Maps are storytellers, but they can exclude certain narratives. UNC graduate student Fowota Mortoo said that’s the case for Chapel Hill’s Black builders. Although instrumental in designing and constructing UNC’s buildings, walls, and pathways, she said their contributions to the university often go unnoticed. Her 12-square-foot map of UNC became a way to look not only at the history of campus buildings, but the local faces who built them. “The four families that I focused on were the Jones, Barbee, Blacknell, and Johnson families,” Mortoo recently told 97.9 The Hill. “I was interested in looking at The Carolina Inn, The Forest Theatre, the dentistry school, and sort of piecing together these specific families’ connections to those specific places.” The paper map layers archival photos and a hand-drawn maze, with the names and faces of the four families embedded on the specific spaces each were integral in creating. Unveiled at the Seymour Center this month, the UNC PhD student said ...