Two women sit at a table on the porch of 123 North Raiford Street in Selma. Every few minutes, a customer opens the door, which dings a chime and floats the scent of espresso outside. Each person who walks into the coffee shop, each car that cruises by looking for a parking spot, each small business within view that has lights on and an “Open” sign in the window — these are signs of life in this Johnston County town that were hard to imagine just a few years ago.

Melissa Dooley (left) and Cindy Brookshire knew Selma was the little town that could. photograph by Charles Harris

It’s chilly enough that most customers look for seats inside, but Cindy Brookshire and Melissa Dooley are happy on the porch, where they have a view up and down Raiford, Selma’s “Main Street.” Because Brookshire and Dooley did imagine a lively, vibrant Selma — and they worked hard to make it happen.

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Like many small towns, Selma has peaked and dipped over the years. For decades following its birth in 1873, it was a busy railroad hub, serving as an important junction in the Coastal Plain southeast of Raleigh. It had a short season of infamy during World War II due to the Catch-Me-Eye explosion, when a munitions truck headed to Fort Bragg with 30,000 pounds of explosives collided with a car, caught on fire, and exploded, leaving behind a crater on U.S. Highway 301 and rumors of a German attack. In the ’90s, “Selma was not dead, but it was in intensive care,” the late Bruce Radford, former town manager, once said. Things picked up in the early aughts, when the town became an antiques shopping destination.

But when Dooley took a job as events coordinator with the Parks and Recreation department in 2017, Selma was struggling. “If you stood here and looked up and down Raiford Street, you’d see maybe one car parked,” she says. “A lot of the storefronts were abandoned.” She points to a building at the southern end of the main shopping district. “That building there, the entire facade crumbled one day. Just fell off. They had cones around a pile of bricks in the street for a long time.”

Selma has been known as a rail town and a hot spot for antiques shopping. Trackside Antiques — located on East Railroad Street, naturally — brings the two together, plus fudge. photograph by Charles Harris

Dooley’s job was to plan festivals and events that would bring people to Selma — “an empty town where there was nothing to do. With no budget.” She tried a few things: Selma Saturdays never took off; the antique wine train was a hit. She nearly gave herself a nervous breakdown trying to keep the Railroad Days festival afloat singlehandedly.

Then, one day, Dooley noticed lights on at the visitor center, which she had never seen open before. She stopped by and met Brookshire, who had moved to the area a few years earlier. Brookshire had seen what appeared to be a permanent “Closed” sign on the Selma visitor center, and so she began volunteering. She replaced old brochures, got Pine Level Hardware & Furniture to donate some rocking chairs, and cleaned the bathrooms.

Jeffery Hamilton photograph by Charles Harris

The women bonded over their vision for what Selma could be. Soon, Jeffery Hamilton started joining them in the visitor center, and they recruited another like-minded local, Donna Reid. The four of them began meeting every Wednesday morning to kick around ideas about how they could bring life into the town. “I kept a four-cup coffee maker in the visitor center, and I made coffee for us — badly!” Brookshire says. It wasn’t long before other residents and business owners joined their meetings.

“At first, we found ourselves complaining a lot,” Dooley recalls. “And saying things like, ‘They should do this, and they should do that.’ Well, then we decided the ‘they’ should be us.”

The group adopted a slogan: “We don’t complain; we take action.” It gave them a compass point to return to. If someone started griping or blaming, someone else could bring the conversation back around to — What can we do? At times, the problems seemed unending and overwhelming. So much needed to be done, and so much was outside the control of any individual.

They decided to tackle one of the most glaring problems downtown: the garbage cans. “They were overflowing and attracting flies,” Dooley says. “So we went to the town and asked what we could do about it. They said they had a contract with a waste management company, but they hadn’t been coming to pick up the cans. We ended up saving the town thousands of dollars and the garbage problem got solved. It was a woo-hoo! moment — and then we were like, What else can we do?”

The spark of momentum almost fizzled when Covid shut things down in 2020. Dooley remembers a particularly low moment when, in order to avoid furloughing her, Parks and Recreation tasked her with power-washing the sidewalks downtown. She gripped the hose and squinted through condensation fogging her safety goggles. Dampness seeped in the edges of her pants and shirt. Her shoulders ached. A woman stepped out of the jewelry store along the stretch of sidewalk where Dooley was spraying.

The family business Selma Jewelry opened in 1971. photograph by Charles Harris

Today, the tradition continues with Kimberly Wooten (left) and her daughter Logan Boykin running the store. Wooten also serves as president of Activate Selma. photograph by Charles Harris

The curious onlooker was Kimberly Wooten, owner of Selma Jewelry, a family business that’s been in town since 1971. Dooley invited Wooten to cross the street for a better view. The freshly cleaned sidewalks in front of the jewelry store gleamed. “Oh, wow,” Wooten said. “Now my building looks tired.”

She decided on the spot to paint and upgrade the outside of her store. “Then the business next door did the same thing,” Dooley says. “It just snowballed from there.”

New businesses opened. Grants were applied for and won. Murals were painted. The events calendar put out by the Parks and Recreation Department saw more and more squares filled in. Having dwindled to a single day, the Railroad Days festival in October expanded to three. The group that Dooley and Brookshire had started — now called Activate Selma — grew from four people to more than 20, still meeting every Wednesday. The coffee had gotten a lot better, too, thanks to the new coffee shop in town.

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A few years ago, 123 North Raiford was just another empty brick building desperately in need of repairs. Meanwhile, Hamilton was running into a frequent conversation while working at the Rudy Theatre, which brings in thousands of people every year for live music and shows.

He recounted the scenario in Brookshire’s book A Heart for Selma: “One of my jobs at the Rudy was getting people in to be seated and then showing the church or tour bus drivers where to park. Every group leader that got off the bus wanted to know where to get a cup of coffee or something to eat in downtown Selma. The answer was, ‘Nowhere.’”

Visitors to the Rudy Theatre would often ask where they could get a cup of coffee. So Zena Hamilton Rose and her brother Jeffery decided to open Coffee on Raiford. photograph by Charles Harris

Hamilton convinced his sister, Zena Hamilton Rose, to go into business with him. They bought a 1,100-square-foot building for $25,000, gutted it, and worked their tails off for a year to renovate it. In September of 2020, they opened Coffee on Raiford.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Rose says, wiping foam off the espresso machine. “And that’s saying something because I owned a painting company for 20 years!”

Out on the porch, Brookshire and Dooley sip their drinks — decaf Americano for Brookshire (“Zena knows my usual order and she makes it perfectly”) and tea for Dooley (“Zena keeps a box of chamomile tea behind the counter just for me”).

Rudy Theatre offers concerts, community performances, and more throughout the year. photograph by Charles Harris

They downplay their role in Selma’s transformation: “You can’t change a town,” Brookshire says. “You change yourself. When you do better, the town changes.” And they’re the first to point out factors they had nothing to do with, like the almost-completed Eastfield Crossing development a mile down the road, with its popular big-box stores and restaurants, and the fact that Johnston County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state.

Most of all, they sing the praises of local small business owners, who have taken risks, worked hard, and brought dying buildings back to life. But if you ask the business owners or the mayor or the developers, “What happened in Selma?” they’ll tell you about how people came together, how the circumstances were right, and how Activate Selma sparked a grassroots movement that helped transform their town.