News and Observer: “Former state Rep. Henry “Mickey” Michaux was a student at North Carolina College (now N.C. Central University) in 1948 when the talk of the town was that Don Parrisher would be making a film about Hayti, Durham’s historic Black neighborhood.
Parrisher was a white filmmaker known for his reels documenting towns and cities across the country. The Durham Business and Professional Chain, the city’s oldest Black business advocacy group, commissioned the film to highlight the “thriving” and “self-contained” community, as Michaux calls it, and its lively business district known as “Black Wall Street.” “In Hayti, during that era, we didn’t have to cross the tracks for anything,” he said.
That’s exactly what, in 28 minutes, Parrisher and his crew captured in “Negro Durham Marches On.” The film, narrated over an organ soundtrack, takes viewers back to a long-gone, bustling business district largely wiped out by the development of the Durham Freeway in the late 1960s that removed hundreds of homes and dozens of the businesses featured.”