Every year, a new class of students deals with the inevitable fact of a university surrounded by an actual city—there are Dukies and there are Durhamites. The perceived divide prompted an ethnography my freshman year that answered a single question: “Why is Durham so ‘other’ to Duke?”
My research in Rubenstein Library uncovered a 2004 graduate thesis on the “town-gown” relationships of the Triangle area: “Carolina’s Campus and Community” by Eric Moyen, a graduate student pursuing a degree in anthropology at the University of Kentucky. One particular chapter of the thesis framed Duke’s historical relations to Durham with the University’s acquisition of Central Campus.
I was interested. Central Campus, even to the thousand students it houses, is an enigma. The stout apartment complexes sprouting under dim yellow light do not afford their residents insight into the campus’s past. With Moyen’s thesis in hand, I followed an archival trail to report the intriguing saga of Central’s acquisition—a trail that leads all the way to a former University president.
The story begins from the Duke Archives vault, in the year 1950.
West Durham was a company town, formed around its driving economic force, Erwin Cotton Mills; the 400-plus families supported by the cotton mill lived in company-owned housing next door. Coined by Moyen as the “Mill Village,” the community occupied the land that would become Central Campus. Different neighborhoods formed individual identities. The area between Swift Avenue and Anderson Street became “Monkey-Bottom,” while the area between Trent Drive and Anderson Street became “Hickstown.” Moyen describes both areas as “alternating between lower-middle class and destitution.”
The capricious economy cradling these enclaves slumped in the 1960s and 1970s with the opening of Northgate Mall, a damaging event for the retail ecosystem that had developed around the cotton mill. In 1965, University President Douglas Knight penned a series of memos to his closest advisors discussing the land on which “Mill Village” stood. An overwhelming number of Knight’s personal letters, tax appraisals of the land and transaction ledgers are preserved, making investigation difficult. But the memos themselves, now held in the Rubenstein Library, detail seven months of politick between University administrators, cotton mill owners and villagers in perfect chronological order.
The land and its 153 homesteads were initially sold by the Erwin Cotton Mills to a holding agency in response to the local recession. The contract for the transaction, penned by the holding agency, promised the village residents “18 months of non-transferred ownership” in April 1965—meaning the land would remain an agency possession for that term. Moyen believed this promise was absolutely essential to the villagers’ livelihoods: “a short-term guarantee” promising a village “base” from which to work, build a safety net and remain financially afloat for eventual relocation.
In his memos, Knight appears to have hatched a conflicting plan. Fresh off of a publicity coup in which Duke-owned apartments were sold to create public housing for African-Americans in a traditionally white area, the administration steamed forward with University purchase of the land. Why? The administration’s haste in the purchase can be traced to a May 1965 memo, in which Knight enthusiastically anticipated announcing a grand “campus unification” during that year’s September convocation.
At this point, the heroes and villains of my narrative mushed and melted into a morally gray molasses. In the memos, Knight’s closest advisers recommended a policy of maximized net revenue from the property, claiming that a 50 percent rent increase on the land’s tenants would be “in-line” with the current housing market. Their reasoning obscures the truth of the mill village situation—a depressed area sustained by what commercial records show to be a shrinking industry.
The Knight administration finalized the purchase of the land from the holding agency in November, just seven months after the promise to not sell the land for 18 months. The immediate result of the purchase, according to historical records channeled by the Moyen thesis, was the demolition of 15 percent of village homes. These houses were those deemed too expensive to repair to housing standards. Memos show that residents of the newly-minted Central Campus area were given six months to find new homes, after which the land was developed with apartments to replace those sold earlier as public housing.
Amidst rent increases, eviction and demolition, the grey molasses persisted. Duke defended the homes from demolition as the Durham Freeway was built, a lucky fate not shared by some of the immediately adjacent, predominately black neighborhoods. Moyen claims that the administration, and Knight himself, saw itself as a benevolent father to the surrounding Durham communities, “repurposing” their low-income housing toward “worthier,” academic pursuits (using Moyen’s language based off of the Knight memos). Even if the administrative attitude was benevolent, such paternalism soon soured. Duke’s actions displaced swathes of working-class West Durham. Knight reflects un-ironically in his memoirs that he was honored by the University’s involvement in solving the public housing problem of Durham, despite the unfavorable net total of houses destroyed by Duke’s expansion.
Indeed, the saga did not end so much as peter out. The most visible mark of Central’s history is the name of the portion between the basketball courts and Yearby—“Mill Village.” I guess that fits; the land gained via eviction of cotton mill workers with a cutesy general store and mill-style buildings must certainly resemble its older counterpart.
Sarcasm aside, it is important that campus history is known. Duke’s actions and relationship to Durham during the purchase were informed by the “other”-ing of Durham. The memos and research of the time showed a real current of elitism in Duke’s regard of Durham. Just as I intended, the story of Erwin Cotton Mill’s town touches on the question I set out to answer. Now, as the city government struggles with a loss of nearly $1.7 million in revenue from the federal government, Duke continues to expand farther into Durham via more “repurposing” efforts in downtown. Low-income housing is a nagging issue for lofty Bull City dreams, rooted in issues similar to the four-decade-old cotton village struggle.
The issues between Duke and Durham are historical, but our attitude today remains in many ways the same—we are the academic institute and they are strange. For Duke-Durham relations to truly work, every Dukie needs to view our Durhamite environment as no other from ourselves. And, like the real “Mill Village,” this time, Duke cannot put a matching sign up and call it the real thing.
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