, purchased a small plot of land on the outskirts of Chapel Hill in Carrboro, NC, named after white supremacist Julian Carr, in the mid 1870Õs. They built a one-room cabin that eventually expanded to a two-story home. The family survived and thrived through the racial violent times of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Dolores Clark (centered) sits with her children and great-grandchildren in the home her great-grandparents, Toney and Nellie Strayhorn (pictured on the wall), built around 1879 in Carrboro, North Carolina.

The Stone Center’s cancellation could have been the end for “Tarred Healing,” if not for the outpouring of public support from Chapel Hill’s community. Local activist Danita Mason-Hogans rallied the troops. Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP paid to print the photos the Stone Center refused to. Chapel Hill Public Library offered space to host the exhibit. Between the outpouring of support and the exhibit’s debut at the library, Watson received a call from the director of the National Civil Rights Museum.

Almost a year later, Watson was hearing families use his art to talk to their kids about the legacy of racism in the South — the whole legacy, up to the present day.

“They tell the story of not just the Civil Rights Movement, the history of Black people in America, without excluding anything at all,” Watson tells me of the National Civil Rights Museum, “and I think that is the power of being unapologetic.”

Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, located on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a segregated cemetery. The Black side of the cemetery is the burial site of free and enslaved people. A fieldstone often marked enslaved Black people’s burials. According to the Town of Chapel Hill website, the Black side of the cemetery has been vandalized on several occasions. One incident described the Black side of the cemetery being used as parking for a football game in 1985 against Clemson. Resting in peace is a privilege some people do not get.

Aside from the symbolism of the day, Watson was honored to be in a museum that documented the legacies of his lifelong heroes, David Dennis and Bob Moses. Watson met the two men when he was in middle school in Halifax County.

“It was so special to know that in the same place as my heroes, who I actually know — people who sacrificed so much, people who had their best friends murdered in Mississippi for trying to register voters — this is going to be in that same sacred space.”

The exhibit brings Watson’s photos to life. It uses metal barricades similar to those that surrounded the Unsung Founder’s Memorial. The curators recreated the base of Silent Sam in the gallery. On the back wall, the Daily Tar Heel article about the exhibit’s cancellation is on display, alongside a Michael Jordan basketball jersey and the history of the word “Tar Heel” — once a term to describe the poor white and enslaved people who created tar from the state’s pine trees, then a term of pride for Confederate soldiers and finally a name for UNC-Chapel Hill students. It’s a reminder that these stories, all around us, are worth hearing.

Advertisement