This interview originally appeared in Scalawag magazine.
Ajamu Dillahunt. Photo by Jonathan Michels.
Jonathan Michels: You are a part of the New Great Migration of African Americans from the North who moved back down to the South following the Civil Rights Movement. Why did you decide to move to North Carolina?
Ajamu Dillahunt: We moved to North Carolina in 1978. By some people’s standards, we still ain’t from here, as they say. I don’t know when you get to be from here, but we certainly feel like it.
We moved from New York. We decided to move south for both political and personal reasons. We wanted to be a little closer to our families. That was on the personal side. On the political side, North Carolina had that history of… the founding of SNCC, the sit-ins, Robert Williams in Monroe,[1] and, in the more recent period, through the 1970s, the Wilmington Ten case. The resistance to that was important. And then the community work that we knew that was going on. We were like, “Yeah, this is probably a good place to be.”
JM: What were your perceptions of North Carolina and the South as a child growing up in New York?
AD: I had visited in 1954, had come back to North Carolina with my grandmother. We went to New Bern, her home, and also Wilmington where we had cousins. We rode the bus. We get south of the Mason-Dixon line, and you’ve got to get in the back. Separate waiting rooms and all that stuff. I experienced that as a really young person. That’s in your mind as well. Those years in between, I’m reading and watching, so the South is a dangerous place, it’s a bad place. A place where we need to make some changes, a site of some important struggles.
There’s the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi. Mississippi has always had this place in Black discourse as being the worst place you could ever be for Black folks. Medgar Evers is murdered there. There’s Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner that are killed there.[2] The list of atrocities just goes on and on.
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