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Housing, Neighborhoods & Displacement, Civil rights era: 37 dated entries from the full dataset. Back to the highlights →
- Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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The Negro Community Center opens for community use
After the Navy Pre-Flight School wound down, the community center returned to town control on October 24, 1945 and opened to Black residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. By December a nursery school filled the basement, and an all-Black board chaired by Hubert Roberson ran the building under the Town Recreation Commission.
Subject: Hargraves Community Center
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First Baptist Church moved to its present site on North Roberson Street
The Black Baptist congregation organized in 1865, which first met in the Quaker school building on Franklin Street, moved to North Roberson Street in 1946. Rev. J. R. Manley served as its pastor for sixty-six years.
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The name Northside began to replace Pottersfield and Sunset
When the old Lincoln building became Northside Elementary in 1951, the school's name spread to the Black neighborhoods around it. By the mid-1950s Pottersfield, north of West Rosemary and west of Columbia Street, and its western neighbor Sunset were both being called Northside.
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Eno Mill houses are relocated
Most company houses moved into nearby neighborhoods.
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Charlie Mason's motor court on West Rosemary Street was lodging Black travelers
Mason's Motor Court at 603 West Rosemary Street, with the Starlite Supper Club, gave Black travelers and touring musicians a place to stay when other Chapel Hill hotels turned them away. The building is gone and the Greenbridge condominiums now stand on the site.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
McClamroch, one of five candidates for three seats, was elected on May 5, 1959 with F. E. Strowd and Roland Giduz, and was sworn in with Mayor Oliver K. Cornwell the following Monday night. Campaigning, he had called for coordinating town and university planning and for bringing the university's payments for town services above the table.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected mayor of Chapel Hill without opposition
McClamroch ran unopposed for mayor in the May 1961 town election. Before the vote he took questions from residents at a public meeting at the Negro Community Center sponsored by the Chapel Hill Fellowship for School Integration and the Civic Club, and on a WUNC radio panel, saying he wanted to improve the town's public relations and would discuss merging Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
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McClamroch is sworn in as mayor and Joe Page is named to his aldermen seat
McClamroch and three re-elected aldermen, Adelaide Walters, Paul Wager and Hubert Robinson, were sworn in at the Monday night meeting of the Board of Aldermen by Recorder's Court Judge William Stewart. The board named businessman Joe Page to the unexpired two year aldermen's term McClamroch left on becoming mayor, and elected Mrs. Walters mayor pro tem.
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A.D. Clark Pool opens
Chapel Hill's swimming pool for Black residents, at the Roberson Street community center and now the A.D. Clark Pool, was dedicated on June 15, 1961. Cornelia Spencer Love gave $40,000 to build it, Black residents supplied labor and raised money for the bath house, and Adolphus D. Clark led the pool association.
People: Cornelia Spencer Love
Subject: Hargraves Community Center
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Nate Davis moves from Northside Elementary to Chapel Hill Junior High
In 1962, after sixth grade at Northside Elementary, Davis went to Chapel Hill Junior High School on Franklin Street as one of the first Black students in the town's formerly white schools. Harassment kept him out of school for two or three months, and he later attended the new Chapel Hill High School when it opened.
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David Caldwell's family bought a home on Rogers Road
David Caldwell, later a RENA leader, said his family moved from Merritt Mill Road to Rogers Road when Black families got the chance to buy homes there. He recalled a farming neighborhood of about thirteen houses, with dirt roads and cornfields.
People: David Caldwell Jr.
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Realtors steer Howard and Lillian Lee away from white subdivisions
After moving to Chapel Hill for graduate study, Howard and Lillian Lee searched for about six months while realtors hesitated to show them houses in white subdivisions. They bought in Colony Woods, then received threatening calls and had a cross burned on their lawn.
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Chapel Hill aldermen vote down a public accommodations ordinance
The Board of Aldermen rejected, 4 to 2, an ordinance that would have required all town businesses to serve Black customers, and set up a nine-member committee on race relations instead. Integration leaders promised more demonstrations.
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Integrated Chapel Hill High opens on High School Road
A new Chapel Hill High School campus opened on High School Road in 1966 as the town's first racially integrated high school, taking in the white student body from the Franklin Street school together with Lincoln High's students. Under freedom of choice the board had planned for white students to occupy the building a year before Black students joined, but Black students applied together for 1966 so that the school would not first be seen as belonging to the white students.
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Lincoln High School closes during integration
Lincoln High on Merritt Mill Road, the Black high school led since 1946 by principal C. A. McDougle, stopped operating as a secondary school in 1966 and its students were reassigned to the new Chapel Hill High, completing the desegregation of the district's schools. McDougle became an assistant principal there and Lincoln's championship football coach William D. Peerman was made an assistant coach after a contested board vote; Lincoln's name, colors, mascot and much of its memorabilia were not carried over.
Part of School desegregation in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, 1959–1967 · 3 events
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Northside Elementary closed as the school system integrated
The Caldwell Street school closed soon after the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools began mandatory integration in 1966, and the building was turned into office space.
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Chapel Hill opens its first public housing at Craig-Gomains and Lindsay Street
Chapel Hill's first public housing neighborhoods were Craig-Gomains (40 units) and Lindsay Street (9 units), both built in 1967. Both remain in the town's 296-unit, 12-neighborhood public housing portfolio.
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Chapel Hill adds five more public housing neighborhoods
North Columbia Street (1968), South Estes Drive (1970), and Airport Gardens, Rainbow Heights and South Roberson Street (all 1972) extended the town's public housing after the first two 1967 sites.
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Chapel Hill aldermen approve an open housing ordinance 3 to 2 on first reading
Weeks after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. and a petition signed by about 2,200 people, the Board of Aldermen voted 3 to 2 for a local ban on discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. The margin fell short of the two-thirds needed to pass on first reading, so the measure went to a second vote.
People: Sandy McClamroch
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Chapel Hill adopts North Carolina's first local open housing ordinance
On second reading the Board of Aldermen passed the open housing ordinance 4 to 0, effective immediately, making it a misdemeanor for an owner to discriminate by religion, race, color or national origin in selling or renting property in town. The penalty was a fine of up to $50 or up to 30 days in jail.
People: Sandy McClamroch
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Northside and Pine Knolls residents resist federal urban renewal
When Northside and Pine Knolls were targeted for urban renewal, residents confronted HUD and avoided the wholesale clearance seen in Durham's Hayti, winning home improvements and new construction instead.
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Robert Campbell moves to Rogers Road as the county landfill is built beside it
Campbell, who grew up in the Northside community of Chapel Hill, moved to Rogers Road in the early 1970s, as the Orange County landfill was going in next to the neighborhood. He later became president of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association and of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP.
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Black residents question the police handling of the Cates killing
Black residents met at the Roberson Street Center to discuss how police handled the stabbing, young Black residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro asked the Justice Department to investigate the campus police, and a fund was started to hire extra counsel for the prosecution. Vice Chancellor Joseph Eagles and Assistant Chancellor Claiborne Jones began reviewing the campus police response.
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Durham motorcycle gang member charged with murder in the Cates stabbing
Durham County officers arrested Ronnie Broadwell, 28, a member of the Durham Storm Troopers motorcycle gang, at Watts Hospital early on the morning of the stabbing, and he was charged with murder and held without bond in the Orange County Jail. By November 24 four white men were in jail and a second man, Bryan King of Durham, faced an assault charge.
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James Cates is killed outside the UNC Student Union
James Lewis Cates Jr., 22, a Black Chapel Hill resident, was stabbed outside the UNC Student Union shortly before 2 a.m. during an all-night dance, in a clash with members of Durham's Storm Troopers motorcycle gang, and died at North Carolina Memorial Hospital. Three white men charged in his death were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1971.
Part of Killing of James Cates, 1970
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Mayor Howard Lee leads a memorial march for James Cates
About 65 people joined a memorial march for James Cates led by Mayor Howard Lee and Alderman R. D. Smith, four days after the killing.
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Three Durham men bound over to the grand jury in the Cates killing
At a preliminary hearing in Hillsborough, Ronnie Broadwell, Rufus Nelson and William Johnson were bound over to the Orange County Grand Jury on murder charges and held without bond. Medical testimony indicated that immediate care could have prevented Cates's death.
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Trial of three Storm Troopers for the death of James Cates opens
Ronnie Broadwell, Rufus Paul Nelson and William Johnson went on trial in Orange County Superior Court in Hillsborough before Judge Thomas Cooper on second-degree murder charges, reduced from first degree. District Solicitor Herbert Pierce prosecuted, and prosecution witnesses placed the three defendants around Cates with weapons.
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All-white jury acquits three men in the killing of James Cates
A jury of 11 men and one woman, all white, found Ronnie Broadwell, Rufus Paul Nelson and William Johnson not guilty after about an hour and a half of deliberation. The defense called no witnesses.
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Black Student Movement holds a first-anniversary memorial for James Cates
The Black Student Movement and the Afro-American Society of Chapel Hill High School gathered at noon at the Confederate Monument and marched across campus to the Pit in memory of Cates. The service also protested the killing of William Murphy by a highway patrolman in Ayden.
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Rogers Road environmental justice
In 1972 officials placed the county landfill on Eubanks Road beside the historically Black Rogers Road community, promising it would run about ten years. It was expanded instead and did not close until 2013, and residents' organizing through the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association helped win a sewer line for the neighborhood, completed in 2019.
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Rogers Road landfill opens
Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County opened a shared, unlined county landfill on Eubanks Road, built in late 1972 beside the historically Black Rogers-Eubanks community, whose residents were told it would close after about ten years. It was expanded repeatedly and ran for 41 years, closing in June 2013.
Part of Rogers Road environmental justice · 3 events
People: David Caldwell · Howard N. Lee
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New Hope Improvement Association sues to stop the Eubanks Road landfill
Opponents of the landfill formed the New Hope Improvement Association, which drew about 500 members, and filed a lawsuit in late September 1972. The suit was denied in early October.
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Chapel Hill aldermen voted to buy the Eubanks Road site for the county landfill
Three months after the Chestnut Ridge site was abandoned, the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen voted unanimously to buy a 200-acre tract on Eubanks Road for $235,000. An unlined landfill was then built on about 80 acres of it, next to the Black Rogers-Eubanks neighborhood.
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Officials signed the landfill agreement that carried promises to the Rogers-Eubanks neighborhood
RENA's chronology records that Chapel Hill Mayor Howard Lee, Mayor Robert Wells Jr. and county commission chairman H.D. Bennett signed the full landfill agreement. Residents remember Lee promising that their road would be paved and that the filled site would become a recreation center for them.
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Black Student Movement march remembers James Cates
A Black Student Movement march in memory of James Cates was photographed by Les Todd, whose print is now held in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives at Wilson Library.
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Chase Park and Elliott Woods apartments are completed
The Inter-Church Council's housing corporation finished Chase Park and Elliott Woods, 79 federally assisted low-income apartments on Elliott Road in Chapel Hill. Construction began in January 1973, and the complexes took applications from June 1974.
The other dated entries wait behind a subject, a place, an era, a month, or the All dated entries switch, and each storyline’s page carries its own component entries. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. Each card’s “Correct this” link opens the contact form with the entry already named. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated September 14, 2026.
