Carrie was born in John’s Island, South Carolina in 1954.

On life in the segregated South: “When I was getting ready to go to high school, desegregation happened, and so my class was the first class to integrate this white high school. One of the advantages of growing up on the Gullah Islands is that we were kind of isolated. We had white neighbors. If we went into Charlestown, we knew there were certain stores we couldn’t go in.”

On life in Cleveland: “Amazingly when I came here, I felt it a lot more. It was more covert. I was surprised at how segregated Cleveland was. I knew that there were communities we were told we couldn’t go to like Little Italy. Don’t go to Parma. Don’t go to the West Side.”