To Drink from the Well

"By paying attention to the particular history of America’s oldest public university, Kapur illuminates how the struggle for white supremacy that sometimes erupts violently in our society has been maintained and reinforced by the stories we tell ourselves. To become the multiethnic democracy we have never yet been, we must embrace a better story."—Reverend William J. Barber, II; President and Senior Lecturer, Repairers of the Breach; Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

"Geeta Kapur is both hero and inspiration. And To Drink From the Well is both a story of horror, cruelty, and unrelenting injustice and a story of hope, determination, sacrifice, and steely resolve. The 'University of the People,' Kapur shows, rises, if it does, 'from a bedrock of white supremacy, racial injustice, and iniquity.' And a university must reckon with its past, especially one that so powerfully contradicts its preferred narrative—a past that has been concealed and, often happily, ignored. A past that continually reappears in its present. Kapur gives voice to Carolina’s unknown, untold foundations and pathbreakers. This book is a gift to the University of North Carolina. There is no 'light' and 'liberty' without first seeing the darkness."—Gene Nichol, Indecent Assembly and The Faces of Poverty in North Carolina

"To Drink from the Well is a bold and much-needed examination of the racial history of UNC-Chapel Hill, an institution that perpetually lacks the courage to tell its own history. Kapur has given us an ode to truth and a love letter to the Black men and women who made UNC possible."—William Sturkey, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White

"The history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill cannot be understood nor told accurately without recognition of its intimate and enduring relationship to slavery, Lost Cause ideology, and legal segregation. What is admirable about the university’s past cannot be separated from its role as an instrument for preserving southern rules of race. In this powerful study, Geeta Kapur, integrates the celebratory with the evil to provide a rich and truthful narrative of the history of the nation’s oldest public university."—William Darity Jr., From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century