The night I met John Hope Franklin, two amazing things happened. First, my wife sent me a text message informing me our young son went to the potty for the first time. Second, the now late historian gave me some of the most important advice I have ever received.

As a public historian I lie awake at night trying to figure out how to tell the emotional story of slavery. It's an uncomfortable topic that many Americans, both black and white, often tend to avoid. As Dr. Franklin was filling his mouth with pimento cheese sandwiches, I sat down beside him and asked him to help solve my dilemma. He turned to me and simply said, "Just tell the truth."

This was a concise answer in form but infinitely complicated in execution. As Americans, we live with the legacy of slavery every day whether we know it or not. It is a part of our past and thus a part of us. However, the cornucopia of emotions slavery elicits and the misconceptions that surround it make telling the truth a difficult task.

Important in telling the story of slavery is knowing about Juneteenth, a celebration that began in Texas on June 19, 1865 and is now a national holiday commemorating the end of black bondage. July 4 marks the founding of America but Juneteenth marks the founding of modern America. Although still unequal, the entire nation was free and 4 million slaves became citizens. For all of the painful barbs that wrap around the story of the first 250 years of black people in America, the coming of freedom is one of the few roses on the vine. Learning the stories of those who straddled worlds during this great change helps us make sense of what came next.

Recently several wonderful history projects have helped us understand this story in our backyard. Both the exhibit on the Rogers Road community and the "We're Still Here (and Moving)" production with the Northside neighborhood enable residents to tell their own stories. They come as development threatens to disintegrate these proud communities. To understand why these places are important requires knowing what difficult challenges these newly emancipated people faced when they sought to carve out their place in a free world.

The Preservation Society wants to tell the true story of Chapel Hill's enslaved people preserving the places where they built, lived and died. A new project to help achieve this would use science to recover a lost part of this past.

After years of vandalism, theft of headstones, and threats of disinterment, the African-American section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery is in need of attention. We hope to raise $2,500 for a ground-penetrating sonar study to map the graves in the black section of the cemetery. The plots could then be marked and possibly identified through oral histories conducted in the community.

Projects like these help us remember those who had been denied so much and help us all act on John Hope Franklin's advice and tell a little more of the truth about slavery.

Ernest Dollar is the executive director of The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.

IF YOU GO

Ernest Dollar's lecture begins at noon today at the Horace Williams House, 610 E. Franklin St. It includes a showing of the 1939 H. Lee Waters film shot in Chapel Hill's black community. A $5 donation is suggested.