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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1850s
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Zebulon Vance studies law at Chapel Hill
Vance entered the University of North Carolina early in 1851 and spent the rest of the year at Chapel Hill studying law under Judge William H. Battle and Samuel F. Phillips. He obtained his law licence in December 1851 and set up an office at Asheville early in 1852.
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Legislature transfers the university's escheats to the common schools
The General Assembly took the right to escheats from the university and gave it to the public schools. Friends of the university soon won repeal, and the Supreme Court later held that the university, as a part of the state, was subject to such legislation.
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John W. Carr sits as a justice of the county court
Carr was one of five justices holding the February 1852 term of the Orange County court, which elected a Board of Superintendents of Common Schools and set the county tax.
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Judge John L. Bailey buys the Norwood house south of the Eno and names it Eno Lodge
Superior court judge John Lancaster Bailey bought the house above the Eno from Joseph C. Norwood, probably added the rear ell and north bay, and called it Eno Lodge. He lived there until about the start of the Civil War, when he moved to Buncombe County.
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Samuel F. Phillips teaches in the university law school
From 1854 to 1859 Phillips taught in the university law school at Chapel Hill.
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Abner Burnette is twice prosecuted for carrying a gun and once recorded as Indian
Abner Burnette of the Texas community was indicted in Alamance County in 1855 for carrying a gun, which was unlawful for free persons of color. He pled guilty and was fined thirty one dollars. Indicted again in 1860 he pled not guilty, was convicted and was fined five cents. The 1860 census for Orange County recorded him as Indian, and the 1870 Alamance County census as mulatto.
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Revised Code tightens the laws around the university
The state's Revised Code barred the sale of liquor within two miles of Chapel Hill, public gaming tables within five, and shows, concerts and performances within five miles without seven days' written leave from the president or faculty. It also voided students' contracts with merchants made without faculty permission and restored escheated real estate to the university.
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Thomas Webb serves as Orange County's clerk and master in equity
Thomas Webb signed notices as clerk and master of the Court of Equity for Orange County, at his office in Hillsborough, from at least 1855 into 1862.
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Old belfry burns and the college bell is destroyed
During a student game of throwing alcohol-soaked fireballs, the old belfry caught fire and burned and its bell was destroyed. The executive committee sent the facts to the Orange solicitor, but no bill went to the grand jury, and the two literary societies agreed to fine any member $25 for wanton damage to university property.
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Alves, an enslaved man sentenced to death, is baptized at St. Matthew's
St. Matthew's register records the baptism of Alves, "a slave under sentence of death," with James Waddell as witness.
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John W. Graham joins the university faculty as a Latin tutor
A year after taking his A.B. in 1857, John W. Graham became a tutor in Latin at the University of North Carolina. He finished a law degree there in 1860.
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Students of a lawless club riot and are sued for damages
A club of students sworn to back each other in breaking rules rang and stole the bell, stoned the faculty and piled the classroom benches and blackboards for a bonfire. The leaders were expelled and, sued in Orange Superior Court, made to repay the university about $200.
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Frederick Nash dies in Hillsborough and is buried in the Old Town Cemetery
Nash fell ill returning from a synod meeting at New Bern and died in December 1858 at his Hillsborough home, while serving as chief justice of the state supreme court. He was buried in the Hillsborough Old Town Cemetery.
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Samuel F. Phillips closes his law school and shares the office with Judge Battle
Phillips, who had taught law in his Franklin Street office since 1854, closed the school, went back to practice, and shared the building with Judge William Horn Battle.
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Corporators organize the Hillsborough Savings Institution
The corporators of the Hillsborough Savings Institution, among them Thomas Webb, William A. Graham, James F. Cain and Pride Jones, met in the county court clerk's office on April 1, 1859, adopted the charter and appointed Webb and others to open subscription books. By December 1860 Webb was its cashier.
- 1860s
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North Carolina secedes from the Union
Meeting in Raleigh on May 20, 1861, the state convention, with Orange County's delegates William A. Graham and John Berry among its members, unanimously adopted an ordinance dissolving North Carolina's union with the United States and the same day ratified the provisional Confederate constitution.
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Orange County elects William A. Graham to the secession convention
Graham had led Union men in defeating a February 1861 referendum to call a convention on disunion. After Fort Sumter he was elected by a large margin to represent Orange County in the Constitutional Convention of May 1861, where he stood unsuccessfully for the presidency of the convention before voting for secession.
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The Orange County court sets aside $50,000 for soldiers' families
Recognizing that many volunteers were men of small means, the county court appropriated $50,000 to support their families. The fund lasted until late in the war.
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Hillsborough meeting resolves to erect a monument to Col. Charles C. Tew
A Hillsborough meeting chaired by M. E. Manly resolved to raise a monument to Col. Tew, killed at Sharpsburg, at or near the front of his Military Academy, and named Dr. Edmund Strudwick, Dr. Pride Jones and Thomas Webb to collect funds and build it.
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The county court sets its 1865 levy for poor relief and soldiers' families
The February court matched the state tax on land and polls and split the money: $15,000 for poor relief, $10,000 for county purposes and the rest for soldiers' families. The previous August, presiding justice James C. Turrentine had called all the justices together on the families' support.
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Confederate leaders gather at Hillsborough
Wade Hampton and Joseph E. Johnston used the Dickson farm on the edge of Hillsborough as a temporary headquarters while Johnston negotiated with Sherman, and Confederate officials including Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge came there to work on terms. Johnston and his staff rode from the Dickson place along the old Hillsborough to Durham road to complete the surrender.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Freedpeople register their marriages in Orange County
An 1866 state law declared formerly enslaved couples who had lived together as husband and wife legally married and required them to register their unions, most often with the county register of deeds. Orange County’s cohabitation records from that registration survive at the State Archives and are digitized in North Carolina Digital Collections.
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John W. Graham serves as Orange County solicitor
After the Civil War, John W. Graham of Hillsborough was solicitor for Orange County from 1866 to 1868, before going as a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention and into the state senate.
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Sheriff H. B. Guthrie announces that the county treasury is empty
His notice to taxpayers said no county tax had been levied or collected for 1865, the treasury held not a dollar and the wardens of the poor were deep in debt. He set fifteen collection days in July.
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Black men vote in Orange County's first Reconstruction election
Under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, Black men registered and voted alongside white men in the November 19-20, 1867 election for a state constitutional convention. Orange County elected E. M. Holt and J. W. Graham as delegates.
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Governor Holden appoints Wilson Caldwell a justice of the peace
In 1868 Governor William W. Holden appointed Wilson Swain Caldwell a justice of the peace. Caldwell had been enslaved by university president David L. Swain and had worked at the university since boyhood; he taught school for a time before returning to the university in 1875.
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The Court of Wardens of the Poor holds its last meeting
The seven-member wardens' court, which had run poor relief and the county poorhouse, met for the last time before the new board of county commissioners took over its work.
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Court strikes down the act for a state-built railroad to Chapel Hill
An 1869 plan had the state build a line from the North Carolina Railroad to Chapel Hill through commissioners, paid for with $300,000 in state bonds. When the commissioners chose Henry C. Thompson as president over Governor Holden's choice, Holden refused to sign the bonds, and in the University Railroad Company's suit against him the court held the act unconstitutional over Judge Reade's dissent.
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Solomon Pool buys Nancy Hilliard's house, the Crystal Palace, at a sheriff's sale
When the hotel keeper Nancy Hilliard went bankrupt, university president Solomon Pool bought her Franklin Street home, known as the Crystal Palace, at a sheriff's sale for $150. He let Col. Hugh B. Guthrie and his wife Jane, a daughter of Hudson Cave, move in, which Bryant reads as a way of forcing Hilliard out.
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The sheriff auctions the former Burwell School to David C. Parks
Dr. Thomas D. Warren was deep in local debt, and the Orange County sheriff sold the house at auction to David C. Parks for $600. Parks and his brother Charles traded the property between them for the next quarter century.
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Federal court dismisses the state's suit to void the university's bank mortgage
The Reconstruction trustees had the state sue in the United States Circuit Court, returnable at the June 1869 term, to cancel the university's mortgage to the Bank of North Carolina, but Judges Hugh L. Bond and George W. Brooks dismissed the bill for want of jurisdiction. On July 20, 1871 the trustees present advised against an appeal.
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Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow and Daniel Morrow are lynched
Early on August 7, 1869, about 100 disguised white men took Washington Morrow and his brother Nelson from the Hillsborough jail, where they were held on barn-burning charges, and shot Washington as they fled; he died of the wound. On October 14 a mob hanged their father, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, and their uncle, Daniel Morrow.
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Klansmen take two Black prisoners from jail and shoot one of them
A few nights after three barns burned in late July 1869, two Black men accused of another barn burning were taken from jail. One was let go; the other was shot and died.
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Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County
Six people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. In September 2022 the county commissioners apologized for racial-terror lynchings and approved markers, citing five cases without naming the victims.
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Wright Malone is abducted and lynched near Little River
On the night of September 6, 1869, four mounted men took Wright Malone, a young Black farmer, from the coal kiln he was burning with his father near Little River in eastern Orange County. A neighbor found his body hanging from a tree on September 12, and the coroner concluded the killing had been planned in advance.
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Cyrus Guy is lynched by a masked mob in western Orange County
A masked mob seized Cyrus Guy, a 24-year-old Afro-Indigenous farmer from a free family of color, and hanged him from a tree on the High Rock Road near the Alamance County line, above the county poorhouse. The Hillsborough Recorder reported that an inquest held under Sheriff Turner found out nothing, and Ben Johnson recalled in 1937 that the body was left hanging for four days.
- 1870s
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Disguised men whip residents of the county poorhouse
Men in disguise entered the poorhouse at night and whipped several of the men and women living there. On March 10 the commissioners offered a $200 reward for the attackers, over the written protest of commissioner W. N. Patterson, who defended the raiders' motives.
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Rival claimants to Chapel Hill's town offices are told to stand down
On March 30, 1870, the Chapel Hill commissioners recorded that a group of residents claimed to be the village's officers, had taken some of the town's books and papers and had named A. Mickle magistrate of police. On April 1, Solomon Pool reported that their election had been held without any law authorizing it, on informal notice from T. M. Argo, and the board adopted his advice to take no action if they gave up the books.
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Kirk's militia arrests Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough
On August 5, 1870, a detachment of Kirk's state militia seized Raleigh Sentinel editor Josiah Turner Jr. at or near Hillsborough, took him by rail to Company Shops and then held him with Kirk's other prisoners in the Caswell County courthouse at Yanceyville. U.S. District Judge George W. Brooks ordered him discharged on August 19, 1870, on his habeas corpus petition.
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Strudwick is kept off the impeachment managers because of his Klan reputation
After guiding the impeachment resolution through the house judiciary committee and the full house, Strudwick was not chosen as a manager for the senate trial. It was feared that his widely known association with the Ku Klux Klan would make the proceedings look like a Klan prosecution.
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Joseph Blount Cheshire studies law under William K. Ruffin at Hillsborough
Cheshire read law for several months under William K. Ruffin of Hillsborough, a son of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin. He then worked three months in a Tarboro law office and was licensed in January 1872.
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U.S. Senate committee hears Orange County testimony on Klan violence
A Senate select committee created on January 19, 1871 took testimony in Washington on Klan violence in North Carolina. Orange County witnesses, including Hillsborough constable W. G. Turrentine, court clerk George Laws and editor Josiah Turner Jr., described the 1869 jail raid, hangings and whippings in the county. The committee reported on March 10, 1871.
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Lucinda Morrow of Hillsborough testifies at Governor Holden's impeachment trial
Called by Holden's defense, Lucinda Morrow, then living in Hillsborough, described disguised men breaking into her Cane Creek home in Orange County in the fall of 1869 and hanging her husband, Thomas Jefferson Morrow. Prosecution counsel William A. Graham objected to her evidence, and Augustus S. Merrimon argued it was irrelevant unless tied to Alamance County.
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Senate convicts Holden on the article charging Turner's arrest in Orange County
The state Senate found Governor Holden guilty, 37 to 12, on Article III, which charged him with the unlawful arrest of Josiah Turner Jr. in Orange County on August 5, 1870, and also convicted him on Articles IV through VIII. Senator John W. Graham of Orange then offered the order of judgment removing Holden from office and barring him from state office, which the Senate adopted.
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The Hillsborough Presbyterian session asks that members be allowed to withdraw without church trial
The session resolved to ask presbytery to propose to the General Assembly a change in discipline, so that a member living outside the church's standards could leave its communion without a formal trial. After this, discipline cases disappear from the minutes.
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Andrew Mickle serves as Chapel Hill's magistrate of police
Under the town charter the commissioners chose a magistrate of police to preside at their meetings, and Andrew Mickle held the office in 1874 and 1875. In March 1870 a rival group of citizens claiming to be the town's officers had named him to the post, which the sitting board said was without authority of law.
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The new trustees sue Solomon Pool and Alexander McIver at Orange Superior Court and win possession of the university in the Supreme Court
At the May 1874 term of Orange Superior Court the new board brought one action against Superintendent Alexander McIver, who held the university's seal and books and had agreed to a friendly test suit, and another against Solomon Pool for the buildings. Judge Albion W. Tourgee ruled against the trustees; John W. Graham and James A. Graham of Hillsborough argued for them without fee, as did B. F. Moore and William H. Battle on appeal in June 1874. At its January term 1875 the state Supreme Court decided for the university on every point, and possession passed to Andrew Mickle, the board's agent, with the seal, books and papers going to Treasurer Kemp Battle.
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Federal court rules the campus cannot be sold for the bank debt
In the suit of Charles Dewey, assignee in bankruptcy of the Bank of North Carolina, to sell the university's property under its mortgage, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite with Judges Hugh L. Bond and George W. Brooks held the debt valid. They ruled that neither the trustees nor a creditor could sell the property that made up the life of the institution, as distinct from its endowment.
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William A. Graham dies and is buried at Hillsborough
Graham died unexpectedly at Saratoga Springs, New York, on 11 August 1875, where he had gone for a meeting of the Virginia and Maryland arbitration commission. He was buried in the cemetery adjacent to the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church. He had been elected a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1875 but died before it assembled.
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John W. Graham serves on the university board of trustees
John W. Graham sat on the University of North Carolina board of trustees from 1876 until his death in 1928, and from 1891 he was an elected member of its executive committee.
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William Horn Battle returns to Chapel Hill to teach law
Battle had left for Raleigh in 1868 when Reconstruction politics disrupted the university. When his law school reopened at Chapel Hill in January 1877, while his son Kemp was president, he returned as professor of law, and he taught until he resigned in January 1879, shortly before his death that March.
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Three men hanged for a string of Chapel Hill burglaries
In 1877 a band of four broke into six houses in and near Chapel Hill and wounded the widow Margaret Hendon with an axe blade while trying to rob her. Albert Atwater, a Black man held for a lesser offense, confessed and named two white men and a Black man, who were convicted in Orange Superior Court and hanged on April 16, 1878 after Governor Jarvis refused clemency.
- 1880s
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The upstairs courtroom of the Orange County Courthouse is renovated
In the 1880s the second-floor courtroom of John Berry's 1844-1845 courthouse on East King Street was renovated; the rest of the interior keeps most of its original finish.
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John Manning teaches law at the university
Elected professor of law in 1881, John Manning taught at Chapel Hill while keeping a private practice, and law enrollment grew from seven students to eighty-seven by 1897-98.
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Lisbon Berry becomes Orange County's first Black lawyer
Lisbon Payne Berry, born enslaved in Hillsborough in 1850, studied law in Hillsborough and was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1882, becoming the first Black attorney in Orange County.
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Dr. Pride Jones serves as Orange County clerk of superior court
Dr. Pride Jones followed George Laws, clerk for thirty years, as clerk of the superior court of Orange County and held the office from 1883 to 1888, when Samuel M. Gattis succeeded him.
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The university begins leasing its Franklin Street land to faculty for houses
Because a federal court had ruled about 600 acres around the campus inalienable, the trustees leased a Franklin Street parcel to James Lee Love for fifty years, followed by leases to Charles Baskerville and Francis K. Ball. Later, on legal advice, such lots were sold outright to faculty members.
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Student Jacob A. Freeze is shot dead during a clash between students and Black residents
After a student quarreled with a Black man, Pat Brewer, a group of students besieged Jack Barbee's house in Chapel Hill, where Brewer and others had gathered, and a shot from inside killed Jacob A. Freeze, a first-year student from Rowan County, about 1 a.m. on Sunday, October 10, 1886. After the state Supreme Court upheld the sentences in December 1887, Brewer went to the penitentiary for ten years and Frank Kirby and Jesse Harris for five each. Battle, writing later, gives Pat seven years and says he escaped.
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Samuel M. Gattis becomes chairman of the Orange County Democratic executive committee
In the year he began practicing law in Hillsborough, Gattis was elected chairman of the Orange County Democratic executive committee and a delegate to the party's national convention.
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Judge Walter Clark gives the annual address at the 1888 commencement
Chosen by the Philanthropic Society, Walter Clark gave the annual address on the Wednesday of the 1888 commencement, speaking on the opportunities before young men and the duties that came with them.
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Samuel M. Gattis becomes clerk of the Orange County superior court
Judge Gilmer appointed the young Hillsborough lawyer clerk of the superior court after Dr. Pride Jones resigned. Gattis was elected to the office in 1889 and held it until 1894.
- 1890s
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The state superintendent tells Orange County to make its sheriff pay over the school taxes
Teachers were holding $500 in unpaid orders with nothing in the school treasury because Sheriff John Knox Hughes had not turned over the taxes he collected. Asked for advice, the state superintendent advised Patton to collect from the sheriff or take him to court.
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The university confers an honorary doctorate of laws on Zebulon Vance
The University of North Carolina awarded Vance an honorary LL.D. in 1890, listing him as a student who had entered in 1851.
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Frederick Strudwick dies and Hillsborough holds a meeting in his honor
Strudwick died on 29 July 1890 after an illness of several months and was buried in the Hillsborough Cemetery. A special town meeting led by C. E. Parish was convened in his honor. Between the legislature and his death he had served as solicitor for the Fifth District for eight years.
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The school board hires D. H. Thompson to audit the sheriff's school accounts
Rather than sue, the board engaged Major D. H. Thompson to go through Sheriff Hughes's accounts of school money, hoping to settle the matter without a lawsuit.
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Frank Nash returns to Hillsborough to live and write
After breakdowns in health ended most of his Tarboro law practice, Frank Nash moved back to Hillsborough, where he had grown up at the Nash-Kollock school. He stayed about twenty years and began writing historical romances and local history.
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Manly McCauley is lynched near Carrboro
Manly McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, left Milton Brewer's farm west of Chapel Hill with Brewer's wife on October 26, 1898. A posse caught them beyond Jonesboro, and on the way back masked men took McCauley from the officer holding him and hanged him. His body was found on November 6, about three miles west of Chapel Hill.
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Manly McCauley's body is found hanging from a tree three miles west of Chapel Hill
A farmer, Thomas Myrick, found McCauley's body hanging from a bent dogwood beside the public road some three miles west of Chapel Hill, a week after masked men had taken him from the officer bringing him back. Coroner Jordan was telegraphed to hold an inquest.
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W. A. Guthrie urges Chapel Hill voters to the polls for the white supremacy ticket the day after McCauley's body is found
With McCauley's body found the previous afternoon, Major W. A. Guthrie spoke at Chapel Hill on election eve, appealing to white voters to cast their ballots for the party of white supremacy; A. L. Brooks, the Democratic candidate for solicitor, followed him. The state election was held the next day.
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Jesse King, the officer who held McCauley, is tried and acquitted at Hillsborough
King, returning alone to Chapel Hill with his prisoner, was met by masked men who overpowered him and hanged McCauley from a dogwood. Tried at Hillsboro for permitting the prisoner to be taken from him by the mob, he was acquitted; the News and Observer used the trial to confirm that the lynching had in fact happened.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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A state Supreme Court ruling unseats a legislature-named school director in Orange
Following a North Carolina Supreme Court decision on the 1899 school act, the county board reorganized: director Stephen Forrest lost his seat and A. R. Holmes of the old Board of Education returned to finish a term running to July 1900.
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The superior court orders the old Ruffin place sold to Nannie Russell Roulhac
Under a superior court judgment, Allen J. Ruffin was named commissioner to convey the ten-acre Ruffin place to Mrs. Nannie Russell Roulhac of Rockingham County for $100 in cash and a mortgage note of $1,455.
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Martha Hall sells the Ellis house to Sheriff R. D. Baine
After Nelson Hall died, his widow Martha bought the house and farm from his estate and sold them two years later to Orange County sheriff R. D. Baine.
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Judge W. P. Bynum gives the university a gymnasium
Judge William Preston Bynum paid for a gymnasium on the campus in memory of his grandson and namesake, a student who died before graduating, and presented it to the trustees by letter in May 1905. Dr. Richard H. Lewis accepted it at commencement.
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Attorney Frank Nash inherits the old Strudwick office and makes it his office and home
Frank Nash inherited the former Strudwick medical and law office at 139 West King Street and used it as both his law office and his home. It has been a private house since 1924.
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A Queen Anne house is built on West King Street for Samuel Mallett Gattis
The two-story house at 158 West King Street was built for lawyer Samuel Mallett Gattis, former clerk of superior court and Speaker of the state House in 1903. The Gattis family also rebuilt the lot's old wellhouse that year.
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The university adds a new athletic field and tennis courts
By University Day 1908 the university had laid out a new athletic field for about $1,000 and built more tennis courts, and a new dissecting hall was in use.
- 1910s
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Frank Nash serves as attorney for Orange County
Nash was the county attorney for four years, while also an elder of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church and chairman of the county Democratic executive committee.
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Walter Clark helps teach the university's Summer Law School
Chief Justice Walter Clark assisted in the university's Summer Law School, which enrolled thirty-seven students.
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The General Assembly makes hazing a crime
After the outcry over Rand's death the 1913 legislature outlawed hazing; the same session gave the university enough to keep growing and money for a new dining hall.
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Three students are convicted in Hillsborough in Isaac William Rand's death
At the Orange County Courthouse one of the four defendants was freed after the first testimony, and a jury of Orange County farmers found the other three guilty within a few hours. The judge gave the minimum four months with the option of hiring them out, and their families paid the fees and took them home the same day.
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Six students and the track trainer are arrested in a Chapel Hill craps game
The authorities found the floating game when a loser wrote a bad check; a few townspeople were arrested too, the faculty suspended the students, and the trainer resigned.
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Margaret Berry becomes the first woman to graduate from UNC's law school
Margaret Berry of the Hillsborough Berry family, who had finished her UNC undergraduate degree in 1913, graduated from the university's law school in 1915, the first woman to do so. That summer she passed the state bar examination, listed as Margaret Kollock Berry of Orange.
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Oscar Efird organizes the Law School Association
Law teacher Oscar Ogburn Efird turned the school's loose moot courts into appellate-style law clubs under a Law School Association. It faded after he left the next year.
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The clerk of superior court becomes judge of Orange County's juvenile court
A 1919 state law required a juvenile court in every county. In Orange, as in most counties, the clerk of superior court was made its judge.
- 1920s
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Louis Graves reports that Orange County has the state's biggest illicit distilling
Writing in the New Republic, Graves said North Carolina led the country in illicit still capacity and that Orange County, home of the University, had the largest distilling operations in the state, ahead of Wilkes.
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Orange County women vote in a presidential election after the Nineteenth Amendment
Orange County women could vote for president for the first time on November 2, 1920, after registering by October 23 without paying a poll tax. In an October 15 speech at the Chapel Hill high school auditorium, Governor Thomas Bickett said women should cast their votes. Literacy tests and hostile registrars kept many Black women off the rolls.
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Courts clear the University's claim to $75,000 a year from the Bingham estate
Five years of litigation over Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham's bequest ended in late 1922, confirming the University's right to an annual income of $75,000 from her estate.
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The law school moves to a three-year course with new entrance rules
By the end of 1922 the law curriculum had become a three-year course of study with new admission requirements, part of Dean Lucius McGehee's effort to meet American Bar Association standards.
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University trustees name the new law building for John Manning
At their June 13, 1922 meeting the university trustees approved naming the new law building for John Manning. The School of Law moved into Manning Hall before the fall 1923 semester.
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"Judge" Brockwell's cabin at the edge of Battle Park burns
The cabin known as "Judge" Brockwell's, on the edge of Battle Park, burns down. Early in 1924 coach Bill Fetzer bought the plot in the new Gimghoul development and planned a Colonial house there.
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Albert Coates joins the law faculty at Chapel Hill
Coates, a university graduate with a Harvard law degree, joined the law faculty in 1923. The schools he ran for police officers and sheriffs grew into the Institute of Government.
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Law dean Lucius McGehee dies
McGehee, dean since 1910 and the man who brought the casebook method to Chapel Hill, broke down weeks before the fall term and died in Richmond in early October. Atwell C. McIntosh became acting dean, and the trustees gave his estate $2,000 for burial and debts.
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Governor Morrison offers the law deanship to Justice Walter P. Stacy, who declines
At a trustees' executive committee meeting in early November, Morrison bypassed Chase and offered the deanship to Stacy on the spot. Stacy turned it down, and Chase saw the move as an intrusion on the president's role.
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Albert Coates revives the Law School Association
Coates brought back Efird's association and used it to bring state supreme court justices, judges and lawyers to Manning Hall to lecture, to run moot courts across all three classes, and later to equip a model law office.
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Trustees adopt higher law school standards over Governor Morrison's objection
At a four-hour meeting in the governor's office, attended by about half the trustees, 45 of them lawyers, Morrison argued against stiffer entrance rules, but a voice vote approved Chase's plans. The board put off naming a dean rather than accept Chase's out-of-state choice.
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Trustees elect Merton L. Ferson dean of the law school
Ferson, an Iowan who had been law dean at Washington University in St. Louis, won with three times the votes of his nearest rival, ending months of resistance from trustees who wanted a North Carolinian.
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Charles Martindale builds a bungalow in the Gimghoul colony for attorney L. J. Phipps
Contractor Charles Martindale nears completion of a Craftsman bungalow in the Gimghoul colony for Chapel Hill attorney L. J. Phipps and his wife Vivian. Its floor-length windows and front terrace are noted in later surveys.
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Manning Hall is dedicated as the law school's new home
Supreme court justices, superior court judges, lawyers and alumni, 200 or more, came for the dedication and lunched at the new Carolina Inn with John Sprunt Hill as host.
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The Mayo family's quarry land near Hillsborough is sold to Duke's land agent for $500
A deed at the Orange County courthouse records that Duke land agent Murray Jones paid the Mayo family $500 in March 1925 for land with a working stone quarry, the source of the stone for Duke's new campus. According to family accounts, George Mayo refused to sell until he was jailed and signed so his family would not go hungry.
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Lawyer J. Clyde Ray finishes a two-story office building with a restaurant on Churton Street
J. Clyde Ray built a two-story brick building, about $10,000 with its lot, with his law offices on one side of the ground floor and a restaurant run by Arthur Crabtree on the other. It also held six offices, a lodge room and a rest room for women shopping in town.
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A Superior Court judge rules against the county school board in the Efland School site dispute
The county board of education had gone to court against Thomas Forrest and James O. Webb over the acre-and-a-fraction Efland School site. At a hearing in Graham the judge ruled against the board, which told its lawyers to appeal to the state Supreme Court.
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Three armed men rob the Bank of Efland
Three men held up the Bank of Efland in mid-morning, locked cashier Roberts Riley in the vault and drove off with a few thousand dollars. Two men were tried for the robbery at Hillsborough in March 1926.
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Chase keeps Albert Coates with a raise and tenure
After Coates collapsed from exhaustion in June 1926 and sent Chase a private resignation, Chase gave him a pay raise and tenure as professor of law, and Coates was teaching again that fall.
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Five fraternity houses by Brodie Thompson form the Big Fraternity Court
Alumni gifts paid for the Big Fraternity Court on the first block of South Columbia Street: five Colonial Revival houses built by Brodie Thompson and set around a shared court, in the manner of the new campus quadrangles. A smaller court stands around the corner on Cameron Avenue.
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Orange County builds a new jail
The county replaced its run-down jail with a $65,000 building, also used as a base for convicts on road work. Five years later the state took over most sentenced prisoners and the jail was often nearly empty.
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Susie Sharp enters the law school as the only woman in her class
Sharp was the only woman among sixty first-year law students and met harassment in her early weeks. She later became the first woman superior court judge in North Carolina and chief justice of the state supreme court.
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Charles T. McCormick becomes dean of the law school
Merton L. Ferson had left in 1926 for the Cincinnati deanship, and the man Chase hired to replace him backed out months before the fall term. Chase then named McCormick, on the faculty only a year. The trustees consented but not unanimously, and James A. Gray Jr. moved that they be consulted before the next dean was chosen.
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First-year law students protest Coates's failing grades
Coates failed fifteen of fifty-two students in personal property and gave seven more Es. Class leaders including Dan K. Moore pressed him to grade on a curve and talked of a boycott; he kept the grades but gave a new examination.
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A model law office and courtroom are fitted out in Manning Hall
Through the Law School Association, Coates had lawyers around the state pay for a model courtroom and a practice law office stocked with real forms, so students could join theory to practice. Coates had put $2,600 of his own money into the office over four years.
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The Chapel Hill recorder's court is established
The new court heard all misdemeanors from Chapel Hill Township every Tuesday, with a judge elected by town voters and a clerk and prosecutor named by the aldermen.
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Coates holds a Law School Association conference on criminal justice
About thirty lawyers, judges and state officials, including Attorney General D. G. Brummitt and Justices George W. Connor and Willis J. Brogden, met at the law school and split up sections of the American Law Institute model code to begin a new state code of criminal procedure.
- 1930s
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Kappa Sigma builds a $35,000 house on the Cameron Avenue fraternity court
Kappa Sigma's new house, designed by Kenneth Ellington to match its neighbors on the Cameron Avenue court, cost about $35,000.
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The university's Black janitors back John J. Parker's Supreme Court nomination
The Negro Janitors Association of the University of North Carolina, forty-six members, supported President Hoover's nomination of Parker, a UNC alumnus and federal appeals judge, which the Senate rejected amid opposition over his segregationist statements as a 1920 candidate for governor.
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An Efland merchant kills a robber outside the Bank of Efland
A holdup at the Bank of Efland failed when Mrs. George Shambley warned merchant Carl Forrest, a bank officer, who shot robber Bruce Carpenter of Durham as he came out. His partner escaped by car, and a coroner's jury found Forrest acted in self-defense.
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Albert and Gladys Coates mail the first issue of Popular Government
The seventy-page first issue, built on Coates's paper The Convict's Question, called for a scientific overhaul of the state's criminal justice system. The Coateses paid about $1,500 to print it and addressed some two thousand copies by hand at the Chapel Hill post office before year's end.
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Albert Coates establishes the Institute of Government
UNC law professor Albert Coates began building the Institute of Government in 1931, with police schools that September and a Carolina Inn planning meeting in December, and the Institute was formally organized and named in May 1932. Working with his wife, Gladys Hall Coates, he ran it as a private enterprise until it became part of the University in 1942; it is now the UNC School of Government.
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The legislature creates a commission on improving the state's laws, with Coates as secretary
The 1931 General Assembly set up a commission of justices, judges, lawyers and law school representatives to recommend changes to the laws, with Albert Coates as executive secretary and a report due in 1933.
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Coates opens his first statewide school for law officers in Manning Hall
About fifty police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, clerks and judges, growing to seventy-five or more, met for three days under the police chiefs' association, the first meeting of city, county, state and federal officers under one roof. Governor Gardner called it the most promising movement the university had begun.
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Coates and his law students open local police schools around the state
Less than a month after the Chapel Hill meeting, the first local police school opened in a Raleigh courtroom with Coates's students in tow, followed by schools in High Point, Greensboro, Wilmington, Asheville and Winston-Salem.
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The state builds a prison camp for road crews near Hillsborough
The state prison camp near Hillsborough, whose inmates worked on road crews, was built in 1932. By 1960 it held about ninety felons and kept a vegetable farm behind its fence.
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Civil Works crews tear down the old stone jail on Hillsborough's courthouse square
As part of a Civil Works Administration project around the courthouse, relief workers demolished the old jail, and flagstones from its walls were used for sidewalks around the square. The work was nearly done in late December and complete by late January.
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The Institute of Government publishes its digest of the 1933 laws and its first guidebook, for clerks of court
Henry Brandis's summary of the laws passed by the 1933 General Assembly came out as an issue of Popular Government, followed by a guidebook written for clerks of court. Covington treats them as the Institute's first substantial publications that local officials could use in their daily work.
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Attorney and three-time mayor William Roberson is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
William Roberson (1869-1935), a lawyer who served three times as mayor of Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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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.
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The sheriff stops serving as the county's tax collector
The sheriff had collected Orange County's taxes since colonial days, and that ended in 1936, with collection moving to the county accountant's office. Carl C. Davis became tax collector in 1938.
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The Institute of Government opens its first ten-day school for police officers
Sixty-one lawmen, about a quarter of them police chiefs, attended, taught in part by instructors lent by the FBI's new National Police Academy. J. Edgar Hoover then gave agent Edward Scheidt, a former Coates student, a year's paid leave to write Institute guidebooks on arrest, search and seizure, and crime detection.
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Ben Johnson, born enslaved near Hillsborough, recalls the Klan lynching of Cyrus Guy for a WPA interviewer
Interviewed at 85 in Hecktown, Durham, by Federal Writers' Project worker Mary A. Hicks, Johnson said the Ku Klux came for Cy Guy a hundred strong, tried him in the woods and hanged him over the road. He said nobody would touch the body for four days, until the sheriff took it down.
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Racial violence erupts in western Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Late on Saturday, August 21, 1937, a white filling-station attendant struck Tom Atwater, a Black man, with a bottle near West Franklin Street. An angry crowd gathered, some throwing stones and firing guns, and armed white men from Carrboro fired on them from a barricaded truck. Four men were shot before Durham police with tear gas restored calm.
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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.
- 1940s
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Henry P. Brandis Jr. joins the UNC law faculty
After two state tax posts, Brandis, the Institute of Government's first full-time staff member, joined the university's law school faculty in 1940. He became its dean in 1949 and a Graham Kenan Professor of Law in 1965, and retired in 1972.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Henry W. Lewis joins the Institute of Government faculty
After his discharge from the Army, Lewis joined the small faculty of the Institute of Government at Chapel Hill, where he worked mainly on election law and the property tax.
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Terry Sanford serves as assistant director of UNC's Institute of Government
After the Second World War Sanford returned to Chapel Hill, completed a law degree in 1946 and served two years as assistant director of the Institute of Government before opening a law practice in Fayetteville.
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The Institute builds a Highway Patrol training camp on Raleigh Road
Coates won approval to put a training camp on the eastern edge of the campus, on the south side of Raleigh Road at Country Club Road. State Highway Department crews brought seven wooden barracks built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from Camp Mackall near Fort Bragg and set them in a U around a drill yard, with water and sewer lines run from the university gym.
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The Institute of Government's first State Highway Patrol school opens in Chapel Hill
With money from the legislature to bring the Patrol back to its prewar strength, Governor Gregg Cherry's administration turned to the Institute, which offered an eight-week course for about a hundred recruits chosen from 1,300 applicants. Classes began on October 13, with instructors from the FBI, the State Bureau of Investigation, Northwestern University and New York University.
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Forty-four graduates of the Institute's Patrol school are sworn in as state troopers
Fifty-three men finished the first eight-week course, and 44 took the oath as State Highway Patrol officers on December 7; the other nine were hired as places opened within the year. After the 1947 legislature voted to double the Patrol, Sanford and Pace ran two more sessions.
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Journey of Reconciliation comes to Chapel Hill
Interracial riders testing segregation on interstate buses reached Chapel Hill on April 12, 1947. The next day police arrested four of them at the bus station and a white cab driver struck rider James Peck. Convicted in Orange County, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko and Joe Felmet surrendered at the Hillsborough courthouse on March 21, 1949 to serve chain-gang sentences.
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Joseph Felmet is tried in Chapel Hill Recorder's Court on the bus seating charge and sentenced to the roads
Felmet's trial, put off in May while Bayard Rustin and Igal Roodenko were tried, was held in Chapel Hill Recorder's Court on June 24, 1947. He was sentenced to the county roads, appealed to Superior Court and posted a $50 bond.
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Chapel Hill NAACP holds its first meeting at the Community Center
On October 23, 1947, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro branch of the NAACP held its first official meeting at the Negro Community Center, now the Hargraves Center. The branch, which marked 75 years in 2022, gave Black residents a civil-rights organization apart from church and school.
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An Orange County Superior Court jury convicts Felmet and the other three Chapel Hill bus defendants
A jury found Andrew S. Johnson, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko and Joseph Felmet guilty of breaking the bus seating law, and Judge Chester Morris sentenced each to 30 days. The men, defended by C. J. Gates, Herman L. Taylor and E. R. Avent, appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court and posted bond.
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Henry Brandis becomes dean of the UNC law school
Brandis, the Institute's first associate director, was promoted from professor of law to dean in 1949. Under him the law school and the Institute drew closer, with Institute staff teaching Coates's classes when he was away.
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North Carolina Supreme Court upholds the convictions of Felmet and the other Chapel Hill bus riders
In State v. Johnson the court affirmed the Orange County convictions, holding that the state seating statutes applied unless the riders proved they were interstate passengers. The opinion, like the lower court record, spells his name Joseph A. Felmont.
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A federal appeals court awards the Ackland Trust to the university at Chapel Hill
After Duke refused Ackland's bequest, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled for UNC-Chapel Hill over Rollins College, citing the university's finances, its graduate arts program and its nearness to Duke.
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Orange County sets up a county recorder's court
Under a 1949 act, the commissioners created a recorder's court for the six townships outside Chapel Hill, sitting every Monday, with the clerk of superior court as its clerk.
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Black law students sue to enter UNC's Law School
On October 25, 1949, Harold Epps and other law students at North Carolina College in Durham sued for admission to UNC's law school. A federal district court ruled against them on October 9, 1950, but the Fourth Circuit reversed on March 27, 1951, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the university's appeal on June 4, 1951.
- 1950s
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An office building for the Orange County Sheriff's Department goes up on East Margaret Lane
A one-story Flemish-bond brick Colonial Revival office building, built to look like a house with a pedimented Corinthian portico, went up at 144 East Margaret Lane in the 1950s for the Orange County Sheriff's Department. It now holds the Orange County District Attorney's offices.
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Produce seller Rachel Crook is abducted and murdered
Rachel Crook, who ran a fish and produce stand at the corner of West Franklin and Merritt Mill Road, was kidnapped and killed. Her killer was never identified, and the restaurant that later opened on her corner took the name Crook's Corner.
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Dean Brandis handles the applications of Pauli Murray and three other Black students to the law school
After the trustees left admissions to each professional school's dean, Brandis wrote Chancellor R. B. House about four Black applicants, Pauli Murray, J. Kenneth Lee, Harvey E. Beech and William C. Chance Jr., and on June 6 told Murray the school offered no graduate law courses. The UNC Libraries exhibit reads these letters as showing the law school resisting integration.
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Desegregating the University of North Carolina
After a 1951 federal court decision in McKissick v. Carmichael, five Black students began law school classes at UNC on June 22, 1951. In September 1955, again under court order, LeRoy and Ralph Frasier and John Lewis Brandon of Durham registered as the university's first Black undergraduates.
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UNC Law School begins desegregation
About a week after the Supreme Court refused on June 4, 1951, to review McKissick v. Carmichael, Black students registered for summer session at UNC's law school, the first African Americans to enroll at the university. UNC Law names them as Harvey E. Beech, James L. Lassiter, J. Kenneth Lee, Floyd B. McKissick and James R. Walker.
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Eben Merritt stops highway crews with an injunction over land taken for the new bypass
Filling station owner Eben G. Merritt got an injunction that briefly halted State Highway Commission work near Morgan Creek, arguing that the new bypass and the rerouted Pittsboro road would cut through his pasture, isolate his new house and pull his station off the main highway for far less than they were worth. A court-appointed commission set his damages at $6,000 in March 1953, and he appealed.
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Harvey Beech and J. Kenneth Lee graduate from UNC's law school
A year after they entered as the first Black students at UNC's law school, Harvey Beech and J. Kenneth Lee received their law degrees. UNC also lists James Robert Walker among the 1952 graduates.
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Milton Julian wins the right to build his modernist house on Ledge Lane
When W. C. Coker's chosen architect, Walter D. Toy, refused to approve the plans for clothier Milton Julian's house on Ledge Lane, designed by George Matsumoto of the State College School of Design, Milton and Virginia Julian sued on September 30, 1953; Coker's executors, his widow and neighbors Cornelius and Beulah Cathey opposed them. The North Carolina Supreme Court held on June 4, 1954 that the approval clause was personal to Coker and ended at his death in June 1953, and the International Style house was finished by November 1956.
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Brown v. Board places local school segregation under constitutional challenge
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional, putting Orange County's separate schools for Black and white children under legal challenge. Four days later Chapel Hill Mayor Edwin Lanier urged gradual adjustment, and school board chairman Carl Smith predicted little trouble in complying but expected high schools to be affected most.
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Chapel Hill school board pledges to comply with Brown "to the best of our ability"
Under chairman Carl Smith, the Chapel Hill school board unanimously resolved to comply with the Supreme Court's integration ruling to the best of its ability while operating its schools under the state's school laws, keeping existing assignment practices for 1955-56.
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The county board names a committee to study school segregation after Brown
Answering a letter from the Governor's Advisory Commission on Education, chaired by Thomas Pearsall, the Orange County board appointed a local committee to study the problems the Supreme Court's segregation ruling raised for its schools. Ira Ward and Delmar Brown soon replaced two of the first members, Bonner D. Sawyer and W. T. (Buck) Murray.
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First Black undergraduates enter UNC
LeRoy and Ralph Frasier and John Lewis Brandon, all of Durham, became UNC's first Black undergraduates when they began classes on September 19, 1955. A three-judge federal court in Greensboro had ordered the university on September 10 to process their applications, and they registered in the General College.
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Moses C. Burt Jr. is one of the first three Black students admitted to UNC law as first-year students
Moses C. Burt Jr., son of Orange County farm agent Moses Burt and Ridge Road principal Alethea Burt, entered the UNC School of Law in fall 1955 as one of the first three African American students admitted straight into its first-year class. Three other Black students who enrolled that fall transferred from other programs.
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Daniel H. Pollitt joins the UNC law faculty
Pollitt came to the UNC School of Law in 1957 as an associate professor of constitutional and labor law, after resigning from the University of Arkansas rather than sign an oath disavowing membership in the NAACP.
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William B. Aycock serves as chancellor of UNC at Chapel Hill
Aycock, on the law faculty at Chapel Hill since 1948, was chief administrator of the university there from July 1, 1957 until August 1964. His records cover desegregation, the state's speaker ban law and the Dixie Classic betting scandal.
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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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The law faculty and the Institute staff vote against merging the Institute into the law school
When Albert Coates pressed again to fold the Institute of Government into the UNC law school, both the law faculty and the Institute's own staff voted the idea down. Assistant director John Sanders warned that the Institute's service work would be subordinated to the law school and its identity lost.
- 1960s
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The open court in the middle of the Bellevue mill is roofed over for storage
For more storage, the owners roofed the space inside the U-shaped mill with open-web steel trusses running from the main mill to the weaving room and closed its east side with a new wall, removing the 1923 stair tower.
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The Vickers family files its federal suit against the Chapel Hill City Board of Education
Suing through his parents, Stanley Vickers asked the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina to declare his right to attend the public schools without racial discrimination. After the board turned down his June 1960 application to Chapel Hill Junior High, the complaint was amended to seek that school, and the case was tried on October 5, 1960.
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Lincoln High students picket Colonial Drug and sit in at the Bus Station Cafe
The day after the sit-in, nearly 100 Black high school students picketed Colonial Drug after manager John Carswell roped off its booths, while others filled the counter at the Bus Station Cafe until proprietor Leo Eliadis closed it and were served standing at the Long Meadow Dairy Bar.
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The Chapel Hill sit-in movement forms an executive committee and retains counsel
At a Tuesday night meeting the Lincoln High demonstrators and their adult supporters organized, set up an executive committee to coordinate the lunch-counter protests and acquired legal counsel.
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The Chapel Hill CORE Committee rejects a second truce and resumes picketing as 27 ministers back the protests
After a week-long pause the students' 12-member executive committee, led by Harold Foster, declined the Human Relations Committee's request for a second truce and resumed afternoon picketing at Colonial Drug and Long Meadow Dairy. Twenty-seven Chapel Hill ministers issued a statement commending the peaceful, non-violent picketing.
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Chapel Hill aldermen refuse Chief Blake's picketing-control ordinance
The Board of Aldermen unanimously declined to pass an ordinance against blocking sidewalks that Police Chief William W. Blake had requested as a safety measure, saying its passage would be misread as interference with the peaceful picketing at Colonial Drug.
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An Orange County jury convicts four men of arson and conspiracy in the Reverie plant fire
After a three-day trial in Orange County Superior Court, a jury found four men, among them an ILGWU representative from Atlanta, guilty of burning the Reverie Lingerie plant. Judge Raymond Mallard sentenced them the next day to five to twelve years, and all appealed.
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The university's attorney finds the trustees never deeded the cemetery to the town
In a letter of November 11, 1960 to J. A. Branch of the university business office, university attorney J. A. Williams reported no sign that the trustees had ever conveyed title to the cemetery land to Chapel Hill.
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Desegregating the Chapel Hill and Carrboro schools
After the school board refused in 1959 to admit ten-year-old Stanley Vickers to Carrboro Elementary, his parents sued, and their 1961 win in federal court set the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools on the course to desegregation. In 1966 all-Black Lincoln High merged into Chapel Hill High, and Lincoln's name, colors and mascot were left behind.
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The first Black students enter the formerly white Chapel Hill junior-senior high school on Franklin Street
For 1961-62 the board granted two of three Black applications to the white junior high school and later reassigned a fourth child who had moved into the district, while the federal court ordered Stanley Vickers admitted to the eighth grade there. Sheila Florence, who described herself as one of the first four Black students and who graduated from Chapel Hill High School on Franklin Street in 1965, was one of them, and Eugene Hines was another Black student in the school.
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L. J. Phipps and Stanley Peele form a law partnership in Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill attorney L. J. Phipps took Stanley Peele, associated with him since he was admitted to the bar in 1959, into partnership.
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The school board's lawyer advises closing White Cross School rather than fight the case
A. H. Graham, attorney for the county board, told it the transfer fight could not be won and recommended shutting White Cross School instead.
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Federal court rules Chapel Hill denied Stanley Vickers a junior high transfer because of his race
Chief Judge Edwin M. Stanley of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina held that the Chapel Hill City Board of Education had refused Vickers reassignment to all-white Chapel Hill Junior High School on account of race and that he was entitled to be admitted there for the 1961-62 school year. The suit had been filed on February 2, 1960 and tried on October 5, 1960.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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