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Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1960s
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Julius Chambers graduates first in his class from the UNC School of Law
Chambers graduated first in his class from the University's School of Law in Chapel Hill in 1962. He went on to practice civil rights law in Charlotte.
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Lillian Hughes Prince leaves funds to the Carolina Playmakers
Lillian Hughes Prince, who had acted in thirty or more Playmakers productions, left considerable funds to the Carolina Playmakers in her will. She died in New York and was buried in Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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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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Quakers from the Chapel Hill and Durham meetings found Carolina Friends School
Members of the Chapel Hill and Durham Friends meetings founded Carolina Friends School as a purposely integrated school, beginning with early education programs in the two meeting houses. Mildred Ringwalt was one of the seven founders and the first clerk of its board of trustees.
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Robert Burns and Brian Shawcroft design a house for Robert Work on Hillcrest Circle
Robert Burns and Brian Shawcroft designed the 1962 house at 214 Hillcrest Circle for the chemist Robert Work and his wife: two levels stepped into the hillside, a glazed rear wall, an elevated deck and a central open stair. It won a national Homes for Better Living award and a state AIA award.
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Hyconeechee Regional Library director David Flick writes a books column for the News of Orange County
By January 1962 the News of Orange County was running "Between the Covers," a column of news and comment on books in the public library by the director of the Hyconeechee Regional Library. The North Carolina Library Association's 1962 directory lists David Flick as the region's director, at Yanceyville.
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James Riley opens the Hillsboro Fish Market in the old Godfrey's store on Highway 70
James Riley opened the Hillsboro Fish Market on Highway 70 West, in front of Kenan Oil Company in the former Godfrey's Home Supply store, selling fresh fish cleaned free. By August 1962 it had moved to his old market next to Eno Methodist Church.
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Two federally funded kindergartens operate at the Efland schools
A federal research grant was paying for two public kindergartens in the county, one at Efland Elementary and one at Efland-Cheeks, the Black school. The board limited them to five-year-olds living in the Efland district.
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Portrait of the late Sheriff Oddie Clayton is hung in the sheriff's office
A portrait of the late Orange County sheriff Oddie Clayton, painted by Hillsborough artist Edmund Strudwick and paid for by public subscription in a drive led by ABC Police Chief Burch Compton, was hung in the county sheriff's office before members of his family.
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Law dean Henry Brandis Jr. turns down Albert Coates's last appeal for a merger
Coates sent Dean Henry Brandis Jr. a pleading letter with thirty-nine pages of enclosures urging that the Institute become part of the law school. Brandis refused to reopen the question and said that once Coates returned to full-time teaching, Institute staff would no longer teach his courses, since their part had weakened the school's instruction.
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Orange County was still running a separate library for Black readers
The county bookmobile schedule printed in March 1962 listed a Thursday stop from 1:30 to 2:00 at the Orange Co. Negro Public Library. The previous year's vacation reading club invited children to register either at the Confederate Memorial Public Library or at the Orange County Negro Public Library in Hillsboro.
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Carl Smith leads the Democratic primary for Orange County commissioner
Carl Smith of Chapel Hill topped the six-man Democratic primary for three county commissioner seats with 3,783 votes, ahead of Gordon Cleveland and Donald McDade; nomination usually amounted to election in the county.
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Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee asks for a Black nurse on the district health staff
At a Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee meeting, Esther Atwater said the district health department needed a Black nurse on its staff. Chairman Dr. William Joyner said he would take the request to District Health Officer Dr. O. D. Garvin.
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Chancellor Aycock chooses John Sanders to succeed Albert Coates as director of the Institute
After Coates would not name a successor through months of talks, Chancellor William B. Aycock picked assistant director John Sanders, then thirty-five, who accepted in a short meeting with Aycock and Dean of Faculty James Godfrey. Sanders, on the staff since October 1956, took over when Coates left the post on August 31, 1962.
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The Orange County Council on Alcoholism opens its headquarters in an addition to Calvin Burch's cabinet shop
The council's rehabilitation committee moved into a new office built onto Calvin Burch's cabinet shop on old NC 86, rented as a round-the-clock place for counseling and advice. Burch chaired the committee, which reported 54 cases in its first year there.
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The Orange Printshop closes after 39 years
The Orange Printshop, founded by Louis Graves in 1923 with the Chapel Hill Weekly, stopped work at the close of business on August 15, 1962. W. M. Pugh had run it as lessee since the 1940s, and the building had just been sold to the Bank of Chapel Hill.
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Edmund Strudwick speaks against a new federal access road and bridge into Hillsborough
At a public hearing in Hillsborough on a proposed $338,000 federal project for a new access road and bridge into the town, artist Edmund Strudwick opposed it, saying he did not want more cars coming up Churton Street. The News of Orange County called the opposition thin.
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Albert Coates retires as director of the Institute of Government
Coates retired as director of the Institute he founded on August 31, 1962, but stayed on the law faculty, teaching full time until about 1967 and a reduced load until a stroke in early 1968.
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Charles E. Maddry's funeral is held at Hillsborough Baptist Church
Charles E. Maddry, pastor of the church at the start and end of his fifty-three-year ministry and former head of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, died on September 17 and was buried at Richmond after a funeral in the Hillsborough church.
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James J. Freeland's Dixie Motor Inn opens at Interstate 85 and NC 86
The Dixie Motor Inn, owned by James J. and James Rae Freeland, opened two miles south of Hillsborough where Interstate 85 meets NC 86. It had 16 air-conditioned units and was the sixth motel the elder Freeland had built in Orange, Durham and Wake counties.
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Neal's Restaurant opens beside the Dixie Motor Inn south of Hillsborough
Neal Humphries, a Durham restaurant man for 15 years, opened Neal's Restaurant next to the new Dixie Motor Inn at I-85 and NC 86. It seated 75, stayed open around the clock and served steaks, seafood and fried chicken.
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Chapel Hill Planning Board reviews the Research Triangle Planning Area land use plan
The Chapel Hill Planning Board held a special meeting to review the Research Triangle Planning Commission's land use plan for the planning area, which projected population and density to 1980. The Chapel Hill Weekly described the plan as a major guide for future zoning changes and school locations.
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Arthur Cogswell designs a barrel-vaulted concrete house for David Hill
In 1963 Cogswell built a concrete house with a barrel-vaulted roof at 205 Wood Circle in Coker Hills for Duke engineering professor David Hill, an example of the period's trials of new building materials.
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Aycock and Hillsborough High schools are consolidated into Orange High School
When Orange High School opened in 1963, the county consolidated the high school grades of Aycock School in Cedar Grove and Hillsborough High School into it, and the older buildings became junior high or elementary schools. Some Aycock seniors went to Eastern Alamance High School in Mebane, but most went to Orange High.
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Chapel Hill Town Hall is remodeled with a mezzanine over the old fire bays
A general remodeling added a mezzanine over the first-floor fire engine garage and a new stair, and the engine doors on Columbia Street were later filled with windows.
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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.
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Floyd McKissick sends organizers to Chapel Hill and defends arrested demonstrators
As head of CORE's Durham office, McKissick sent organizer Quinton Baker to Chapel Hill in 1963 to teach nonviolence and demonstration tactics, and he acted as attorney for many demonstrators arrested there. Letters to him in 1964 include one written from the Orange County jail.
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Governor Terry Sanford establishes the Historic Hillsborough Commission
Interest stirred by the county and town bicentennials led to the commission, whose first projects included buying and restoring the Burwell School in 1965.
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Guy B. Johnson is named Kenan professor of anthropology and sociology
Johnson became Kenan professor of anthropology and sociology at UNC in 1963 and retired six years later.
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Inter-Church Council forms
Seven women’s organizing led to coordinated local poverty relief.
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James Brittian is expelled from Lincoln High School after a civil rights march
Brittian, a student at the segregated Lincoln High School, was expelled for taking part in a civil rights protest march. He then became chairman of the Student Commission, a branch of the Chapel Hill Freedom Commission.
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Mary Claire Engstrom documents 122 Hillsborough sites for the Historic American Buildings Survey
From 1963 to 1965 Mary Claire Engstrom documented 122 old structures and historic sites in and around Hillsborough for the Historic American Buildings Survey. Her research helped many of them reach the National Register, including the Nash-Hooper House as a National Historic Landmark, and helped establish two Hillsborough historic districts.
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Mary Claire Engstrom helps found the Hillsborough Historical Society
Mary Claire Engstrom was instrumental in founding the Hillsborough Historical Society, which filed National Register applications for local buildings, led walking tours and published newsletters and journals. It merged with the Orange County Historical Museum in 2007.
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Orange High School begins desegregation
Tonya and Narviar Cathcart entered Orange High School after their family’s transfer petition was approved.
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Orange Junior High School opens in the old Hillsborough High School building
When the county consolidated its white high schools into Orange High in 1963, it organized Orange Junior High School for grades six through nine in the old Hillsborough High School building, with Ted Shoaf as principal.
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Peg Owens takes over Lake Forest and names it Lake Forest Estates
Peg Owens bought part of the Lake Forest subdivision in 1963 and carried on its development. She also acquired the land west of Eastwood Lake along today's North Shore Drive, laid out its streets and built many of its first houses between 1965 and 1968, and gave the whole area the name Lake Forest Estates.
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The Chapel Hill Weekly moves into the old Harris-Connors Chevrolet agency on West Franklin
The town's weekly paper took over the space the Chevrolet dealer had left. Renamed the Chapel Hill Newspaper, it moved a few doors west in late 1973.
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The Chapel Hill civil-rights demonstrations
Marches, sit-ins and arrests over segregated businesses from 1963 into 1964, the aldermen's refusal of a public accommodations ordinance, the Holy Week fast, and the Watts Restaurant protests and the Klopfer speedy-trial case that grew out of them.
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The Colonial Dames erect a marble monument to the hanged Regulators beside the Hughes Academy schoolhouse
In 1963 the North Carolina Society of the Colonial Dames of America erected a marble slab monument to the six Regulators hanged at Hillsborough in June 1771, placing it next to the historic Hughes Academy schoolhouse in Hillsborough. The men's grave, thought to lie near the Eno, has never been found.
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The General Assembly makes the Orange County Board of Education an elected five-member board
A 1963 local act (H.B. 1329) set the county school board at five members chosen by voters in partisan elections from 1964 on, with six-year staggered terms and no more than two members from any one township.
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The Underwood family buys Murphey School at public auction
The school property was sold at public auction in 1963 to the Underwood family.
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UNC completes Coker Hall and names it for William C. Coker
The university completed a new building in 1963 and named it Coker Hall for William Chambers Coker, Kenan professor of botany and long-time head of the buildings and grounds committee.
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The Torian family deeds a lot beside Ridge Road School to Emma Torian Jones and Rev. Walter Jones
Maggie Torian and her children conveyed 0.79 acre west of the school, on Coleman Loop Road, to her daughter Emma and Emma's husband, Rev. Walter Warren Jones, who built a frame house there. Walter and Maggie Torian, Black farmers, had owned the land the school stood on and supplied its water.
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Jayne Mansfield rides in the pace car at Orange Speedway
Film star Jayne Mansfield, in North Carolina for a nightclub date in Greensboro, rode in the pace car to start the 150-mile race at Orange Speedway. Orange County sheriff's deputies Will Gilmore and Avery Maddry acted as her bodyguards, and she watched from the judges' stand, signing autographs.
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Chapel Hill Planning Board favors a large village in response to the Triangle commission's development plan
Reviewing the Research Triangle Planning Commission staff's General Development Plan for Chapel Hill to 1980, the Planning Board went on record preferring that the town grow as a large village rather than a small city. The plan also addressed subdivision layout, a collector road system and a proposed lake on Bolin Creek north of town.
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Junior Johnson wins the spring 150-miler at Orange Speedway
Junior Johnson won the spring 150-mile Grand National race at Orange Speedway in March 1963.
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Orange County Board of Education closes Caldwell School
In 1961 the county board weighed a proposal to close White Cross School at once and Caldwell School later. In March 1963, in the consolidation that came with the new Orange High School, it voted to close the white-only Caldwell School, built in 1925, and from that fall its pupils went to Aycock and Cameron Park. The county could not sell the building until 1973.
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Orange County completes a new Agricultural Building in Hillsborough
The county's new Agricultural Building, designed by Archie Davis, passed final inspection and the county's agricultural offices moved in. A dedication and open house were set for April 1.
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Student pickets begin marching outside the segregated College Cafe
The Student Peace Union and the NAACP put pickets in front of the segregated College Cafe on East Franklin Street, saying they would keep on until it integrated. The picketing led to the forming of the Committee for Open Business that May.
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Floyd McKissick and Malcolm X appear together at UNC's Memorial Hall
A day after their meeting in Durham, Durham attorney Floyd McKissick and Malcolm X appeared at UNC in a meeting moved from Howell Hall to Memorial Hall when about 1,600 people came. McKissick said he believed the Muslim movement had grown out of the frustration of Black Americans.
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NAACP chapter pickets North Carolina Memorial Hospital over segregated rooms and wards
The UNC chapter of the NAACP organized a picket in April 1963 to protest that private rooms and certain wards for Black patients at the hospital were still segregated, although outpatient clinics, recovery rooms, pediatrics and the cafeteria had been integrated. Hospital officials opposed the demonstration.
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Gerard Tempest opens Villa Tempesta, an arts center and café, on East Franklin Street
More than 2,000 people toured artist Gerard Tempest's Villa Tempesta, an Italian-style villa built from pieces of the old Duke and Watts mansions in Durham, at its open house; its studios and espresso café opened for regular business the following Thursday.
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Roosevelt Warner is elected the first Black member of the Hillsboro Board of Commissioners
Roosevelt Warner, a masonry contractor and business owner, led the field of eleven candidates with 281 votes for the five-member Board of Town Commissioners on his second try, unseating incumbent Herman H. Strayhorn. Two years earlier he had been the town's first Black candidate, finishing last with 180 votes.
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Research Triangle Planning Commission projects Chapel Hill school growth to
John Scott of the Research Triangle Planning Commission told the Chapel Hill School Board that district enrollment could reach 8,000 pupils by 1980, more than double the current number, and cited a 1960 township population of 25,000. The commission delivered its full report on school needs to 1980 by late July.
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The Committee for Open Business presses Chapel Hill merchants to desegregate
The Committee for Open Business grew out of a Student Peace Union boycott of 13 segregated Chapel Hill restaurants and first met in early May 1963 to coordinate students and townspeople. On July 19 its sit-in at the Merchants Association office on West Franklin Street ended with 34 arrests.
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Aldermen hear Daniel Pollitt's opinion that Chapel Hill may pass a public accommodations law, then shelve it
At a Town Hall hearing attended by more than 200 people, Mayor Sandy McClamroch read an opinion by Pollitt that Chapel Hill had the authority to enact a public accommodations ordinance and that similar laws elsewhere had withstood court tests. The Board of Aldermen then voted 4 to 2 to postpone the ordinance indefinitely.
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Speaker Ban controversy
The General Assembly passed the Speaker Ban on June 26, 1963, barring known Communists and people who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment from speaking on state campuses. In March 1966 Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker spoke to UNC students from the Franklin Street side of the wall, and a federal court struck the law down on February 19, 1968.
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Teacher Hassie Vanhook Gattis retires after 34 years
Hassie Vanhook Brooks Gattis retired in 1963 after 34 years of teaching Black children in northern Orange County, at the Sartin, Grover, Poplar Grove and Carr schools and, from about 1955, at Cedar Grove. The News of Orange County marked her retirement in June.
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The General Joseph E. Johnston Motel is among motels that agree to admit Black guests
The Carolina Times reported that all eleven motels in the Durham area, the General Joseph Johnston Motel among them, had agreed to admit Black guests.
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Police carry out demonstrators sitting in at the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Merchants Association office
Members of the Committee for Open Business sat in and sang in the Merchants Association office on West Franklin Street to press merchants to desegregate. Police carried out 27 on trespass warrants signed by director Joe Augustine, and 34 were arrested that day in all.
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Charles M. Walker Jr. announces that Walker Milling Co. will close
Walker said he would close the milling business in the three-story landmark on Court Square, which his father and uncle had run for decades before he bought it after World War II, and take a job in Battleboro. He pointed to changes in the farm economy.
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Warner's Motel and Warner's Wash-eteria invite the public to see their facilities
An advertisement invited everyone to visit Warner's Motel and Warner's Wash-eteria on Highway 70-A in Hillsboro on Friday, August 2, and inspect their modern facilities.
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Fire breaks out in the Rathskeller and spreads through its East Franklin Street building
A fire of unknown origin started in the wall behind a stove in the Rathskeller on a Thursday evening and crept through the walls of the building. Ted Danziger put the damage to the restaurant and his Old World Gift Center at about $70,000, and water stood ankle deep in Amber Alley.
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George Esser proposes an ordinance barring discrimination by new Chapel Hill businesses
After the aldermen declined a public accommodations law in June, Esser suggested as a private citizen an ordinance that would bar racial discrimination by businesses opening in the future, applied like zoning rules. The Board of Aldermen began considering it in August while the Committee for Open Business kept up its marches.
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A tobacco truck crashes into Carlton Mize's Rock Pile store
A tractor-trailer carrying 25,000 pounds of tobacco went out of control and crashed into the side of the Rock Pile, Carlton Mize's grocery on the Chapel Hill-Durham Road. No one was hurt, but the west wall was crushed and the front windows shattered.
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The Bank of Chapel Hill merges into North Carolina National Bank
At the close of business on September 27, 1963, the Bank of Chapel Hill, founded in 1899, became part of North Carolina National Bank. Its office at 137 East Franklin Street made Chapel Hill the twelfth city in the NCNB system.
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Joe Weatherly wins his last race at Orange Speedway
Joe Weatherly won the fall 150-mile race at Orange Speedway, the last victory of his career; he was killed in a crash at Riverside, California, in January 1964.
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Carrboro Baptist Church remodels its sanctuary
Work on an extensive remodeling of the sanctuary began after the first Sunday in October 1963, alongside a new educational building. By September 1964 the renovation was finished and the church invited the community to see the new facilities.
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Daniel Pollitt's law review article calls the Speaker Ban constitutionally suspect
Pollitt's article Campus Censorship: The North Carolina Visiting Speakers Law, written for the December 1963 North Carolina Law Review, argued that the Speaker Ban raised serious problems of free speech, self-incrimination and due process. The Daily Tar Heel called it the first known legal analysis of the law by a lawyer outside the attorney general's office.
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The A&P opens its first Hillsborough supermarket at US 70 and Churton Street
The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened a supermarket of about 10,000 square feet in a red-brick "Early American" building with a cupola and parking for 165 cars. It was the chain's first store in Hillsborough and the first major unit of the North Hills Shopping Center.
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Walker's Funeral Home dedicates its chapel at 204 North Churton Street
On its 41st anniversary Walker's Funeral Home held an open house and dedicated the chapel in its brick building on North Churton Street, finished late in 1962, honoring founder Houston J. Walker and his late wife Minnie Montgomery Walker.
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Karen Parker is arrested at a sit-in at Leo's restaurant
Parker, UNC's first Black woman undergraduate and a CORE member, went with other demonstrators to Leo's, a segregated restaurant in downtown Chapel Hill, where they were arrested and taken to jail. She described it in her diary entry of December 18.
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Sit-in demonstrators at the Rock Pile are doused with ammonia
Around New Year's Day 1964, sit-in demonstrators at the Rock Pile, Carlton Mize's segregated grocery on the Durham Road, were doused with ammonia and bleach water. Seven were treated for burns, among them NAACP youth leader Quinton Baker; four were arrested, and thirteen more were arrested at a second sit-in there the next day, when five more needed treatment.
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A bronze plaque honoring builder John Berry is placed on the Old Orange County Courthouse
A bronze plaque naming John Berry a contributor to the tradition of American architecture was fixed to the 1845 courthouse he built in Hillsborough.
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Allen A. and Pauline O. Lloyd publish a history of the town of Hillsborough
Pharmacist Allen A. Lloyd published a 200-page, illustrated History of the Town of Hillsborough, with his wife Pauline O. Lloyd named as co-author, after working on it since 1945. He paid about $2,500 to print it and sold copies at James Pharmacy, which he ran.
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Arthur Cogswell designs the Koch House on Clayton Road
In 1964 Cogswell designed a one-story, flat-roofed house for botany professor Arthur Koch at 401 Clayton Road in Coker Hills: a floor plate projecting from a block base, with glass walls opening to a deck over a pond. It received a North Carolina AIA award.
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Binkley moves to Willow Drive
The congregation occupied its first permanent building.
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Central High principal A. L. Stanback dies
Albert Leon Stanback, who came to Central as a coach and mathematics teacher and led it for more than twenty years, died after a short illness. His funeral was held in the school's auditorium. Under him the school grew to about 1,200 students.
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Fanny McDade, laundress to generations of students, is buried at 103 in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Fanny McDade (1861-1964), an African American woman who did students' laundry for many years, died at 103 and is thought to be the oldest person buried in the cemetery.
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Four of Orange County's 2,001 Black pupils attend white schools
The county school system enrolled 2,001 Black students in 1964-65. Four went to formerly white schools; the rest attended Central High, Efland-Cheeks or Cedar Grove.
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Graham Memorial passes from student union to the Department of Dramatic Arts
Graham Memorial, the student union for 27 years, was turned over to the drama department after the new Frank Porter Graham Student Union opened elsewhere on campus.
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Isaac M. Taylor serves as dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Taylor succeeded W. Reece Berryhill as dean in 1964. Student enrollment, faculty and research funding grew during his deanship, and a ten-year capital building program began that produced Berryhill Hall, the first phase of the Health Sciences Library, and the Brinkhous-Bullitt and Burnett-Womack Buildings.
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James J. Freeland builds his third family house on Highway 70
After homes near Fairview and in his Mountain View development, Freeland built the family's third house in 1964 on Highway 70 a little northwest of that subdivision, and lived there the rest of his life.
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Joe Straley chairs the Committee of Concerned Citizens
The UNC physics professor Joe Straley chaired the Committee of Concerned Citizens, a group of Chapel Hill residents dedicated to civil rights, in 1964 and 1965.
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Mary Claire Engstrom chairs the Historic Hillsborough Commission
Mary Claire Engstrom chaired the Historic Hillsborough Commission, a state-appointed body created in 1963, from 1964 to 1966 and again from 1976 to 1983. Her research files for the commission and other projects cover deeds, cemeteries, mills, inns, Quaker settlements and schools such as the Hillsborough Academy and the Burwell School.
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Morris Telephone Company builds a larger exchange on East King Street
As part of a half-million-dollar improvement program around Hillsborough, the Morris Telephone Company put up a new telephone building on East King Street about twice the size of the old exchange. Subscribers got new numbers on May 17, and in November the company moved its business office into the new building.
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Orange High and Orange Junior High win accreditation from the state and the Southern Association
Between about 1964 and 1969 Orange High School and Orange Junior High were accredited by the state and by the Southern Association, so every county pupil in grades 7 through 12 attended a regionally accredited school. A push to accredit the elementary schools was put off by integration.
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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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The old school buildings and the Caesar Cone house on West Franklin are razed for a bank and University Square East
Chapel Hill's old elementary and high school buildings on West Franklin came down, along with the house known as the Caesar Cone house. Central Carolina Bank & Trust and the University Square East shopping center went up in their place.
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UNC founds its computer science department under Frederick Brooks
Brooks, 33, founded what became the Department of Computer Science, the second free-standing doctorate-granting department of its kind in the United States; it was first called Information Science and took the name computer science in 1971.
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William E. Leuchtenburg wins the Bancroft Prize
Leuchtenburg won the 1964 Bancroft Prize for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (Harper & Row, 1963). He was then teaching at Columbia University, where he taught from 1952 to 1982 before joining UNC.
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Watts Restaurant protests
Sit-ins at the segregated Watts Restaurant and Motel on South Columbia Street began on January 2, 1964. Over the next days demonstrators were urinated on, hosed and struck with a broom handle, and Duke and UNC faculty were among those arrested. The owners held out after the Civil Rights Act and desegregated on July 10, 1964.
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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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Institute of Government delivers its report on Chapel Hill's power to pass a public accommodations law
A report prepared by George Esser at the aldermen's request, gathering cases from all fifty states on a town's power to pass a public accommodations law, was completed and handed to Town Manager Robert Peck for the aldermen days before their vote. Esser said it showed the probable attitude of North Carolina courts toward a town using its general welfare power for that purpose.
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Survey finds N.C. Memorial Hospital still separates patients by race
A Daily Tar Heel survey of Chapel Hill accommodations listed North Carolina Memorial Hospital among places keeping segregation, with director E. B. Crawford Jr. saying the hospital had two floors of mostly Black patients and did not generally integrate patient rooms.
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Thirty-nine demonstrators are arrested sitting on the steps of Brady's Restaurant
On a Sunday night, 39 demonstrators, seven of them white, were arrested after sitting three deep on the front steps of the segregated Brady's Restaurant and blocking the door. The night before, 53 had been arrested in sit-downs in front of Brady's and the Rock Pile.
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Gloria Williams asks the school board to readmit boycotting Lincoln High students
At the Chapel Hill school board meeting, Mrs. Gloria Williams, speaking for parents of students who had joined the Chapel Hill Freedom Committee's boycott of Lincoln High School, asked that all of them be readmitted. The board upheld the expulsion of two senior leaders, Henry Sanford and James Brittain, after Superintendent Howard Thompson said he would resign if they returned.
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The Efland brothers form Efland Tractor and Equipment Company
John L. Efland Jr. and Wilson Efland took the International Harvester franchise for Orange County and formed Efland Tractor and Equipment Company, with parts and service in the front of the Efland Knitting Company building.
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Villines Rest Home opens on Occoneechee Street in Hillsborough
A notice in February 1964 announced that the Villines Rest Home on Occoneechee Street was open to anyone who could no longer care for themselves.
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The last Southern Railway passenger trains run through Hillsborough
Trains 13 and 16, the daily Greensboro-Goldsboro round trip, made their final runs, ending more than a century of passenger service in Orange County. Hillsborough had been a flag stop without ticket sales for two years.
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More than 25,000 Orange County residents take Sabin oral polio vaccine on one Sunday
The Durham-Orange County Medical Foundation ran a Sunday oral polio vaccine campaign at eight public school feeding stations in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Cedar Grove and Efland. A total of 25,679 people took the vaccine on a sugar cube, about 56 percent of the county, with Glenwood School alone serving 5,063; a second dose was set for May 17.
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The Holy Week fast began on the Franklin Street post office lawn
At sunrise on Palm Sunday, Freedom Committee members John Dunne, Pat Cusick, James Foushee and the Rev. LeVert Taylor began an eight-day, water-only fast on the grounds of the Chapel Hill post office, planned to last through Easter. The fast was aimed at the Board of Aldermen, and a fifth faster joined within two days.
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A Klan rally gathers at the post office fast and a UNC student is struck
On the fast's seventh day a Ku Klux Klan rally drew onlookers to the Franklin Street post office, where textile worker Milford Cordell Hill of Gold Hill struck UNC senior Louis S. Calhoun Jr. and knocked off his glasses; police officers who saw it swore out complaints.
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The Holy Week fast ends on Easter Sunday and the Rev. LaVert Taylor is hospitalized
The five fasters finished their eight-day water-only fast in front of the post office on Easter Sunday. The Rev. LaVert Taylor of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was admitted to Memorial Hospital with an upset stomach afterward; James Foushee had been treated there during the fast and released.
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The Committee of Concerned Citizens raises about $400 for injured demonstrators and the hospitalized faster
Committee members served bread and cheese for donations twice a day in the basement of the First Baptist Church, raising about $400 to cover the hospital bills of demonstrators hurt in sit-ins and of the Rev. LaVert Taylor after the fast.
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Edmund Strudwick finishes a portrait of retired farm agent Don S. Matheson
Hillsborough artist Edmund Strudwick finished a portrait of Don S. Matheson, who retired in 1963 after 34 years as Orange County farm agent. Paid for by public gifts, it was hung in the county agricultural building, and further gifts founded a 4-H fund.
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Orange Speedway names its spring race the Joe Weatherly Memorial
Orange Speedway scheduled its spring 1964 150-mile Grand National race as the inaugural Joe Weatherly Memorial, honoring the late national champion who held both track speed records and had won his last race there.
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Supreme Court lets stand the ruling against segregated hospitals built with federal funds
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, leaving in place the Fourth Circuit's November 1, 1963 ruling that Greensboro hospitals built with Hill-Burton money could not segregate doctors or patients. The Daily Tar Heel carried the decision on its front page.
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Judge Mallard sentences fasters Pat Cusick and John Dunne to a year in jail
In Orange County Superior Court at Hillsborough, Judge Raymond B. Mallard gave Pat Cusick a year in jail on April 23 and John Dunne twelve months on April 24 for the February street-blocking demonstrations, among a dozen active sentences and about 100 suspended ones that stripped the Chapel Hill movement of its leaders four weeks after the fast.
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Chapel Hill Recorder's Court fines the man who struck a student at the post office fast
Judge William S. Stewart fined Milford Cordell Hill $50 and costs for striking Louis S. Calhoun Jr. at the scene of the fast on March 28, on complaints sworn out by the police officers who saw it.
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A Burger Chef hamburger stand opens at 337 West Rosemary Street
A Burger Chef franchise opened at 337 West Rosemary Street at 11 a.m. on May 6, 1964, selling 15-cent broiled hamburgers, shakes and fries. A week later it was advertising for more help.
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Kenan Oil Company opens the Colonial Phillips 66 service station at Churton and Tryon
Kenan Oil Company held a grand opening for its new Colonial Phillips 66 station on Churton Street at Tryon, with Fred Albert as station manager and door prizes drawn Friday night. The station opened for business the next day; Odis Johnson of Mebane was the builder.
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The Civil Rights Act changes the legal ground for local integration
The Civil Rights Act, signed on July 2, 1964, barred segregation in restaurants, hotels and theaters. Within a week, testers found eight of 13 previously segregated Chapel Hill-area businesses serving Black customers, while five, including a Franklin Street beer parlor, still refused.
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Austin Watts and his staff attack civil rights testers at Watts Restaurant
The night after the Civil Rights Act was signed, a mixed group of testers seeking service at Watts Restaurant was turned away and, the testers said, attacked with fists and clubs, and owner Austin Watts was charged with striking Pete Leak. Watts was convicted of assault in Chapel Hill Recorder's Court on July 21 and fined the costs of court.
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Clarence's Bar and Grill turns away an integrated group the day after the Civil Rights Act
Five white people and one Black person asked for service at Clarence's Bar and Grill on West Franklin Street. Owner Clarence Gray refused them, saying he thought one of them was drunk. Testers visited other Chapel Hill restaurants that weekend as well.
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Sixty-six Black parents petition the county board to stop running schools by race
Led by the retired Cedar Grove teacher Hassie Vanhook Gattis, 66 parents signed a petition asking the Orange County board to stop operating its schools on a racial basis. It charged that the board had kept a dual system since the 1954 Brown ruling in disregard of the law.
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The new high bridge over the Eno opens on South Churton Street
The 375-foot bridge, 55 feet above the river and built for about $450,000 with state and federal money, opened with the new access road from Interstate 85 into Hillsborough in the summer of 1964, taking traffic off the 1922 bridge.
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Paul F. Sharp serves as chief administrator of UNC at Chapel Hill
Sharp was chief administrative officer of the university at Chapel Hill from September 1, 1964 to February 15, 1966. His records document the state's speaker ban law and programs in medical education, and he left to become president of Drake University.
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The old Walker Milling Co. building on courthouse square is torn down
Orange County, which bought the mill property in August 1963 for $25,000, had a Wilmington contractor raze the building to clear the lot for parking. Historical groups asked the commissioners to save it, but they would only agree, by a split vote, to buy the old handmade bricks for resale.
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A state act limits Orange County school board elections to voters outside the Chapel Hill school unit
A 1965 act (H.S. 695) provided that only county voters living outside the enlarged Chapel Hill school administrative unit could vote in elections for the Orange County Board of Education.
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Albert Coates starts the Institute of Civic Education in the University's Extension Division
With no place offered by the Institute of Government or the law school, Coates set up an Institute of Civic Education under Extension Division director Charles Milner, paid for by the Richardson Foundation and a $50,000 yearly state appropriation approved by Governor Terry Sanford. In the summer of 1965 it brought high school civics and government teachers to Chapel Hill for short courses in state history and government.
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Architect Arthur Cogswell adds a flat-roofed art studio to the Voitle house on Country Club Road
The low modern studio at the rear has vertical wood siding and large fixed windows, a sharp contrast to the 1930s cottage in front of it.
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Black masons build Troy and Roberta Andrews's Sidler-designed house on the family farm
Working from plans by Swiss architect Franc Sidler, a former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice, builder Carl Ellington and the African American masons Willis, Alfred Sr. and Alfred Jr. Barbee raised the Andrews House from stone gathered on the farm, starting in 1965 and finishing in 1967. It is Sidler's only building in the United States and one of the few architect-designed Modernist houses in rural Orange County.
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Brian Shawcroft designs a modernist house on Davie Lane for chemist Donald A. Seanor
Architect Brian Shawcroft designs a modernist house in the Glendale subdivision for Donald A. Seanor, an English-born research chemist at the Chemstrand Research Center; it was commissioned in 1963 and dated 1965.
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Central Elementary School is built north of West Hillsborough
Planned as a segregated school for Black pupils next to Central High School, the flat-roofed brick and concrete building designed by Archie Royal Davis was finished a few years before desegregation and then served an integrated student body. Additions followed in 1975 and during the 1990s.
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Chapel Hill Weekly founder Louis Graves is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Louis Graves (1883-1965), founder, publisher and editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, was buried in the cemetery.
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Chase Hall, the campus's first modernist building, goes up on south campus
Chase Hall, a dining hall designed by Milton Small and Associates of Raleigh and built in 1965, is a glass and steel International Style building that appears to hover over a recessed concrete base. The book calls it the first modernist building erected on the campus; Small had studied under Mies van der Rohe.
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Clyde Eubanks sells his drugstore to Benjamin and Ellyn Courts, who rename it Courts' Drugs
The Courts kept the East Franklin store where it was for about two years, then moved it to University Square East in 1967 when North Carolina National Bank began expanding.
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Col. and Mrs. Jacob Moon buy the Ruffin-Hill House
In 1965 the Ruffin-Hill House on St. Mary's Road, with 2.96 acres, was conveyed to Col. and Mrs. Jacob Moon.
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Don Stewart's Carmichael Auditorium is completed as the state's largest single-span building
Stewart designed Carmichael Auditorium, finished in 1965, with a roof carried on steel beams held by steel tie rods anchored in the ground. The book says it was the largest single-span building in North Carolina when it was built.
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Eric Van Loon chairs the Carolina Political Union
A Daily Tar Heel profile in May 1966 reported that Van Loon, a junior from Nashville, had spent the past year as chairman of the Carolina Political Union, vice president of the debating team, National Student Association campus coordinator, a Morrison resident adviser and treasurer of the Carolina Symposium.
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Fire destroys the home economics building at Aycock School
The home economics building at Aycock School in Cedar Grove burned, with the loss put at $15,000 to $20,000 and fully insured through the state. The county board had approved the building in 1948.
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James L. Godfrey chairs the history department
Godfrey chaired UNC's Department of History from 1965 to 1973.
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Karen Parker becomes the first Black woman to earn an undergraduate degree at UNC
Karen L. Parker, who transferred from the Woman's College in Greensboro in 1963 as UNC's first Black woman undergraduate, graduated in journalism in 1965. She was the first African American woman to receive an undergraduate degree from the University, and as a student she joined Chapel Hill sit-ins and was arrested in December 1963.
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Lucius and Nellie Cheshire buy and restore the Commandant's House
Eula Cole, who had bought the house from John W. Hill's estate in 1938, sold it in 1965 to Lucius and Nellie Cheshire. By 1972 they had restored it to excellent condition.
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Morrison Residence Hall opens, named for Cameron Morrison
The university completed Morrison Residence Hall, a men's dormitory, in 1965 and named it for former governor Cameron Morrison, an influential trustee who had backed the university's expansion program in the 1920s.
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Only 7 percent of the county's Black pupils attend an integrated school
At the start of the 1965-66 school year, about 7 percent of the Orange County system's Black students were enrolled in an integrated school.
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Orange County schools start the federal Title I program
Frank Giles, named first assistant to the superintendent and office manager, took charge of the federal Title I program, whose $166,801.40 budget came on top of the county school budget.
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Paul and Isabel Smith sell the Intimate Bookshop to Wallace Kuralt
The Smiths sold the East Franklin bookshop to Kuralt but kept running a rare-book department inside the store until the end of 1968.
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Ruth Anderson Stephens becomes the first Black graduate of UNC's School of Nursing
Ruth Anderson Stephens completed the School of Nursing's master's program in nursing education and administration in 1965, the school's first African American graduate.
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Stewart and Anderson build a new office on Estes Drive as Webb stays in the old Methodist church
In the mid-1960s Don Stewart and Bob Anderson bought a lot on Estes Drive and built a new office for the firm, while James Webb returned to the old Methodist church on Rosemary Street, the firm's former office, where he worked until he retired.
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The Historic American Buildings Survey documents the Berry Brick House
In 1965 the Historic American Buildings Survey recorded the Berry Brick House, the earliest surviving brick house in the original town, built about 1805 for Rhody Berry.
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The Historic Hillsborough Commission buys the Burwell School
The commission bought the house from the Spurgeon children and began restoring it to look as it had after the 1848 enlargement.
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The Occoneechee Steakhouse and a ten-room motel go up on South Churton Street
Among the restaurants that grew up around Daniel Boone Village was the Occoneechee Steakhouse, across South Churton Street, with a second small motel of ten rooms built beside it.
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The former Military Academy dining hall is turned into a church
The one-story board-and-batten building beside Barracks Road, thought to be a surviving piece of the long frame service building that stood behind the barracks, became a church building in 1965.
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UNC names its Chapel Hill gymnasium for William D. Carmichael Jr.
Four years after his death the university named the gymnasium at Chapel Hill for Carmichael. NCpedia lists buildings named for him on three campuses, the television building at Greensboro, the gymnasium at Raleigh and the auditorium at Chapel Hill.
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William F. Little chairs the chemistry department
Little, who had come to Carolina as a chemistry instructor in 1956, became department chair in 1965 at 35. He hired young scholars and nearly doubled the faculty to 30.
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Jim Medford is elected president of the campus YMCA
A Daily Tar Heel photograph taken on the steps of South Building shows Jim Medford as the newly elected YMCA president with the other officers chosen in the campus Y election.
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The county board asks the commissioners to back a desegregation plan and Black members on school boards
Facing federal compliance rules, the board met the county commissioners and asked for two Black members on the Board of Education, integration of schools, buses and staff, Black members on district committees and signature of the federal compliance form.
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"Get out of Vietnam" is painted on the gun outside the Naval Armory
Overnight, someone lettered an antiwar slogan on the antiaircraft gun on the armory lawn; NROTC officers called it a childish prank.
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Harper and Row publishes John Ehle's The Free Men, an account of the Chapel Hill protests
Ehle's nonfiction book traced the 1963–1964 civil rights campaign in Chapel Hill through three of its leaders, John Dunne, Pat Cusick and Quinton Baker, from the first pickets at a cafe to mass arrests and long prison sentences.
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Three Black students desegregate Aycock School in Cedar Grove
Under the county's Freedom of Choice plan, three Black families asked for their children to be transferred to the white Aycock School, and on May 20, 1965 the three students were assigned and began attending. United States Marshals escorted at least one of them.
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Cedar Grove families answer the county's freedom-of-choice forms
The county sent 401 school-choice forms to Cedar Grove School families at the end of the 1964-65 year. Fifty-two made no choice, three asked for all-white Aycock Elementary and four for Orange Junior High.
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Howard Mumford Jones wins the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Howard Mumford Jones, who had taught at the University of North Carolina from 1925 to 1930, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for O Strange New World (1964), a study of American culture from the discovery through the Jacksonian era. He was then retired from Harvard.
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Memorial Hospital ends racial segregation
After a federal inspection team found the hospital out of compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chancellor Paul F. Sharp announced it would take immediate steps to obey the law. The hospital had assigned patients to rooms by what it called cultural background, and room assignments now had to be made without regard to race.
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The board names the first principals of Stanford Junior High and Central Elementary
Paul Raspberry was chosen to lead the new Stanford Junior High, and Tarleton Davis was picked to open Central Elementary as its first principal.
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The Ku Klux Klan calls a rally in a field across from the General Sherman Restaurant
Robed Klansmen handed out bills in Hillsborough for a night rally at Interstate 85 and US 70, where scores of hooded members were expected in a field across from the General Sherman Restaurant.
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The county board adopts a school desegregation plan
After most of a year spent trying to reach a plan acceptable under federal rules, the Orange County Board of Education adopted a desegregation plan on September 7, 1965.
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A House committee names the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan unit in Orange County
The House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating the Ku Klux Klan, named the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan organization in Orange County. Sheriff C. B. Knight told the Daily Tar Heel that three Klan meetings had been held in the county recently.
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Bob Powell is named executive director of the Carolina Forum
The Daily Tar Heel's list of student government appointments made by Student Body President Paul Dickson gives Bob Powell as executive director of the Carolina Forum for the 1965-66 year.
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Medford is named to the student government State Affairs committee
Student Body President Paul Dickson's committee appointments, printed in the Daily Tar Heel, put Jim Medford on the State Affairs committee along with Henry Patterson and Taylor Branch.
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Eunice Milton is listed among the members of the Order of Valkyries
When the Order of Valkyries, described by the Daily Tar Heel as the highest women's honorary organization on campus, tapped new members in November 1965, Eunice Milton was named among the seven continuing members. She appears again in the honorary's March 1966 list.
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Arthur Cogswell designs a pyramid-roofed house for Marion Townend
At 411 Clayton Road in Coker Hills, Cogswell designed a house in 1966 for Marion Townend under a tall pyramidal roof. A skylight at the peak lights the central living room and the rooms around it, whose light shifts as the sun moves.
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Baptist Association rejects Binkley membership
The local association denied admission over Binkley’s open membership policy.
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C. Hugh Holman serves as UNC provost
Holman, dean of the Graduate School from 1963 to 1966, served as provost of the University of North Carolina from 1966 to 1968 and later as special assistant to the chancellor.
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Don Stewart designs the Chapel Hill Public Library building on East Franklin Street
Around 1965 library committee head Mrs. Richmond P. Bond asked Stewart about a traditional design; he said he was not a traditional architect and suggested Durham's William Van Sprinkle, but the committee kept Stewart and his modern plan. The 1966 building uses sloping native stone walls and stained wood to fit among the older faculty houses on East Franklin Street.
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Eric Van Loon becomes assistant to the student body president
After Robert S. Powell Jr. was elected student body president in the spring of 1966, the Daily Tar Heel reported that Van Loon had newly taken on the roles of student legislator, National Student Association delegate and presidential assistant to Powell. He had run unsuccessfully for student body treasurer the previous spring.
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Eunice Milton serves as president of the campus YWCA
The Daily Tar Heel called Milton the YWCA president when it reported the filing of the Speaker Ban suit on April 1, 1966, and the former YWCA president when it reported on the case in May.
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Fire destroys Kemp Nye's record store on East Franklin Street
Kemp's record shop burned out in 1966. A Burger King later opened in a small store on the site.
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Hillsborough makes its first annexations beyond the one-square-mile town
In 1966 the town began extending its limits past the square mile platted in 1754, first taking in homes on Cameron and Ruffin streets to the northeast and the Bellevue mill and its village to the west. Annexations have continued since, most of them under ten acres.
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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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Interstate 85 is completed south of Hillsborough
The interstate linking Charlotte and Durham by way of Greensboro was finished in 1966 about a mile and a quarter south of downtown, and a commercial strip grew up along South Churton Street between the town and the interchange.
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James J. Freeland opens the Daniel Boone Inn and restaurant at South Churton Street and I-85
A 1966 plat of the "Daniel Boone Inn and Restaurant Tract", eleven acres lying behind the Shell station on the northeast side of the interchange, shows a pond, a general store, a restaurant later known as the D. B. Cafeteria and a long two-story motel. It was the start of Daniel Boone Village.
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John E. Greenbacker Jr. leads the Dialectic and Philanthropic literary society
The federal court's findings in Dickson v. Sitterson list Greenbacker as president of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Literary Society, one of the recognized student organizations whose officers brought the Speaker Ban suit. The Daily Tar Heel likewise named him as Di-Phi president among the ten student leaders who wrote to Chancellor Sitterson on March 1, 1966.
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John E. Greenbacker Jr. serves as associate editor of the Daily Tar Heel
The masthead of the December 7, 1966 Daily Tar Heel lists Greenbacker as associate editor under editor Fred Thomas. He wrote signed opinion pieces, and a letter in the same issue takes issue with his Sunday column profiling the SDS leader Gary Waller.
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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.
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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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Saving the Eno
The Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley, formed in 1966 to stop Durham's reservoir plans, won Eno River State Park and has kept adding land to it.
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Stuart Matthews serves on the steering committee of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society
The federal court's findings in Dickson v. Sitterson list Matthews as a member of the steering committee of Students for a Democratic Society, one of the recognized campus organizations whose officers brought the suit. The Daily Tar Heel adds that Matthews and Gary Waller invited Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker to speak under SDS sponsorship on January 3, 1966.
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The Mary Manning house on East Franklin Street, where Arthur Nash boarded, is torn down
Nash lodged with Mary Manning from his arrival in 1922 until his own house was finished in 1926. The house stood at what is now 507 East Franklin Street, first numbered 402.
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The Presbyterians sell their East Franklin manse to Gordon L. McAndrews
After 77 years of ownership, the church sold its manse at 513 East Franklin, the house William Mercer Green built in the 1840s and Charles Phillips later owned, to McAndrews.
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Wall speeches at the campus line
In 1966 the trustees barred Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker from the campus under the Speaker Ban law, so each spoke to students across the stone wall at McCorkle Place from the Franklin Street sidewalk. Students and the two speakers sued in Dickson v. Sitterson, a federal court struck the law down in 1968, and a marker went up at the wall in 2011.
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Carolina Forum chairman George Nicholson answers Professor W. C. George on the Forum's speakers
Nicholson told the Daily Tar Heel that the Forum invited both liberals and conservatives, naming Strom Thurmond and Ross Barnett among its recent guests, after the segregationist UNC professor W. C. George said it largely ignored conservative racial views.
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The Botanical Garden Foundation is incorporated, with William Lanier Hunt as its founder
Hunt, a member of the garden's advisory board, led the effort to form a private foundation to raise money, hold land and speak for the North Carolina Botanical Garden. At its first annual meeting in 1967 he was elected its first president, and 291 people and 18 organizations joined as charter members.
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Students for a Democratic Society invites Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker to speak at UNC
The UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society invited Frank Wilkinson, who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment when questioned in California about Communist activities, and the Communist theoretician Herbert Aptheker to speak on campus. After the trustees barred both men, Student Government under Paul Dickson, the Daily Tar Heel, the Carolina Forum, the YMCA and YWCA, the Di-Phi and the Carolina Political Union joined SDS in renewing the invitations.
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Dickson, Nicholson and McCrary invite Herbert Aptheker to speak on campus
Three of the students who later sued invited Aptheker to speak at Chapel Hill on March 9, 1966 under the sponsorship of Student Government, the Carolina Forum and the Daily Tar Heel. Aptheker accepted two days later.
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Cedar Grove's advisory council asks for a painted lunchroom and a paved playground
Oscar Beasley and Arthur Wells of the Cedar Grove Advisory Council asked the board to paint the lunchroom, hang doors on the girls' restroom and give the school a hard-surfaced playground. The board granted part of the request.
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Gary Waller joins a student panel on the Speaker Ban in Memorial Hall
The Daily Tar Heel reported that student body president Paul Dickson presided over a noon meeting of students and faculty in Memorial Hall, with a panel of four that included Waller, Carolina Conservative Club president Wilson Clark and the SDS faculty advisers Joseph Straley and Lewis Lipsitz. The meeting adopted a resolution about four and a half hours before the trustees' executive committee voted 8 to 3 to bar Herbert Aptheker from speaking.
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UNC trustees' executive committee bars Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker from the Chapel Hill campus
Meeting in Governor Dan K. Moore's office in Raleigh, the executive committee of the UNC board of trustees voted 8 to 3 to deny university facilities to Aptheker and Wilkinson and suspended all other invitations covered by the speaker ban law until the full board adopted rules. Earlier that day more than 800 students and faculty at a Memorial Hall meeting had backed Aptheker's right to speak.
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Nicholson criticizes SDS over the Aptheker invitation while backing the principle
The Carolina Forum chairman called the Students for a Democratic Society invitation to Herbert Aptheker ill-timed and planned for sensationalism, and said the Forum had joined the invitation only in support of the principle of free speech.
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Nicholson rebuts the Conservative Club chairman's charge about Forum speakers
Answering Carolina Conservative Club chairman Wilson Clark, Nicholson said the Forum's budget was 2,000 dollars rather than 6,000, that it had invited conservative speakers, and that John Birch Society founder Robert Welch was coming to campus later that month.
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J. Carlyle Sitterson serves as chief administrator of UNC at Chapel Hill
Sitterson was the chief administrative officer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from February 16, 1966 to January 31, 1972. His records as chancellor cover desegregation and the federal HEW lawsuit, the Speaker Ban law, protest against the Vietnam War and campus unrest.
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Stuart Matthews and Gary Waller write to Chancellor Sitterson inviting Herbert Aptheker
On the day the full board of trustees adopted new speaker regulations, Matthews and Waller wrote to Acting Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson for the UNC Chapel Hill chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, asking that Herbert Aptheker be allowed to speak on campus about the war in Vietnam on March 9. The letter set out his publications, speaking engagements and his Supreme Court passport case.
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The UNC Board of Trustees adopts visiting-speaker procedures under the amended Speaker Ban
Acting under G.S. 116-199 and 116-200, the full Board of Trustees adopted procedures requiring recognized student groups to clear invitations to covered speakers with the chancellor. The students complied with them when they renewed the Wilkinson and Aptheker invitations, and the court later found the procedures as vague as the statute.
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Gary Waller becomes chairman of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society
A UNC Libraries exhibit states that Waller, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, was vice chairman of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and became chairman when Jim McCorkel resigned on February 2, 1966 to spend more time on his graduate studies.
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Eight student groups re-invite Frank Wilkinson under the trustees' new speaker rules
The day after the full board of trustees adopted speaker regulations on February 28, Paul Dickson and leaders of the Carolina Forum, the YMCA, the YWCA, the Daily Tar Heel, the Di-Phi, Students for a Democratic Society and the Carolina Political Union formally told Acting Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson that Wilkinson was invited for March 2 and Aptheker for March 9. Wilkinson spoke to the Duke Bar Association in Durham that day.
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Barred from Carroll Hall, Frank Wilkinson speaks to about 350 people at the Hillel House
That evening campus security officer Arthur Beaumont, acting on the chancellor's orders, kept Wilkinson, Paul Dickson and about 200 students out of Carroll Hall, and the group moved to the Hillel House on Cameron Avenue, where almost 350 people heard Wilkinson speak on HUAC. He told them a test case with several plaintiffs would be prepared at once.
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Barred from campus by the Speaker Ban, Frank Wilkinson addressed UNC students from the Chapel Hill side of the wall
After Acting Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson refused him campus speaking privileges, Frank Wilkinson spoke for about 10 minutes from the Franklin Street sidewalk while about 1,200 students and faculty stood across the low stone wall on McCorkle Place. Student body president Paul Dickson introduced him and predicted a court case.
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Herbert Aptheker gives his evening talk at the Community Church
Kept off campus, Aptheker gave his evening talk to about 350 people at the interdenominational Community Church on Purefoy Road. Paul Dickson then announced a Free Speech Defense Fund to pay for a lawsuit.
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Herbert Aptheker speaks to students across the McCorkle Place wall
At noon Paul Dickson led Aptheker, invited by SDS and the Committee for Free Inquiry, onto McCorkle Place near the Confederate monument, where campus police chief Arthur Beaumont halted Dickson's introduction and warned of arrest. Aptheker crossed the low stone wall to the Franklin Street sidewalk and spoke to a crowd estimated at 2,000 to 3,000 on the campus side.
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