Lincoln High School, a school built to keep people separate, was the 1961 AA football champion. Or at least that’s what the trophy, now sitting in a dusty cabinet in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools’ central office, says.
When the school was integrated with Chapel Hill High School, the school was stripped of all its awards and achievements. This denial of history goes beyond football; North Carolina desegregated Lincoln in 1966, but the history of the school still remains separated.
Chapel Hill ought to include Lincoln and other black institutions of the segregated south by creating a public exhibit where students and community members can learn about the triumphs of the school during a dark time in Chapel Hill’s history.
Currently, if one were interested in seeing the trophies and photos of Lincoln High School, they would have to visit the Lincoln Center on South Merritt Mill Road, away from the public commons.
This why there is a need to create this exhibit for the school’s and segregated Chapel Hill’s history. The white narrative continues to dominate discussion of the past — which is harmful.
Creating a more inclusive history of the town will provide context and a narrative to many of the problems we are facing today. With anger over UNC and the town’s ignorance of black history, a museum would be a step in the right direction to providing a racially integrated historical conversation.
The Greensboro Historical Museum has done this same thing in their new exhibit called Warnersville. In this exhibit, the museum conducted an oral history project alongside a search into the history of segregated Greensboro.
A public display, like in Greensboro, will allow for the town to remember a school that was apart of so much of our collective history.
The Southern Oral History Project has already compiled stories about the school.
