One night last summer, Durham-based photographer Cornell Watson was standing on the quad at UNC, setting up a white curtain and a light set in front of the Unsung Founders Memorial, a monument to the enslaved people who built the university’s campus, when two campus police officers approached him and his friend. They asked them what they were doing and to see their IDs.
To Watson, the officers did not seem to acknowledge the fact that Watson was a professional photographer, nor the fact that the monument is in a public space. After writing down Watson’s and his friend’s information, they left without explanation of their purpose.
“I wasn’t surprised, but [being questioned like that] definitely leaves you feeling like you don’t have much power. It leaves you feeling violated,” Watson said. “Because if you push back on it right in the moment, like, ‘I’m not giving you my ID because I didn’t do anything,’ well, now you become an aggressor and the angry black person—things escalate. I was thinking about personal safety. But also at the same time thinking, ‘I don’t want to give you my ID.’‘’
Watson asked the university in an email to follow-up on the incident and to find out what his information would be used for. He did not receive a response. A few weeks later, far-right activists led a demonstration July 11 at the same memorial.
“So it just happened,” Watson said. “Which was funny because when the white supremacists from Mebane came down and were marching around [the monument], there was no police presence. I just think it’s a very interesting juxtaposition between two incidents.”
The project Watson was shooting for was “Tarred Healing,” a series of 14 large-scale photographs and narrative captions capturing the experiences of the Black community in Chapel Hill. It has been featured online in the Washington Post and premiered April 30 in-person at the Chapel Hill Public Library. Originally commissioned by the Stone Center at UNC in 2021, it received national attention when the Center said in a Feb. 24 statement that there were “disagreements over content and scope” for how the story of Black history in Chapel Hill would be told, and decided to not show the exhibit.
“I was surprised, but not surprised,” Watson said.
Among several of the photos the University found issue with, one came from the controversial tenure case of Pulitzer Prize-winning Nikole Hannah-Jones, when the UNC Board of Trustees decided not to grant tenure to the journalist. The photo portrays Clayton Somers, a member of the Board, staring directly into Watson’s camera while student and faculty protestors from the Black Student Movement demonstrate in the background against the decision at a BOT meeting.
UNC professor and Director of Research for the Vice Chancellor Deborah Stroman was one of the activists shown in the photo. She graduated from the University of Virginia as an undergraduate in the 1980s, came to UNC for a masters and returned in 2007 as a professor. Throughout the years, she says she has seen similar patterns of injustice and bigotry repeat themselves at both schools.
“From history, southern institutions just have so much to challenge… there are certain things that just won’t go away. And sadly, as much as people say that UNC and Chapel Hill are progressive and liberal, it’s not true. It’s not true. I would say moderate at best,” Stroman said. “It’s just the same thing over and over again, which tells us that it’s systemic. So you can change people in terms of leadership, but it is baked into the system.”
Watson’s caption refers to a nearly-identical event to the Hannah-Jones tenure from over 40 years ago: in 1979, UNC also denied tenure to Sonja Haynes Stone, another qualified Black professor.
“That stare is a hundred years old,” said community activist David Caldwell, Executive Director at the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association and the subject of one of the photos. “That’s one hundred years ago, when you got out of place, like, ‘Just wait until the sun goes down.’”
Caldwell grew up in Chapel Hill in the 1960s, experiencing firsthand the effects of segregation in schools, stores and infrastructure. Rogers-Eubanks is a historically-Black neighborhood of Chapel Hill that has long been the center of environmental racism struggles—in 1972, the Chapel Hill Board of Commissioners voted to place a “temporary” landfill there, which remains to this day. Along with others such as Reverend Robert Campbell, Caldwell has spent decades fighting for better resources for the neighborhood.
“Sometimes I wake up, and see the same things from 40 years ago,” Caldwell said. “The exact same, the exact same thing is still happening. I think to myself, have I made a difference?”
Sitting in front of Somers’ “hundred year stare” photograph, Caldwell said: “There’s gonna be a lot of talk about the battles, the battles we’re facing. What it is is part of a war. Pick your battles. Be ready to win, and be ready to go again.”
Another image, which in part was inspired by the title of the photo series, depicts a graduating UNC student barefoot in her gown standing in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, a segregated cemetery on campus. Among the multiple meanings of the photo, one is “honoring our ancestors that were there, the freed and the enslaved that helped build the University,” according to Watson.
The photo also highlights broken gravestones, a symbol of the numerous instances of vandalism the cemetery has faced through the years, among other metaphors.
“The problem in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery is because over the years it has been desecrated so much and things have been moved around, a lot of times we don’t know if those fieldstones actually represent where Black enslaved people were buried,” Watson said. “We had [the student] go out there on foot, which is like an ode to our ancestors who didn’t have boots to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But it’s also symbolism, because it goes back to her feet on the tar. The Tar Heel.”
Despite the obstacles he faced in the process, Watson sees the project as a way for people to educate themselves about the history and social issues around them.
“The blood, sweat, and tears of our enslaved and free ancestors have seeped into the soil, floors, walls, and stones of this community and university,” Watson wrote in his artist’s statement. “This photo series… is a vessel for self-healing. Despite continued obstruction by whiteness, we will heal, even if it is tarred.”
The exhibit will be shown at the Chapel Hill Public Library until June 30.
Photos courtesy of Cornell Watson.
