The share of Americans who say they follow local news very closely has fallen from 37% in 2016 to 22% in 2024, a drop of 15 points, according to PEW Research Center.
As our relationships to local and national issues rapidly change, professors in NC State’s history department advise us to reframe how we think about ourselves in history. By centering local issues and figures, things like political autonomy and history-making may feel a little more within our reach.
Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway is an assistant professor whose research centers on Black history and political movements in the South. Born and raised in Raleigh, Dillahunt-Holloway said students, whether they are from the area or not, find it easier to relate and connect to local history.
“Learning about the place in which they’re living for four years or perhaps even longer, it makes them excited about the course material. They connect what they see daily to real studies of the real past,” Dillahunt-Holloway said.
Nishani Frazier, a professor and the director of public history at NC State, is a North Carolinian whose research focuses on the Black Freedom Movement. As someone who teaches about broad swaths of American history, she has been trying to integrate more local history into her curriculum.
“Students and everyday people don’t have a sense of how their own individual lives actually have larger implications for history,” Frazier said.
Frazier said when she teaches local and regional Black history, such as the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, students begin to see their role in history differently.
“For the first time, they’re seeing North Carolina as not just its own unique space, but for what this place is in the larger historical dynamics that we see in the United States,” Frazier said.
Contrary to how we teach history, large social movements are often made up of many small actions by everyday people, Frazier said. There are large figures we remember whose work wouldn’t have been possible without the organization and support of hundreds of others.
“I think about this especially in the Civil Rights Movement, where you see people who are everyday folks who manage to change a nation,” Frazier said. “Everybody seems to think that you have to be some sort of Dr. King-like person. That’s not how movement works, right? It was people like my father, people like my mother.”
For people in the South or rural areas, political and social change might seem even further out of reach. It’s hard for students to imagine themselves as an important part of history, especially for those outside of city centers.
Frazier said rural communities have often been impactful on larger issues. In fact, the environmental justice movement emerged from a 1982 protest in Warren County, North Carolina.
Frazier said Raleigh community members Margaret Rose Murray and Kenneth Murray have made an impact.
In 1964, the couple founded the Vital Link Private School, a preschool serving a largely Black population that remains open to this day. Their institution has been uplifting Black students for 60 years, leaving behind a significant legacy.
“These are not spaces that are always up front. It’s not like Clarence Lightner, the first Black mayor, right?,” Frazier said. “Neck and neck with him and what he’s doing as mayor are Mr. and Mrs. Murray, who are changing on the ground the lives of Black children.”
Though figures like the Murrays are not always as visible, Frazier said, they are the kinds of people who make up local histories. They have directly impacted the lives of hundreds of Raleighites.
“We think, because we don’t see it, that it doesn’t have a ripple effect. But its impact can be powerful, even if it is unseen,” Frazier said.
Raleigh also boasts a long line of universities serving the Black community, beginning with SHAW University, the first historically Black university in the South, which was founded immediately after the abolition of slavery.
North Carolina Agriculture and Technological State University was originally founded in 1891 and North Carolina Central University was founded in 1910 by a Black man. Each of these schools attracted a predominantly Black student population at a time when educational opportunities for people of color were limited.
In general, Dillahunt-Holloway said Raleigh has been the center of many beautiful movements for the underprivileged. The sit-ins of the Civil Right Movement swept through North Carolina in 1960, when Ella Baker, an alum of SHAW, founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Her work and the impact of her organization resonated throughout the South, and her organization was founded right in Raleigh.
“It’s important for students, and for us all, to understand that the local is just as impactful, if not more impactful than seeing us in the context of national history,” Frazier said.
Dillahunt-Holloway said our lives are history in progress, and the events happening around us are the ones soon to be written about and learned from. This framing, he said, can make us more reflective.
“I think seeing yourself in history forces you to think about your actions, your movements, your comments and your decisions in a very thoughtful and intentional way,” Dillahunt-Holloway said.
Frazier said that seeing ourselves as part of a larger history changes how we operate and think about our role in society.
Dillahunt-Holloway echoed this and said understanding local history is important to see how real change is made by individually empowered people.
“I’m committed to having [the Raleigh area] be the strongest, the most just, the most equitable and the most fair place in the country,” Dillahunt-Holloway said. “So, if I want to achieve that, I learned early on that history would be a very important tool, a very important guiding light.”
