Duke students don't often find themselves with the time or the opportunity to go off campus. This is made all the more difficult with the pandemic.
But outside the campus walls is a nuanced community, the real world that is impacted by the sort of systemic challenges we're seeing on a national level.
Here's a peak into Durham for those interested students:
Braggtown, like many predominantly Black neighborhoods in Durham, was settled by formerly enslaved people.
Liberated from the vast Stagville plantation at the end of the Civil
War, these men and women migrated south of the Eno River a few miles to what was then a rural Durham County crossroads.
Today, residents of Braggtown are at another kind of crossroads for their community: the proposed development of hundreds of upscale homes and apartments that could level forest land in the neighborhood, cause property taxes to rise, and squeeze out low-income residents.
It would be the kind of transformation that has hopped around Durham for years, as the city’s resurgence has made overlooked – and often neglected – neighborhoods targets for private investment.
Read more about Braggtown's plight and fight, a vestige of Black culture in an otherwise gentrifying City.
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