Search and filters
Search and filters · 1 active
41 dated events match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–41.Back to highlights
Entries
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1880s
-
Frank Porter Graham was born
Frank Porter Graham was born in Fayetteville; he later led UNC.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
-
Nonfraternity juniors elect a fraternity man class president and hold an open junior prom
Frank Porter Graham helped rally the nonfraternity majority of his class to elect a fraternity member as president on merit, breaking a long custom, and the class held a junior promenade open to every man in it.
- 1910s
-
Students start night classes for the Black men who served the dormitories
Asked for help by the young Black workers who cut firewood and carried water in the dormitories, students began teaching them reading and arithmetic in what were called moonlight schools. Under Frank Porter Graham at the campus YMCA the classes grew to take in history, English, writing, debating, home sanitation and the Bible.
-
A YMCA lecture series on Black life in the South is held for students
Frank Graham and the campus YMCA organized lectures on 'Negro life in the South.' Professor Harry W. Chase told students that Black citizens were a third of the population but received a sixteenth of school spending, and that what they did not pay in property taxes they made up in fines. A second series was held five years later.
-
The Chapel Hill Community Club runs an improvement contest in a Black neighborhood
Susan Moses Graham and the Community Club, with YMCA students under Frank Porter Graham, organized a project in an African American neighborhood at the edge of town, giving prizes for the cleanest house, the cleanest yard and the best fence.
-
Frank Porter Graham becomes dean of students
Chase brought Graham back from the Marines over the summer to fill the new post of dean of students, in charge of discipline and of reviving student government after the SATC, while also teaching history. He agreed to try it for a year.
-
The University opens its first postwar year with a record 1,350 students
On opening day almost 400 freshmen filled Memorial Hall to hear Chase. Enrollment reached 1,350, about 500 more than the spring before; three or four men shared rooms built for two, some 600 boarded in the village, and 80 veterans of the AEF formed a club.
- 1920s
-
Forty-three alumni meet at the Coop and start the campaign for the state's colleges
Telegrams sent in Chase's name by Frank Porter Graham and alumni secretary Edgar R. Rankin brought 43 alumni to the Coop, an off-campus boardinghouse, where talk of the crowding went on past midnight. The book counts the meeting as the start of the citizens' movement that won the 1921 building appropriation.
-
Frank Porter Graham takes the higher-education campaign to Hillsboro alumni
A day after Greensboro alumni founded the Association for the Promotion of Higher Education, Graham spoke to an alumni meeting in Hillsboro, one of nearly two dozen club gatherings across the state that October.
-
Frank Graham leads a faculty resolution urging Chase to stay
While Chase was in Oregon being offered that university's presidency, Frank Porter Graham took the floor at a specially called faculty meeting and won adoption, without a word of dissent, of a resolution praising Chase and tying his staying to the cause of freedom and tolerance. It was wired to Chase in Portland.
-
Chase's memorandum warns faculty against advocacy that embarrasses the university
Under attack from textile editor David Clark, Chase sent Howard Odum, Dudley D. Carroll and Frank Graham a discussion memo on proper activities for social scientists. Faculty whose causes involved colleagues in general embarrassment should leave, he wrote; in North Carolina such causes included certain taxes, labor organizing, racial equality and socialism.
-
A workmen's compensation law that Frank Graham and Harry Wolf helped write passes
Sixteen earlier bills had failed, but with Governor O. Max Gardner's backing the 1929 General Assembly passed a no-fault workmen's compensation act. Frank Graham lobbied for it, and he and economics professor Harry Wolf helped draft it; the governor's support kept textile interests from objecting to Graham's role.
-
Chase refuses a mill official's demand that Frank Graham be fired
After the Southern Textile Bulletin wrongly placed Graham at a Communist Labor Day rally, an official of the company that owned Gastonia's Loray Mill asked Governor Gardner to have him dismissed. In the reply Gardner passed along, Chase said Graham had been in New York and that faculty had the same right as other citizens to form and voice opinions, and he would resist any censorship of those seeking change by lawful means.
- 1930s
-
Alexander H. Graham chairs the committee that chooses Frank Porter Graham as UNC president
Alexander H. Graham chaired the committee that hired Frank Porter Graham as president of the University of North Carolina in 1930. His papers hold the committee correspondence from February to May 1930.
-
Frank Graham circulates his Industrial Bill of Rights
Answering the 1929 Gastonia strike deaths, Graham gathered more than four hundred signers across the state, among them Odum, Branson, Poteat and Walter Murphy, though not Chase. He made it the theme of his mid-April 1930 address as president of the North Carolina Conference for Social Service, ignoring advice to soften it while the trustees searched for a president.
-
Trustees elect Frank Porter Graham president of the university
Meeting in Howell Hall during commencement, the trustees voted without nominations. R. D. W. Connor led the first ballot 26 to 20, but Graham took a majority of 47 on the fourth, and the vote was made unanimous. Found walking by Battle Park and brought in, Graham asked that Connor be chosen instead, then accepted.
-
UNC establishes its School of Library Science
A School of Library Science was added at Chapel Hill in 1931, early in Frank Porter Graham's presidency.
-
Frank Porter Graham is inaugurated as president in Kenan Stadium
On Armistice Day, delegates from campuses across the country attended a full-dress ceremony in the stadium. In an address of more than an hour and a quarter, Graham restated the university's freedom to teach and to report findings whatever powerful lobbies thought, and praised Chase. It was the last such inauguration for the Chapel Hill campus alone.
-
Kennon Cheek moves that the Janitors' Association give to the student loan fund
Frank Porter Graham came to an association meeting to tell the janitors that the Depression would cut their wages but that everyone would come through together. Cheek then moved that the Janitors' Association give five dollars to the fund set up to keep students in school, the first campus organization to contribute to it.
-
The university is consolidated with the Greensboro and Raleigh colleges
In 1932 the university at Chapel Hill, the North Carolina College for Women at Greensboro and State College at Raleigh were joined administratively into one University of North Carolina.
-
UNC names W. C. Jackson dean of a new School of Public Administration
Graham and Odum announced Jackson, history chair at the Woman's College in Greensboro, as dean of the school Odum had planned for three years with a small state allocation. Graham urged Coates to fold the Institute into it and made him one of its trustees, but Coates kept apart; short of state money, the school was dissolved after Jackson returned to Greensboro as chancellor.
-
Albert Coates convenes the Institute of Government's first statewide school for public officials
About six hundred officials and citizens from nearly every county came to Chapel Hill for a two-day meeting Coates had promoted all summer. Frank Graham opened the Friday evening session in Gerrard Hall and Harvard law dean Roscoe Pound gave the closing address on Saturday, when the organizing committee approved hiring Coates as director with a staff.
-
Dean Isaac Hall Manning resigns after President Graham overrules his Jewish quota
Manning limited the admission of Jewish medical students. When Morris Krasny, a rejected Jewish applicant, appealed, President Frank Porter Graham ordered him admitted, and Manning resigned rather than change his decision.
-
Coates and law dean Van Hecke withdraw their resignations after meeting with President Graham
That spring law dean Maurice T. Van Hecke had recommended that Coates stop teaching and work only for the Institute, and first Coates and then Van Hecke offered to resign. At a June 6 meeting in Graham's South Building office both stayed on: Coates got a fall leave and a second chance in the law school, and he agreed to stop presenting the law school or the university as the Institute's sponsor.
-
Janitors' Association president Elliot Washington asks for help joining a union
In 1934 Dean Robert House wrote to President Frank Porter Graham about a request from association president Elliot Washington for help with union membership, since the janitors could not afford local union dues.
-
Robert B. House becomes Dean of Administration at Chapel Hill
As part of consolidation, President Frank Graham chose Robert Burton House, confirmed by the trustees in 1934, as Dean of Administration for the Chapel Hill campus. His title became chancellor in 1945.
-
Graham refuses to move Albert Coates out of the law school
In May 1935 Dean Van Hecke reported that Coates's teaching had failed again and, with the whole law faculty behind him, asked that Coates be freed from law school duties to run the Institute. Coates threatened to demand an academic trial; Graham declined the transfer and again refused Van Hecke's offer to resign, and Coates rejoined the law faculty in February 1936 and taught there for thirty years.
-
Trustees offer land and the PWA approves a grant for an Institute of Government building
University trustees agreed to give the Institute a site valued at $15,000 on the western edge of the campus south of the Carolina Inn, the building to go to the university if the Institute ended. The Public Works Administration approved $55,498 for labor, one of 52 grants from 300 applications in the state, toward a building then estimated at $123,000.
-
UNC rejects Pauli Murray's graduate application
Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham and lived in New York, applied to UNC's graduate school in 1938 to study with Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson. On December 14, two days after the Supreme Court's Gaines ruling, Dean W. W. Pierson rejected her because of her race, and her appeals to President Frank Porter Graham became national news.
-
House Speaker William Bankhead dedicates the Institute of Government building
On the eve of Thanksgiving a standing-room crowd in Hill Music Hall heard Bankhead, Governor Clyde Hoey and President Frank Graham praise Coates, with eight of the state's eleven congressmen and former governor O. Max Gardner on hand. A reception followed in Graham Memorial, and guests stayed for the Virginia football game the next day.
- 1940s
-
A Chapel Hill chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies is organized
Frank Graham and Durham banker George Watts Hill were among the first North Carolinians to sign on with the national committee formed in 1940, and chapters were organized in Chapel Hill and Asheville. Covington describes Chapel Hill as a center of support for the Allies while both of the state's senators opposed involvement.
-
The university founds the Inter-American Institute, with Leavitt as director
President Frank Porter Graham founded the Inter-American Institute in 1940, growing out of Leavitt's work building Latin American research collections. Leavitt directed it until 1959; it took the name Institute of Latin American Studies in 1947.
-
UNC offers its faculty and laboratories to the national defense
Twenty months before Pearl Harbor, the university president telegraphed Washington putting UNC faculty, laboratories and equipment at the government's service; the trustees confirmed the step at their August meeting.
-
The university hosts 108 South American students in its Winter-Summer School
In 1941 the university received 108 students from seven South American countries for English courses and regular classes in a program Leavitt directed. The General Assembly met in special joint session in Chapel Hill in their honor.
-
Eleanor Roosevelt speaks at Memorial Hall to close a post-war planning conference
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in Memorial Hall at UNC to a capacity audience of about 2,000 people, closing a two-day conference on post-war planning sponsored by the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service. She warned the audience that there was no going back to normalcy.
-
Governor Broughton speaks at a Pre-Flight School graduation in Kenan Stadium
Broughton and UNC president Frank Porter Graham both spoke at Navy Pre-Flight School graduation exercises in Kenan Stadium on June 2, 1943.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
-
R. B. House becomes the first chancellor at Chapel Hill
North Carolina created chancellorships for its three campuses in 1945, and President Frank Porter Graham turned to House, who had been executive secretary from 1926 and dean of administration from 1934. House held the post until 1957, the longest chancellorship at Chapel Hill.
-
Carmichael serves as acting president of the consolidated university
Carmichael was acting president in 1949 and 1950, after Frank Porter Graham resigned to take a seat in the United States Senate.
-
Governor Kerr Scott appoints UNC President Frank Graham to the U.S. Senate
On March 22, 1949, Governor W. Kerr Scott named Frank Porter Graham to the United States Senate, ending his presidency of the university. Controller W. D. Carmichael Jr. became acting president.
- 1970s
-
Frank Porter Graham is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972), first president of the consolidated University of North Carolina and later a United States senator, was buried in the cemetery.
Suggest a correction to an entry →
A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. 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. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. 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 October 2, 2026.
