Oral history interview with Terry Graham, March 22, 1999

Mooresville, N.C., resident Terry Graham and taxi service operator describes his changing town in this interview. He worries that the town has "just outgrown itself" and is at risk of being swallowed up by nearby Charlotte; already, businesspeople from the racing industry are infiltrating the town, says Graham, and he worries about the effects of the closing of Burlington Mill on African Americans. The future for Mooresville as Graham sees it does not look bright for its lower-income residents. Perhaps the most significant change Graham describes is desegregation. He remembers a relatively uneventful process: though the white and black community disagreed about whether it was the white school or the black school that should undergo the conversion to an integrated facility, that and other questions were handled peacefully, even when Martin Luther King's assassination roiled the community. This interview offers a glimpse of a town in flux, sprawling toward an uncertain future.