Community Documents

In this section, you can find documents and photographs that serve as contextual backdrops to the oral histories included in the Shared Stories project.

A “community document” can take many forms, including, yet not exclusively, materials such as personal and family scrapbooks, high school yearbooks, religious documents, community and organizational bylaws, and newsletters. Most importantly, these are documents that were either produced by community members or that contain relevant information about North Mecklenburg’s Black residents. These types of documents are perhaps those that embody a clearer sense of “shared history.” Usually public in nature, there are also materials included here that are more personal, which can be rightly considered “community documents'' in so far as they are part of the mosaic of experiences that constitute the shared history of places like the Westside Davidson, Smithville, or Pottstown. Living among these documents is evidence of different kinds of shared histories: schools and educational experiences, churches and community organizations, businesses and diverse forms of entertainment, people who have influenced the lives of many others and are constantly remembered, and the list goes on.

The materials included in this section cannot be wholly representative of every aspect of life among North Mecklenburg’s Black communities, but certainly begin to serve as tools for the documentation and contextualization of the past.