Drive from Raleigh to Durham, and you’ll pass countless streets named after war generals, tobacco magnates, and landowners.
But scattered throughout both cities are a different kind of thoroughfare — roads, bridges, and neighborhoods whose names carry a deeper, more deliberate history. This Black History Month, a closer look at the Triangle’s geography reveals that some of the most powerful civil rights stories aren’t archived in museums. They’re embedded in the landscape itself, moving with the traffic.
A Street Reclaimed
On Durham’s west end, what was once Gattis Street carries a new name: Pauli Murray Place. The renaming, which took place roughly 20 years ago, was no small gesture. Pauli Murray was a native Black Durhamite who went on to become one of the most consequential legal minds and humanitarians of the 20th century – a lawyer, an activist, and an early voice for both civil rights and LGBTQ equality, who is today recognized as a saint in the Episcopal Church.
“Thurgood Marshall called her writings the bible of civil rights law,” said Alice Sharpe, a local resident familiar with Murray’s legacy, who added that Murray was also a lawyer, advocate, and LGBT spokesperson. “A great person.”
Renaming the street, advocates say, was about more than honoring a favorite daughter. It was a reclaiming — a rewriting of the landscape to reflect the community’s own history on its own terms.
Aspiration, Built Into the Pavement
In Raleigh’s Biltmore Hills subdivision, the history is older — and the intention behind it just as deliberate. When John Winters helped spearhead development of the neighborhood in the late 1950s, racial segregation was still firmly the rule in Raleigh. Black families were largely shut out of established neighborhoods, and the city’s power structure had little interest in changing that. But Winters had a vision that went beyond simply providing housing…