Excerpt Description: Taylor Webber-Fields states her desire for all Black students to know that they have the ability to activate their internal power to create change external to themselves.
Excerpt Transcript: “I just never want another little black girl to come on that campus and not think that she can do something to shape her environment. Because I think so much of the human condition is us thinking that everything, and our lives are controlled by external forces, and it’s not. You can activate something from within and change the external, and so that is the larger lesson for me. To recognize my inner knowing and to allow that to have its experience with the place that I am, that was the biggest treasure ever. I was just, you know, in a place that was constantly telling you, you don’t even exist. Like if I took the summation of my education was that I don’t even exist, as a black woman in America, I don’t even exist. But to find identity even within that—psht—I got this. Like the world ain’t easy, but it’s that easy.”
Citation: Interview with Taylor Webber-Fields by Charlotte Fryar, 29 November 2017, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Excerpt Description: Taylor Webber-Fields states her desire for all Black students to know that they have the ability to activate their internal power to create change external to themselves.
Interviewee Name: Taylor Webber-Fields
Interviewer: Charlotte Fryar
Excerpt Transcript: “I just never want another little black girl to come on that campus and not think that she can do something to shape her environment. Because I think so much of the human condition is us thinking that everything, and our lives are controlled by external forces, and it’s not. You can activate something from within and change the external, and so that is the larger lesson for me. To recognize my inner knowing and to allow that to have its experience with the place that I am, that was the biggest treasure ever. I was just, you know, in a place that was constantly telling you, you don’t even exist. Like if I took the summation of my education was that I don’t even exist, as a black woman in America, I don’t even exist. But to find identity even within that—psht—I got this. Like the world ain’t easy, but it’s that easy.”
Organization: Real Silent Sam Coalition
Excerpt Length: 1:08
Interview Date: 11/29/2017
Interview Location: Durham, North Carolina
Campus Space: Saunders Hall
Citation: Interview with Taylor Webber-Fields by Charlotte Fryar, 29 November 2017, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.