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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1940s
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Orange County FSA honors 15 Black farm ownership borrowers
The county Farm Security Administration office awarded certificates of merit to 15 Black farm ownership borrowers, former tenants it had helped to buy farms. By March 1944 the county had 22 approved tenant-purchase loans.
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Hillsborough well-baby clinics are held separately for Black and white babies
The Junior Service League and the district health department held two well-baby clinics each month in Hillsborough, one for Black babies and one for white babies, focused on preventive care.
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Wartime day nursery opens for the children of Black working mothers in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
A federally funded day nursery for Black children opened at the Orange County Training School, caring for thirty children aged two to six from 7:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. while their mothers worked. Parents paid for food, and by October 1944 two nursery schools were running, one in the Masonic building on the edge of Carrboro and one on Brooks Street.
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Orange County's Black home demonstration clubs hold their first dress contest in Hillsboro
Women from every Black home demonstration club in the county modeled thirty-six dresses, suits and accessories they had made at the Hillsboro high school auditorium. By 1946 the clubs met monthly in rural communities including White Oak Grove, Jordan Grove, Cool Springs, Cedar Grove, Harmony, Ridge Road, St. Mary's, Sartin and Carr.
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Jeter and Ethel Neville buy a corner lot at Cobb and Broad streets in Carrboro
On September 13, 1944, Jeter and Ethel Neville bought a small lot at the northwest corner of Cobb and Broad streets, in the Lloyd-Broad section of the Black Northside neighborhood, from Guilford Realty and Insurance Company. Jeter Neville was a janitor at Northside Elementary School.
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The county school board sells the closed Harvey's Chapel schoolhouse
The Orange County Board of Education approved the sale of the Harvey's Chapel schoolhouse, a school for Black children about three miles from Hillsboro. It had closed several years before, its pupils sent to the Hillsboro school, and Mary E. Breeze bought the building.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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A Negro library committee was already running library service for Black readers in Orange County
The committee met in September 1945 under chairman Mrs. M. D. McPherson, reported over a hundred new books received and 800 books circulated during the summer, and was assembling book kits for rural areas. Miss Annie Cameron was named as one of the people who started the library for Black residents of the county.
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Black mason John Wesley Campbell and his sons build the stone Neville House in Carrboro
John Wesley Campbell and his sons, with Jeter Neville and mason Earnest Farrar, built the Nevilles' one-and-a-half-story bungalow of granite fieldstone trimmed in red brick, with an arcaded porch and a star and crescent moon set in stone beside the front windows. Campbell's son Handy said the stones came by army truck from Chatham County; the house is the least altered of Campbell's five 1940s stone buildings in Northside.
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Homemont is platted as a Black neighborhood north of Hillsborough
Laid out in 1945 with gently curving streets and evenly spaced lots on Torain and Lawndale streets, Homemont filled mostly in the 1950s and 1960s with small Minimal Traditional houses, several of exposed concrete block, built by more than one builder for sale or rent. Next to a trash dump, it had no paved streets until the 1970s.
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John Wesley Campbell builds a fieldstone house for a pastor on North Graham Street
John Wesley Campbell designed and built a large fieldstone house at 214 North Graham Street in Northside for a local pastor, finished in 1945 and one of the first houses on the street. It is the largest of his four stone houses in the neighborhood, with a broad arched corner porch and a stone end chimney.
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Mason Alfred Barbee builds his own house on Jones Ferry Road
After working at the Carrboro munitions plant during the war, the African American mason Alfred Barbee spent three years building his own house on Jones Ferry Road near the Strayhorn family homes, using his carpentry as well as his masonry skills.
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The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen runs its headquarters from Chapel Hill
The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, an interracial group of Southern church people founded in 1934, kept its headquarters in Chapel Hill while Nelle Morton was general secretary from 1945 to 1949, working on race relations, labor conditions and the rural South.
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Bowling alley owner James Freeland knocks out a Black man who asked to bowl
Lorenzo Thompson, a Black man, came into the Fairview Bowling Alley late at night, said he had bowled up north and would not leave when told he could not bowl. Owner James Freeland knocked him unconscious and dragged him outside, and Thompson needed stitches.
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The Negro Community Center opens for community use
After the Navy Pre-Flight School wound down, the community center returned to town control on October 24, 1945 and opened to Black residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. By December a nursery school filled the basement, and an all-Black board chaired by Hubert Roberson ran the building under the Town Recreation Commission.
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Central High School adds a twelfth grade
Central High School, the county's high school for Black students in Hillsborough, added a twelfth grade for the 1946-47 school year. By 1949-50 it served 443 elementary and 206 high school students.
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The Campbells build a stone bungalow for carpenter Vance Thompson on Broad Street
Next door to the Neville House, John Wesley Campbell and his sons designed and built a fieldstone Craftsman bungalow at 201 Broad Street for carpenter Vance Thompson and his family just after World War II. Land records show it finished by 1947; a Thompson son recalls moving in in 1946, and the family kept it until 2013.
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The county buys land from Mary Vincent for a Cedar Grove school for Black children
In May 1945 board members Charlie Stanford and James Compton were asked to find a site near Vincent's Store crossroads for a Cedar Grove school for Black children. The board bought the land from Mary Vincent for $1,000 in 1946.
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Marinda McPherson sings a joint recital at the Orange County school auditorium
Mrs. M. D. McPherson and Galvin Lampley gave a joint recital in the Orange County school auditorium in Hillsboro. She sang The Star by James H. Rogers and Because by Guy d'Hardelot, and Lampley played De Falla and Chopin.
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The county board approves twelve classrooms and a gymnasium for Central School
The board approved a building program of twelve classrooms and a gymnasium at Central, the county's school for Black students in Hillsborough.
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Bethsada Baptist Church builds a 500-seat church
Bethsada Baptist Church, a Black congregation led by Jesse Morrow and Rudy Whitmore, built a church seating 500 in 1947.
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Local 403 petitions for student support in a campaign over university wages
After the legislature approved a 20 percent raise for state employees and the university dropped a wartime bonus, Local 403 workers circulated petitions and flyers asking students for support. Under shop steward Rebecca Clark laundry workers won wage increases, safer workspaces and better schedules.
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The William Edward McPherson House is built on Nash Street in West Hillsborough
The 2017 Hillsborough architectural survey records the William Edward McPherson House at 303 Nash Street and dates it to 1947. The McPherson family, whose Edward (Pete) McPherson managed Hillsboro's Black All-Stars baseball team in these years, owned several lots along the west side of Nash Street.
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The first section of the new Chapel Hill High School opens on West Franklin Street
After five years in borrowed rooms, Chapel Hill's white high school moved into a new building on West Franklin Street, whose first section was paid for largely with insurance money from the 1942 fire. That section was nearly ready in late 1946, and the 1947 school year opened with an assembly in front of the new building.
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Hillsboro's Black baseball team opens its season at McPherson's Baseball Park before a record crowd
The News of Orange County's column for the Black community reported that the baseball season opened at McPherson's Baseball Park on Sunday, April 6, before a record crowd; the home team lost to the Roxboro Stars and on Easter Monday to the Graham Stars.
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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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Archie Royal Davis becomes architect for the Orange County schools
In 1948 the Durham architect Archie Royal Davis became architect for the Orange County school system. His work for the county included Cedar Grove and Efland-Cheeks schools for Black children, the first Cameron Park School building, Central High's 1959-60 main building and Central Elementary.
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George Campbell and his father build a stone house on North Graham Street
On a lot owned by George Campbell, he and his father John Wesley Campbell, helped by the other Campbell sons, designed and built a small one-story fieldstone house at 203 North Graham Street, finished in 1948. It is the only one of the family's Northside stone houses whose stonework runs up into the gable.
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George Kirkland, Chapel Hill's first African American dentist, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
George Kirkland (1899-1948), the first Black dentist in Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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The county board hires supervisors of instruction for its Black and white schools
The board decided to hire supervisors of instruction and chose Norma Snipes for the Black schools and later Cora Paul Bomar for the white schools. In 1955 the state ended Snipes's position under a rule of one supervisor per hundred teachers, and she went to teach at Efland-Cheeks.
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The county board moves Murphey School's seventh grade to Hillsboro
Many Murphey-district families had been sending children to Hillsboro, some riding the bus against the rules, and in 1947 the board agreed to keep the seventh grade at Murphey only until numbers justified a move. In 1948, with about seventy pupils left, it sent the seventh grade to the Hillsboro school.
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The county board approves electric wiring for five rural schools for Black children
The Orange County board voted to electrify five rural schools for Black children, asking each community to pay half the cost. Ridge Road School had two electric lights in each room by the late 1940s, but when it was wired is not known.
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The county board sells the former Wardsville and Cool Spring school sites
On January 5, 1948 the county board confirmed the sale of the Wardsville school site to D. D. Jones of Durham for $100, and on March 1 it confirmed the sale of the unused two-room Cool Springs school to C. C. McClees of Durham for $400. Both had been schools for Black children in the Murphy district.
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Fire guts Pete McPherson's cafe and pool hall in West Hillsborough
A fire that started in a defective flue gutted the frame and brick building near the Black school in West Hillsboro where Pete McPherson ran a cafe with a pool and beer hall. Most of the stock was saved, but all the pool tables were lost.
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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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Architect H. Raymond Weeks presents plans for a school for Black children in Cedar Grove Township
H. Raymond Weeks showed the Orange County Board of Education his design for a consolidated school for Black pupils in Cedar Grove Township. The board sent the plans to the Federal Works Agency, which lent school systems money for architects' fees.
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Piney Mountain School closes and its pupils go to Morris Grove School
The county consolidated Piney Mountain School, one of its Black schools, with Morris Grove School. A new gravel road into the area let a bus carry the children out; the school had been kept open only because no bus could reach it.
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Hillsboro's Black All-Stars beat the town's white All-Stars at McPherson's Park
In a Sunday game at McPherson's Park billed as the Stars against the Stars, Hillsboro's Black All-Stars defeated the town's white All-Stars 13 to 10.
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Alethea Burt starts a junior 4-H club at Ridge Road School
Principal Alethea Burt organized a junior 4-H club at Ridge Road School in the 1949-50 term, when 64 children were enrolled. She and her husband, farm agent Moses Burt, helped form 4-H clubs among Black youth in the county.
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Central High's 1949-50 reports show 649 pupils and crowded classrooms
Central High School served 443 elementary and 206 high school students with twelve and eight teachers. Its library of 1,120 books also served the Black community, but nine of its eleven elementary classrooms were too small.
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Chapel Hill builds a brick tool shed in the wall between the white and Black sections of the cemetery
In October 1949 the cemetery committee found the old tool shed past repair and asked for a brick one at a gap in the wall dividing the white and Black burial grounds. The small shed stands in the rubblestone wall that separates Section B from Section I.
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Superintendent Proffit's $1 million school bond pays for a new Efland school for Black children and county lunchrooms
The $1,000,000 school bond passed under Superintendent Glenn T. Proffit paid for grounds and a building for the Efland school for Black children, an addition to Hillsboro High School, and lunchrooms at Aycock, Efland, West Hillsborough and White Cross. It also bought a cannery and gymnasium at Aycock and a remodeling and auditorium at Caldwell.
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The Town of Chapel Hill buys land for a new cemetery for its Black residents
The town bought about ten acres of the former Roberson property, just beyond the railroad on the Carrboro side of town, for a segregated cemetery for Black residents. It became the West Chapel Hill Cemetery on Village Drive.
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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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Orange County Training School is renamed Lincoln High School
In March 1949 the Parent-Teachers Association of the Orange County Training School, Chapel Hill's school for Black students, voted to rename it Lincoln High School and sent the request to the superintendent and school board. By May 13, 1949, the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that the name had been changed.
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Marinda McPherson sponsors the annual kite contest at the Hillsboro school
The annual kite contest sponsored by Mrs. M. D. McPherson was held on the school playground in Hillsboro, with prizes for the fastest getaway, the longest distance, dash and altitude, and the most original kite.
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The Orange County Negro Public Library held its grand opening at the community center in Hillsboro
The library opened on a Sunday afternoon from 3 to 5 p.m. with Mrs. M. D. McPherson as directress and Miss Victoria Craig as librarian. Mrs. Douglas Davis, the tri-county regional librarian, sponsored the event and spoke, and Mrs. Eliza Webb attended for the Confederate Memorial Library.
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Norma Snipes is appointed supervisor of the county schools for Black children
In July 1949 the county named Norma Snipes, formerly a Jeans teacher who trained teachers, as supervisor of its schools for Black children.
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The state's new school building fund allots Orange County's rural schools $292,618
From the 1949 State School Plant Construction, Improvement, and Repair Fund, built from a voter-approved state bond issue and a matching legislative appropriation, the State Board of Education allotted $292,618.06 to Orange County's rural schools. The money let the county begin replacing small one- and two-teacher schools for Black children with central consolidated buildings.
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Principal C. A. McDougle opens Lincoln High School's year under its new name
The Chapel Hill Weekly reported that Lincoln High School, the town's school for Black students, would open at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, September 12, 1949, as announced by Principal C. A. McDougle. The faculty list printed with the notice includes elementary teacher Mrs. Lucille R. McDougle and high school teacher Reginald D. Smith.
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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.
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Will W. Alexander speaks to the Chapel Hill AAUW on the Julius Rosenwald Fund
Alexander, retired and living in the country near Chapel Hill, was scheduled to address the Chapel Hill branch of the American Association of University Women in the Morehead building on his years as director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.
- 1950s
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African American flower sellers known as the Flower Ladies set up on Franklin Street
A group of Black vendors, each working independently, began selling fresh-cut flowers on the Franklin Street sidewalk around 1950 and became one of the town's best-known enterprises.
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Orange County completes consolidation of its white schools
After a countywide program of new public buildings, the shift from small neighborhood schools to larger consolidated schools for white children was finished by the early 1950s. Schools for Black children lagged under Jim Crow funding.
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The census counts 37 masons in Chapel Hill, up from five in
Federal census returns show the number of masons living in Chapel Hill rising from seven in 1930 and five in 1940 to 37 in 1950, growth the nomination ties to the town's Black masonry trade.
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Cedar Grove parents ask that Black educators help plan their new school
A delegation from the Cedar Grove Parent-Teacher Association asked the county board to let Central High principal A. L. Stanback and M. C. Burt, the county's agricultural agent for Black farmers, take part in planning the new Cedar Grove school.
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Archie Royal Davis replaces H. Raymond Weeks as architect of the Cedar Grove school
When state school planners faulted H. Raymond Weeks's design in April 1950, the board sent him to W. F. Credle and Edward Waugh of the Division of Schoolhouse Planning, but Weeks would not rework it on short notice. By May the job had gone to Archie Royal Davis, who was also designing Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill; the board approved his preliminary plans in June.
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Principal E. M. Stanfield reports on the one-room school for Black children at Cedar Grove
In her report for 1949-50, E. M. Stanfield told the state she was the only teacher for 36 pupils in seven grades in a single room with no library, gymnasium, fire protection or indoor toilet. The two-room Carr School nearby, under principal Anne May Morrow, had 73 pupils and lacked a drinking fountain and state health approval.
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Black residents opened a fund drive to build the Orange County Negro Public Library a building of its own
The library then held 2,254 books in a single room with shelves full and volumes stacked on the floor, and had circulated 2,015 books in the year. A committee including Mrs. Marinda D. McPherson, A. L. Stanback and Mrs. M. C. Burt asked for donations, naming $100 for outside sheeting and $70 for a roof.
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The county board accepts Archie Royal Davis's plans for Cedar Grove School
The Orange County Board of Education approved Davis's final design for the Cedar Grove school for Black children: a low, flat-roofed brick building with long bands of classroom windows.
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Bids for Cedar Grove School run over budget and the board asks the state for $147,000
None of the construction bids opened on December 6, 1950, came within the budget, so the board rejected them all. On December 28 it voted to ask the state School Plant Construction, Improvement, and Repair Fund for a $147,000 grant to build the school.
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Every Orange County high school, white and Black, takes part in a grassland speaking contest
As part of the pasture campaign, each high school in the county entered a grassland oratorical contest in 1951. The Hillsboro branch of the Durham Bank and Trust Company gave $75 in prizes and winners went on to a district contest.
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Jordan's Grove School for Black children closes as the Cedar Grove Negro School opens
Jordan's Grove School for Black children closed in the fall of 1951, when it and six other small Black schools were combined in the new Cedar Grove Negro School, accepted by the county board that November. It is the only surviving rural field school building the 1993 survey could tie to African American pupils, abandoned in a farm field when recorded. A separate white Jordan's Grove school had merged into Aycock in 1930.
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Lincoln High School opens on Merritt Mill Road
In 1951 Lincoln High School, Chapel Hill's high school for Black students, moved from the old Orange County Training School building on Caldwell Street to a new building on Merritt Mill Road, and the old building became Northside Elementary. Lincoln used the Merritt Mill Road campus until 1966; the building is now the school district's Lincoln Center.
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Orange County closes thirteen small schools for Black children and consolidates their pupils
At the start of the 1951-52 school year the county shut thirteen one- and two-teacher schools for Black children, put eleven new buses on the roads and consolidated every Black school except three near Efland. New buildings opened that year at the Cedar Grove school.
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The county board elects G. Paul Carr superintendent of the Orange County schools
Gabriel Paul Carr, principal of Angier High School, became the county's tenth school superintendent in 1951, succeeding Glenn T. Proffit, who left for the Harnett County superintendency. Carr served eighteen years, through the consolidation of schools and the desegregation of the system, and resigned effective June 30, 1969.
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The name Northside began to replace Pottersfield and Sunset
When the old Lincoln building became Northside Elementary in 1951, the school's name spread to the Black neighborhoods around it. By the mid-1950s Pottersfield, north of West Rosemary and west of Columbia Street, and its western neighbor Sunset were both being called Northside.
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The county board buys the Morrow land for Efland-Cheeks, a new school for Black children
The board decided to buy the Morrow land for a new school for Black children in the Efland district, named Efland-Cheeks.
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Construction of Cedar Grove School begins
Work on the new school for Black children on NC 86 north of Hillsborough started in January 1951. By early February a well had been drilled and the footings poured.
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Lucille Caldwell becomes the Negro Community Center's first paid director
Lucille Caldwell was hired in February 1951 as the first paid director of Chapel Hill's Negro Community Center on Roberson Street, now the Hargraves Center. A town history calls her North Carolina's first Black professional recreation administrator. She led the center for twelve years and resigned in 1963.
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The News of Orange prints a photograph of a Ridge Road School classroom
An article on newer classroom methods in the county's Black schools ran a picture of Ridge Road pupils adding to a bulletin board, a few months before the school closed. It is the only historic photograph of the interior that has been found.
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UNC admits Edward O. Diggs, its first Black medical student
UNC mailed Edward O. Diggs of Winston-Salem, a pre-medical student at A&T College in Greensboro, his letter of admission to the School of Medicine under the trustees' April 4, 1951 policy. He enrolled in the fall of 1951.
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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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Orange County Negro Public Library dedicates its own building
About 150 people attended an open house on May 27, 1951 dedicating the Orange County Negro Public Library's own building in Hillsborough, a structure bought from Camp Butner and put up with volunteer labor. Begun in 1942 by Marinda McPherson, the library had opened to the public in 1949 and now held more than 3,000 books.
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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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State says Chapel Hill's new tuberculosis hospital will take Black and white patients
A State Medical Care Commission spokesman said the $1,100,000 tuberculosis hospital under construction at Chapel Hill would treat Black and white patients. He noted that federal rules barred discrimination in federally aided hospitals but still allowed patients to be segregated.
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Cedar Grove parents ask for a say in hiring teachers and get a Black building committee
Seven Cedar Grove PTA members asked for a local committee with power to hire and dismiss the new school's teachers, and for paint and tile floors. The board named a building committee of Dallas Sheppherd Burnett, Wayne Compton, D. W. Torain, Elijah Poole and Oscar Carver Beasley but gave it no say over staff; it did approve the paint and the floor tile.
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The county builds the classroom building and cafeteria later used by A. L. Stanback School
A classroom building and a cafeteria on the Hillsborough campus that became A. L. Stanback School, the grades 6-7 school by 1983, date from 1952 under Superintendent G. Paul Carr.
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The last three schools for Black children near Efland are consolidated at Efland-Cheeks
In the 1952-53 school year the three remaining small schools for Black children in the Efland area were merged into Efland-Cheeks School, completing the consolidation of the county's Black schools begun the year before.
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UNC's new dental school building opens with separate facilities for Black and white patients
The School of Dentistry's new building opened with what a university memo called separate, complete facilities for white and Black patients. Publicity photographs showed separate waiting rooms for each race.
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The county board sells off its remaining small schoolhouses
In March 1952 the board sold the last small school buildings, among them the Fairfield school for Black children, Sartin, Poplar Grove, Morris Grove and Hickory Grove, for prices from $300 to $2,010. Around the same time Carr School went to Jim Wade for $800.
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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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Farmers Home Administration pushes livestock to raise tenant incomes near Cedar Grove
The News of Orange County reported a Farmers Home Administration effort to raise tenant income by adding livestock to tobacco farming. Tenants on the Banks Wilson farm near Cedar Grove added hogs and other animals, and 42 county farm families had FHA operating loans.
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The county school board advertises the White Oak Grove school lot for sale
The Orange County Board of Education gave notice that it would sell at the courthouse on January 10, 1953, a lot on the Cedar Grove-Carr road beside White Oak Grove Church, with its frame, tin-roofed building. The sale followed the opening of the new Cedar Grove school for Black children, which replaced the small rural schools.
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Stephen J. Edwards's Midway Barber Shop is open on West Rosemary Street
Edwards's Midway Barber Shop was advertising on West Rosemary Street, at the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line, by late 1952. His son Stepney Edwards later ran the Black-owned shop.
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Binkley Baptist and the Community Church of Chapel Hill
The Community Church of Chapel Hill formed in 1953 as an interracial congregation and started an integrated preschool in 1955; Binkley Baptist organized in 1958 under Robert Seymour. The Baptist association refused Binkley membership in 1966 over its open membership, the state and Southern conventions disassociated from it in 1992, and the Community Church joined the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1993.
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Community Church of Chapel Hill forms
An interracial congregation organized with Charles M. Jones as minister.
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Hillsborough Heights is laid out, with a street named for James J. Freeland
The African American neighborhood on Terrell, Central, Forrest, Coley and Freeland streets, below US 70 on the west side of North Nash Street, was laid out in the 1950s. Its Freeland Street was named for the builder, who probably put up houses there.
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Rebecca Clark moves from the University Laundry to nursing at Memorial Hospital
In 1953 Clark left the University Laundry for the newly built university hospital, where she spent the rest of her working years as a nurse. UNC's Employee Forum says she was the first licensed practical nurse in the campus infirmary and retired in 1979.
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The News of Orange prints the first picture of the Cedar Grove Negro School
A front-page photograph presented the new school as a major piece of the county's three-year building program. The story listed seven classrooms, a library, an office, a heating plant, two toilets and a multipurpose room used from the start as four classrooms.
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Rock Hill Baptist, renamed First Baptist, holds its first services on North Roberson Street
The Black Baptist congregation organized in 1865 had worshipped for decades as Rock Hill Baptist Church on the south side of West Franklin Street. Under its pastor, the Rev. J. R. Manley, it raised $10,001 in the first months of 1952 and began a colonial-style brick church on North Roberson Street between Franklin and Rosemary streets. The first services in the $100,000 building were held on Sunday, September 27, 1953, opening three weeks of dedication services; with the move the congregation took the name First Baptist Church. By early 1954 the old Franklin Street lot stood vacant.
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Chapel Hill's aldermen adopt an ordinance setting separate sections for Black burials in the new town cemetery
The ordinance for the new Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery on the Durham road reserved some sections for Black burials and others for other races, as the old cemetery had done. The Rev. Charles Jones of the Community Church called it illiberal in a September sermon, and the citizens' committee had urged the town to rid itself of the new Black cemetery north of town.
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Tenant farming drops sharply in Orange County
Tenant-operated farms in Orange County fell from 513 of 1,939 farms in 1954 to 295 of 1,405 in 1959, and croppers fell from 261 to 135. In 1959, 500 of the county's farms were classed as tobacco farms.
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The name Cedar Grove Negro School gives way to Cedar Grove School
The county board and local papers had called the school the Cedar Grove Negro School from the 1946 land purchase on. After 1954 they used Cedar Grove School or Cedar Grove Elementary School.
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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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The county school board decides to carry on as before after the Brown decision
Two days after Brown v. Board of Education, the Orange County Board of Education put on record that since the Court had not said when or how segregation would end, it would go on hiring teachers, preparing the budget and running the schools as in the past. Like other North Carolina boards, it took no step to comply.
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Chapel Hill-Carrboro churches name a committee to help schools desegregate peacefully
Two weeks after the Brown decision, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Ministerial Association set up a steering committee to study how the churches could help bring a peaceful transition to non-segregated schools. Its members were the Rev. Charles Jones, Mrs. Harold Walters, George Esser Jr., the Rev. T. P. Duhart and Mrs. J. Snipes.
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The Pride of Orange Elks lodge clears ground for its hall on South Merritt Mill Road
The Black Elks lodge, Pride of Orange No. 276, cleared the lot and planned to start its $15,000 two-story hall in June, with members doing most of the work. The lodge hall was to be upstairs and the youth group's rooms below; until then the thirty-member lodge rented rooms over the West Franklin Street Grocery.
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Harold H. Webb becomes principal of Cedar Grove School
Harold Hudson Webb, a Greensboro-born veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen with two degrees from North Carolina A&T who had taught at Central High, was hired as Cedar Grove's principal. He led the school until 1962, when he joined the state education department; in 1977 he became North Carolina's first Black state personnel director.
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Howard W. Odum dies in Chapel Hill
Odum died in Chapel Hill on November 8, 1954, while still at work on several books, after 34 years on the UNC faculty.
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Community Church starts an integrated preschool
The congregation’s preschool admitted children across racial lines.
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Edward O. Diggs becomes UNC's first Black medical graduate
Edward O. Diggs graduated from the UNC School of Medicine in 1955, the first African American to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree from the university. James Slade, the school's second Black student, had enrolled in 1953.
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Fumiko Seki lives in Chapel Hill and records the town's color line
Fumiko Seki came to Chapel Hill when her husband received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study at UNC. As a mother, wife and student she watched how residents kept the color line and met Black students, and she later described the town in her memoir Chaperu hiru monogatari.
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The county board ends the supervisor post for its Black schools under a new state staffing rule
In 1955 the state began allotting a county one supervisor per hundred teachers. The schools Norma Snipes supervised had fewer teachers than that, so the board ended her post and made her a primary teacher at Efland-Cheeks School.
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Hilliard Caldwell leads the Chapel Hill chapter of the New Farmers of America
The Lincoln High School paper reported a prosperous 1954 to 1955 year for the chapter under Caldwell, its president, and printed his own account of the chapter's work.
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The county board keeps every pupil in last year's school for 1955-56
The Orange County board ruled that students would attend the same schools in 1955-56 as in 1954-55. Pupils new to the county were to apply to a principal, who would admit them under board policies that kept the races apart.
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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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Hilliard Caldwell writes the Negro Community news column for the Chapel Hill News Leader
Caldwell was named as correspondent at the head of the column, which carried news of Black Chapel Hill and asked Lincoln High School graduates to send in their college addresses for the next week's issue.
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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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The county board deeds the old Gravelly Hill School ground to Mrs. George McAdams
While disposing of closed schools in September 1955, the county board deeded the old Gravelly Hill School ground to Mrs. George McAdams. Gravelly Hill had taught Black children until the Efland-area schools were merged into Efland-Cheeks in 1952-53.
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A Cedar Grove committee asks for classrooms, a lunchroom and playground land
Wayne Compton, Arthur Wells, Lonnie Thompson, Carter White and Oscar Beasley asked the county board for four more classrooms at Cedar Grove School, a lunchroom large enough to grow, and two more acres for a playground. The board did not act.
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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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Northern Heights is developed as a Black neighborhood north of US 70
The subdivision on Rainey, Harper, Homemont, Riddle and Dixie streets followed the usual post-war pattern of curving streets and even lots, but like neighboring Homemont it sat beside a dump and went without paved streets or town services until the 1970s.
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Frances Hargraves teaches Chapel Hill's new special education classes at Northside School
The Chapel Hill schools had begun special education classes, one at Chapel Hill Elementary School and one taught by Frances Hargraves at Northside School. The Junior Service League paid a $200 scholarship for her training.
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Hubert Robinson is named Man of the Year
After Robinson was re-elected alderman with the highest vote on the ticket, a group of Black citizens representing churches, fraternal organizations and civic clubs named him Man of the Year and gave a reception in his honor at the Lincoln High School gymtorium on June 11.
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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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The county takes bids for a gymtorium and twelve classrooms at Central High School
H. F. Mitchell Construction Company was low bidder for two buildings at Central High, a twelve-classroom addition and a gymtorium seating about 1,200, designed by Archie Royal Davis. The whole project came to $266,094, and the gymtorium was nearly finished in February 1958.
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Lincoln High prepares to open with sixteen teachers and about four hundred pupils
In the Chapel Hill News Leader's back to school report, Principal C. A. McDougle said Lincoln High School would have sixteen teachers and that enrollment would probably reach 400, against 381 on the first day of the previous year. Two of the teachers were new that year.
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Central High's new gymnasium is finished after the fire
After the main building of Central High School burned in 1958, Archie Royal Davis designed a new school building and a gymnasium for the site; the gymnasium was finished in late 1958.
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Cornelia Spencer Love serves as a founding trustee of the Chapel Hill Public Library
Love was a trustee of the public library from its start in 1958 until 1970 and secretary of its board of directors. The library began in a small house in downtown Chapel Hill.
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Central High School burns
On the morning of February 14, 1958, fire destroyed the 1936 main building of Central High School, Hillsborough's high school for Black students, including its office, auditorium and several classrooms. Students moved into a newly built structure meant for junior high use, and a new main classroom building designed by Archie Royal Davis went up on the site in 1958.
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The school board orders a new main building for Central High on the day of the fire
The night the old Central High building burned, the county board set aside $214,892 for a new 18-classroom building designed by Archie Royal Davis's firm. Construction went on through 1958.
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A Cedar Grove delegation asks for a classroom and playground to win accreditation
Seeking state accreditation, a delegation from the school asked the board for one more classroom so the library could be used as a library again, land for a playground, paint for the north wing and outdoor floodlights. The board took no action.
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The state declines to accredit Cedar Grove School for lack of space
Ruth Lawrence Woodson, state supervisor of the Black elementary schools, refused accreditation because the school had too few classrooms and was using its library as a fourth-grade room. Her report counted the parents' involvement, a staff study program, the office, auditorium and clinic room in its favor.
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Binkley Baptist Church organizes
Fifty-six charter members established the congregation, initially worshiping on campus.
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Moses Burt retires after 23 years as Orange County's agent for Black farmers
Moses Cimuel Burt, a World War I veteran trained at NC A&T, Hampton and Cornell, retired as the county's African American extension agent in September 1958. Since 1935 he had backed farm programs in the county's Black schools and helped start 4-H clubs.
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Archie Royal Davis's new main building for Central High goes up
After the 1958 fire, Archie Royal Davis designed a two-story, flat-roofed brick main building and a barrel-roofed gymnasium for Central High School. The main building went up in 1959-60; the campus is now Hillsborough Elementary.
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Chapel Hill's city directory lists sixteen bricklayers, twelve in Black neighborhoods
The 1959 Hill's Chapel Hill directory named sixteen bricklayers, twelve of them living in Northside and other historically Black neighborhoods. By 1962 the list had grown to eighteen, including John, Handy and Leo Campbell.
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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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Efland-Cheeks School gets its first addition
An addition went up in 1959 on the north side of the 1952 Efland-Cheeks School, which Archie Royal Davis had designed for Black children in western Orange County. A modern wing larger than the original school followed around 1980.
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Murphey School closes and its pupils go to Hillsborough
After years of falling attendance the county closed Murphey School in 1959 and moved its pupils to the elementary schools in Hillsborough.
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Robert Seymour becomes the first pastor of Binkley Memorial Baptist Church
Robert Seymour came to Chapel Hill in 1959 as the first minister of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, organized the year before. He led it until 1988.
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Cedar Grove's advisory committee asks for two more classrooms
Lonnie Thompson, Arthur Wells, Carter White, Wayne Compton and Oscar Beasley of the school's advisory committee asked the board for a two-classroom addition. The board agreed to consider it and in August approved Archie Royal Davis's plans with a $20,000 limit.
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Stanley Vickers's parents apply for his transfer from Northside Elementary to Carrboro Elementary
After ten-year-old Stanley Boya Vickers finished fifth grade at Northside Elementary School in June 1959, his parents, Thomas Lee and Lattice Vickers, filed a written application to have him reassigned to Carrboro Elementary School, which was much nearer their home. The school board denied it on August 3, 1959.
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Chapel Hill school board refuses Stanley Vickers a transfer to all-white Carrboro Elementary and adopts a first-grade proximity policy
The Chapel Hill City Board of Education denied ten-year-old Stanley Vickers a transfer from all-Black Northside Elementary to the nearer all-white Carrboro Elementary School, and at the same meeting adopted a policy of limited integration at the first-grade level starting with the 1960-61 year. UNC law dean Henry Brandis, who had twice moved to approve the transfer, resigned from the board in protest and called the action both morally and legally indefensible.
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James and Myrtle Graham, a Black Efland couple, buy the old Efland Home cottage
In December 1959 James Nills Graham, called Nello, and Myrtle McAdoo Graham, both raised on Efland farms, bought the former reformatory cottage and 2.4 acres, and the Graham family kept it for more than fifty years. They belonged to White Cross A.M.E. Church and are buried there.
- 1960s
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A two-story lodge for Prince Hall Masons and the Eastern Star is built on West Orange Street
A concrete-block lodge was built in the 1960s at 210 West Orange Street for St. James Lodge No. 494 of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge and the St. Anita Maria chapter No. 622 of the Eastern Star. It stands on the site of a school for Black children shown on the 1924 Sanborn map and gained a rear wing in 1991.
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A vocational building is added at Central High School
Between 1960 and 1962 the county added a one-story, flat-roofed, brick-veneered vocational building with metal awning windows to the Central High campus in Hillsborough.
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Central High builds its "300" elementary wing
Another classroom building, the "300" wing or Elementary School building, went up at Central High from 1960 to 1962. With a vocational and band building finished in 1962, the campus reached the six buildings that stand today.
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Cornelia Spencer Love gives private funds toward a new library on East Franklin Street
Love donated private money during the 1960s to help build the town's new public library on East Franklin Street.
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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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Chapel Hill freedom movement
Nine Lincoln High students began Chapel Hill's sit-ins at Colonial Drug on February 28, 1960. Through 1963 and 1964 Black residents and UNC students picketed, marched and sat in, and held a Holy Week fast at the post office, but the aldermen narrowly rejected a public accommodations ordinance and many businesses stayed segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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The Chapel Hill Nine sit-in
Nine Black young men held Chapel Hill’s first sit-in at Colonial Drug.
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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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Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Chapel Hill
Invited by campus religious groups and the Carolina Forum, King spoke at University Baptist Church on May 8, 1960, visited two UNC sociology classes, and addressed an overflow crowd in Hill Hall on May 9 on the struggle for racial justice.
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Chapel Hill school board admits its first Black pupils to a white school, three first graders at Estes Hills Elementary
Acting under its new proximity policy, the board voted unanimously to grant three of twelve Black reassignment applications for the 1960-61 first grade at previously all-white Estes Hills Elementary School. Applications to transfer to the white junior high school, including Stanley Vickers's, were refused.
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Carrboro Elementary School enrolls its first Black pupils
Eight Black first graders were assigned to Carrboro Elementary under the 1961 zoning map, the school Stanley Vickers had been refused two years earlier. All but two requested and received transfers back to the Black school, so two Black children enrolled at Carrboro that fall.
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Chapel Hill assigns first graders by residence zone and becomes the first North Carolina district with no all-white school
A school board elected on a desegregation platform took office on July 1, 1961 and adopted a single first-grade attendance map, assigning 24 Black children to Glenwood, 10 to Estes Hills and 8 to Carrboro Elementary after the zones were redrawn to reduce Carrboro's share. When school opened, every school in the district had at least one Black pupil for the first time in the state's history, and no incidents were reported.
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Church and student groups picket Chapel Hill's Varsity Theatre
Local church groups and student organizations picketed the Varsity Theatre after Black patrons were refused entry. Later that year the management agreed to admit Black UNC students with ID, and the town's theaters were fully desegregated by early 1962.
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Clara Jones is appointed a supervisor of the Orange County schools
Clara Jones, a Person County principal for twenty-seven years, joined the county staff as supervisor in 1961, assigned to the Cedar Grove, Efland-Cheeks and A. L. Stanback schools for Black children. After integration she ran special education testing and placement, and she retired in 1974.
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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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Black parents at White Cross ask to send their children to White Cross School
The parents of 23 Black children living near White Cross applied to move them from the Hillsboro Negro elementary school, a long daily bus ride away, to the white school in their own community. Most of the children had gone to school in Chapel Hill until White Cross voters again turned down a merger with the Chapel Hill district in 1960.
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The county school board refuses the White Cross transfer requests
The Orange County Board of Education turned down the Black families' request, saying no reassignment had been asked for within ten days of the parents being notified of their children's school.
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Floyd McKissick represents the White Cross children at a school board hearing
At a hearing on the transfers, the children were represented by Durham attorney Floyd McKissick; the county board denied them again, reading a statement it had prepared before the hearing began.
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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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The county board votes to close White Cross School and send its white pupils to Hillsborough
Rather than admit the Black children, the Orange County school board decided to close White Cross School at the end of the school year and move its 75 white pupils to Cameron Park School in West Hillsboro, a step it tied to its ten-year building program.
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A.D. Clark Pool opens
Chapel Hill's swimming pool for Black residents, at the Roberson Street community center and now the A.D. Clark Pool, was dedicated on June 15, 1961. Cornelia Spencer Love gave $40,000 to build it, Black residents supplied labor and raised money for the bath house, and Adolphus D. Clark led the pool association.
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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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Lincoln High's football team wins an undefeated state championship
Coach William D. Peerman's Lincoln High Tigers won the state 2-A football championship for Black high schools on November 22, 1961, beating previously unbeaten Ridgeview High of Hickory 22-0 to finish 12-0. The season was unbeaten but not unscored upon: Harnett High scored six points in the eastern title game.
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Belton Edwards becomes principal of Cedar Grove School
Belton Edwards, a South Carolina native and North Carolina A&T graduate, followed Harold Webb as principal in 1962 and stayed until 1968, when he became the first Black member of the Orange County Board of Education. George Pierce succeeded him at the school.
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Binkley Baptist Church takes James Forbes as a student intern
Under Robert Seymour, Binkley Memorial Baptist Church accepted James A. Forbes Jr., a Black divinity student, as its intern in 1962.
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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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Nate Davis moves from Northside Elementary to Chapel Hill Junior High
In 1962, after sixth grade at Northside Elementary, Davis went to Chapel Hill Junior High School on Franklin Street as one of the first Black students in the town's formerly white schools. Harassment kept him out of school for two or three months, and he later attended the new Chapel Hill High School when it opened.
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Two federally funded kindergartens operate at the Efland schools
A federal research grant was paying for two public kindergartens in the county, one at Efland Elementary and one at Efland-Cheeks, the Black school. The board limited them to five-year-olds living in the Efland district.
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Orange County was still running a separate library for Black readers
The county bookmobile schedule printed in March 1962 listed a Thursday stop from 1:30 to 2:00 at the Orange Co. Negro Public Library. The previous year's vacation reading club invited children to register either at the Confederate Memorial Public Library or at the Orange County Negro Public Library in Hillsboro.
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Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee asks for a Black nurse on the district health staff
At a Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee meeting, Esther Atwater said the district health department needed a Black nurse on its staff. Chairman Dr. William Joyner said he would take the request to District Health Officer Dr. O. D. Garvin.
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Aycock and Hillsborough High schools are consolidated into Orange High School
When Orange High School opened in 1963, the county consolidated the high school grades of Aycock School in Cedar Grove and Hillsborough High School into it, and the older buildings became junior high or elementary schools. Some Aycock seniors went to Eastern Alamance High School in Mebane, but most went to Orange High.
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David Caldwell's family bought a home on Rogers Road
David Caldwell, later a RENA leader, said his family moved from Merritt Mill Road to Rogers Road when Black families got the chance to buy homes there. He recalled a farming neighborhood of about thirteen houses, with dirt roads and cornfields.
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Floyd McKissick sends organizers to Chapel Hill and defends arrested demonstrators
As head of CORE's Durham office, McKissick sent organizer Quinton Baker to Chapel Hill in 1963 to teach nonviolence and demonstration tactics, and he acted as attorney for many demonstrators arrested there. Letters to him in 1964 include one written from the Orange County jail.
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James Brittian is expelled from Lincoln High School after a civil rights march
Brittian, a student at the segregated Lincoln High School, was expelled for taking part in a civil rights protest march. He then became chairman of the Student Commission, a branch of the Chapel Hill Freedom Commission.
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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 Chapel Hill civil-rights demonstrations
Marches, sit-ins and arrests over segregated businesses from 1963 into 1964, the aldermen's refusal of a public accommodations ordinance, the Holy Week fast, and the Watts Restaurant protests and the Klopfer speedy-trial case that grew out of them.
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The Torian family deeds a lot beside Ridge Road School to Emma Torian Jones and Rev. Walter Jones
Maggie Torian and her children conveyed 0.79 acre west of the school, on Coleman Loop Road, to her daughter Emma and Emma's husband, Rev. Walter Warren Jones, who built a frame house there. Walter and Maggie Torian, Black farmers, had owned the land the school stood on and supplied its water.
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Orange County Board of Education closes Caldwell School
In 1961 the county board weighed a proposal to close White Cross School at once and Caldwell School later. In March 1963, in the consolidation that came with the new Orange High School, it voted to close the white-only Caldwell School, built in 1925, and from that fall its pupils went to Aycock and Cameron Park. The county could not sell the building until 1973.
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Student pickets begin marching outside the segregated College Cafe
The Student Peace Union and the NAACP put pickets in front of the segregated College Cafe on East Franklin Street, saying they would keep on until it integrated. The picketing led to the forming of the Committee for Open Business that May.
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Floyd McKissick and Malcolm X appear together at UNC's Memorial Hall
A day after their meeting in Durham, Durham attorney Floyd McKissick and Malcolm X appeared at UNC in a meeting moved from Howell Hall to Memorial Hall when about 1,600 people came. McKissick said he believed the Muslim movement had grown out of the frustration of Black Americans.
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NAACP chapter pickets North Carolina Memorial Hospital over segregated rooms and wards
The UNC chapter of the NAACP organized a picket in April 1963 to protest that private rooms and certain wards for Black patients at the hospital were still segregated, although outpatient clinics, recovery rooms, pediatrics and the cafeteria had been integrated. Hospital officials opposed the demonstration.
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Roosevelt Warner is elected the first Black member of the Hillsboro Board of Commissioners
Roosevelt Warner, a masonry contractor and business owner, led the field of eleven candidates with 281 votes for the five-member Board of Town Commissioners on his second try, unseating incumbent Herman H. Strayhorn. Two years earlier he had been the town's first Black candidate, finishing last with 180 votes.
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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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Teacher Hassie Vanhook Gattis retires after 34 years
Hassie Vanhook Brooks Gattis retired in 1963 after 34 years of teaching Black children in northern Orange County, at the Sartin, Grover, Poplar Grove and Carr schools and, from about 1955, at Cedar Grove. The News of Orange County marked her retirement in June.
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The General Joseph E. Johnston Motel is among motels that agree to admit Black guests
The Carolina Times reported that all eleven motels in the Durham area, the General Joseph Johnston Motel among them, had agreed to admit Black guests.
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Police carry out demonstrators sitting in at the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Merchants Association office
Members of the Committee for Open Business sat in and sang in the Merchants Association office on West Franklin Street to press merchants to desegregate. Police carried out 27 on trespass warrants signed by director Joe Augustine, and 34 were arrested that day in all.
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George Esser proposes an ordinance barring discrimination by new Chapel Hill businesses
After the aldermen declined a public accommodations law in June, Esser suggested as a private citizen an ordinance that would bar racial discrimination by businesses opening in the future, applied like zoning rules. The Board of Aldermen began considering it in August while the Committee for Open Business kept up its marches.
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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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Sit-in demonstrators at the Rock Pile are doused with ammonia
Around New Year's Day 1964, sit-in demonstrators at the Rock Pile, Carlton Mize's segregated grocery on the Durham Road, were doused with ammonia and bleach water. Seven were treated for burns, among them NAACP youth leader Quinton Baker; four were arrested, and thirteen more were arrested at a second sit-in there the next day, when five more needed treatment.
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Central High principal A. L. Stanback dies
Albert Leon Stanback, who came to Central as a coach and mathematics teacher and led it for more than twenty years, died after a short illness. His funeral was held in the school's auditorium. Under him the school grew to about 1,200 students.
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Fanny McDade, laundress to generations of students, is buried at 103 in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Fanny McDade (1861-1964), an African American woman who did students' laundry for many years, died at 103 and is thought to be the oldest person buried in the cemetery.
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Four of Orange County's 2,001 Black pupils attend white schools
The county school system enrolled 2,001 Black students in 1964-65. Four went to formerly white schools; the rest attended Central High, Efland-Cheeks or Cedar Grove.
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Realtors steer Howard and Lillian Lee away from white subdivisions
After moving to Chapel Hill for graduate study, Howard and Lillian Lee searched for about six months while realtors hesitated to show them houses in white subdivisions. They bought in Colony Woods, then received threatening calls and had a cross burned on their lawn.
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Watts Restaurant protests
Sit-ins at the segregated Watts Restaurant and Motel on South Columbia Street began on January 2, 1964. Over the next days demonstrators were urinated on, hosed and struck with a broom handle, and Duke and UNC faculty were among those arrested. The owners held out after the Civil Rights Act and desegregated on July 10, 1964.
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Chapel Hill aldermen vote down a public accommodations ordinance
The Board of Aldermen rejected, 4 to 2, an ordinance that would have required all town businesses to serve Black customers, and set up a nine-member committee on race relations instead. Integration leaders promised more demonstrations.
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