Every neighborhood
has a story.
I make sure it's told.
Carmen Wimberley Cauthen — historian, author, and truth teller, preserving the Black history of Raleigh one record, one neighborhood, one family at a time.
Carmen Cauthen is a native Raleighite — down to her birth at Saint Agnes Hospital in 1960.
She grew up in several of the city's historic Black neighborhoods, including Oberlin Village, Washington Terrace, South Park, and Idlewild, raised by a pharmacist father and an educator-activist mother who prized community above all else. That upbringing — moving between her father's pharmacy counter and her mother's political meetings — planted a lifelong fascination with the stories of the elders around her.
"Sharing information that I learn about our history — all of our history — is exciting for me, and it always helps me learn more."
Her mother, Cliffornia Wimberley, was a Raleigh educator who helped lead the effort to desegregate the city and county schools — a fact Carmen says she didn't fully appreciate until she went looking for it herself, decades later.
After earning her political science degree at North Carolina State University (Class of 1989), Carmen spent more than twenty years with the North Carolina House of Representatives, writing the official House Journal — work that sharpened her into a relentless copyeditor and a precise, patient researcher.
That precision, paired with a storyteller's ear, became the foundation for her second act: uncovering and preserving the freedmen's villages, forgotten neighborhoods, and unrecorded lives that built Black Raleigh — and teaching that history to the communities, schools, and institutions who need to hear it most.
A life spent in the archive
Born at Saint Agnes Hospital, Raleigh
Raised in Oberlin Village, Washington Terrace, South Park, and Idlewild — Raleigh's historic Black neighborhoods.
North Carolina State University
Earns her degree in political science; founds the university's first NAACP chapter.
NC House of Representatives
Writes the official House Journal, honing the copyediting and proofreading craft that still shapes her research today.
Wake County Housing Justice Coalition
Rising property taxes and development spark her research into the neighborhoods she grew up in — the work that becomes her life's second calling.
Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh
Published by Arcadia Publishing; goes on to become an Amazon bestseller.
Quiet No More
Hosts a weekly podcast on Black history, family memory, and community activism — and continues to speak, teach, and research across North Carolina.
Historic Black
Neighborhoods
of Raleigh
The book that's changing how Raleigh remembers itself.
After the Civil War, thousands of newly freed Black families built thirteen freedmen's villages around Raleigh. Only two — Oberlin Village and Method — remain today. In dozens of never-before-published photographs and maps, Carmen traces how these communities were built, restricted, and, in many cases, erased — and why their stories still shape the city.
It's the book Carmen calls proof that "even in death, they are segregated" — and a record she's spent a career making sure no one can un-write.
Order the BookNO
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Quiet No More
My truth about family, life, and history — a place for women and men to hear what being open about what shaped their life and purpose is all about.
Speaking & Teaching
Founders' Day
Keynote speaker for Saint Augustine's University's Founders' Day Convocation, celebrating 157 years of one of North Carolina's founding HBCUs.
Roots, Resilience & Reconstruction
A Wake County Government program drawing from her book to trace the historical forces that shaped Raleigh's Black neighborhoods.
Civil Rights, In The Stacks
Carmen regularly teaches civil rights history directly to students — bringing archival photographs and firsthand research into the school library.
Press & Media
From the collection
Bring this history into your room — a classroom, a stage, a boardroom.
For speaking engagements, book orders, podcast collaborations, or press inquiries.