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Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1940s
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UNC organizes the Division of Health Affairs
In 1949 the university grouped its schools of medicine, public health and pharmacy, the new schools of nursing and dentistry, and the University Hospital into a Division of Health Affairs to coordinate teaching and research.
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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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Governor Kerr Scott appoints UNC President Frank Graham to the U.S. Senate
On March 22, 1949, Governor W. Kerr Scott named Frank Porter Graham to the United States Senate, ending his presidency of the university. Controller W. D. Carmichael Jr. became acting president.
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District health department takes UNC public health students for field training
Health officer Dr. O. David Garvin announced that the district health department would serve as a field training center for eight UNC public health students, four in health education and four in public health nursing, working for ten weeks across Orange, Person, Chatham and Lee counties.
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Morehead Planetarium is dedicated
Morehead Planetarium was dedicated at UNC on May 10, 1949.
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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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Charlie Justice receives UNC's Patterson Medal
UNC placed Justice in the 1950 class of Patterson Medal winners, the university's award for its leading athlete. He had been Walter Camp National Player of the Year in 1948 and Heisman Trophy runner-up in 1948 and 1949.
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Guion Griffis Johnson is president of the Chapel Hill Council of Churches
After returning to Chapel Hill from Atlanta in 1947, Johnson served on the boards of the Chapel Hill Community Council and Community Club, and in 1950 she was president of the Chapel Hill Council of Churches.
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The Southern Part of Heaven is published
William Meade Prince wrote and illustrated The Southern Part of Heaven, a book about growing up in Chapel Hill. Its title became a common nickname for the town.
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UNC establishes its School of Dentistry
The university's School of Dentistry dates from 1950, with John C. Brauer as dean. Its first class was due to graduate in 1954.
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UNC trustees create schools of social work and journalism
In 1950 the Board of Trustees established a School of Social Work and a School of Journalism, and renamed the School of Commerce the School of Business Administration.
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William Picard Jacocks photographs historic houses, including in Orange County
Jacocks photographed historic homes in several North Carolina counties, including Orange, with some of the Orange County images taken on the University of North Carolina campus. The 120 photographs are now at Wilson Library.
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R. D. W. Connor is buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery
Connor died in February 1950, a year after retiring from the university, and was buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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UNC's General Faculty adopts new rules creating a Faculty Council
The General Faculty approved the Faculty Legislation on University Government on May 10, 1950, to take effect in January 1951. It made an elected Faculty Council, meeting each month, the faculty's governing body.
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Henry T. Clark Jr. heads the university's Division of Health Affairs
Clark became the first permanent administrator of the Division of Health Affairs, created in 1948, with charge of the schools of medicine, dentistry, nursing, public health and pharmacy and of North Carolina Memorial Hospital. His title later became vice chancellor.
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Health officer closes the University pool as polio cases rise in Chapel Hill
After an emergency conference with six Chapel Hill physicians, District Health Officer O. David Garvin ordered the University swimming pool and all recreational facilities closed, with six polio cases in Chapel Hill and three more in the county. He asked parents to keep children at home or on their own block but did not recommend cancelling University classes or closing nursery schools.
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Gordon Gray is installed as president of the University of North Carolina
Gray, who had been secretary of the army, was installed as president of the three-campus University of North Carolina on October 10, 1950 at Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, the last day of a program that moved from Greensboro to Chapel Hill to Raleigh. The board of trustees had approved his selection on February 6, 1950.
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Alpha B. Wettach joins the university as dean of women students
Wettach also founded the Chapel Hill Experimental Kindergarten, the town's first kindergarten, and ran it in Mary Nash's old painting studio in the Nash house, where she and her husband rented.
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Gordon Ellis of the UNC education department builds a brick Cape Cod house on Pine Lane
Chemistry professor Henry Thomas and his wife Mary, a librarian at the UNC medical school, bought the house soon after it was finished.
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James Webb designs a house on Whitehead Circle for Joseph and Pearl Morrison
Architect James Webb designed a modern house at 407 Whitehead Circle for Joseph L. Morrison, a member of the university's journalism faculty, and his wife Pearl. The Morrisons lived there for more than fifty years; the house was sold in 2010.
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John Ehle teaches in UNC's radio, television and motion pictures department
Ehle, an Asheville native who came to Chapel Hill after infantry service in World War II and graduated from UNC in 1949, taught in the university's Communications Center, later the Department of Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures, from 1951 to 1963. He published his first books while teaching there.
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Kay Kyser retires from show business and settles in Chapel Hill
Kay Kyser left radio and television and returned with his wife Georgia to Chapel Hill, where he lived on East Franklin Street for the rest of his life.
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Masons lay the cornerstone of North Carolina Memorial Hospital
University Lodge No. 408 shared in the Masonic ceremony that laid the cornerstone of the new Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill.
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The first Morehead scholars are selected
The scholarship Morehead endowed at Chapel Hill made its first selections in 1951.
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UNC establishes its School of Nursing
The School of Nursing was established at Chapel Hill in 1951, with Elizabeth L. Kemble as dean. Its first class was due to graduate in 1955.
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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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Trustees make the campus heads chancellors and add a university vice-presidency
On May 22, 1951, on President Gordon Gray's recommendation, the trustees made the controller a vice-president, created a second vice-presidency, and gave the heads of the branches the title of chancellor. Logan Wilson filled the new post that fall.
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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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William Meade Prince dies at his home in Greenwood
William Meade Prince, illustrator, former head of the university's art department and author of The Southern Part of Heaven, died by suicide in the studio of his Greenwood home. The Weekly wrote that the village felt the loss deeply.
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Bob Cox and Monk Jennings open Town & Campus in place of Wilbur Kutz's Varsity Shop
Cox and Jennings's clothing store, Town & Campus, took over the East Franklin store where Kutz had run the Varsity Shop. It was replaced by another clothier between 1989 and 1993.
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Frank McGuire arrives at UNC to coach basketball
McGuire came to Chapel Hill in 1952 to take over a basketball program that ranked far behind football in the university's priorities. His first office at Carolina was the ticket booth at Woollen Gym.
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Isaac M. Taylor joins the new Department of Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine
Taylor, a 1942 Carolina graduate with a Harvard medical degree, returned to Chapel Hill in 1952 at the invitation of medical dean Reece Berryhill as one of the first members of the medical school's department of medicine.
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Oliver K. Cornwell becomes chair of UNC's Department of Physical Education and Athletics
After Robert Fetzer retired in 1952, Cornwell became chair of the combined department, while Charles P. Erickson became director of athletics. By 1955 the two parts had been separated again.
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UNC names Cobb Dormitory for Collier Cobb
The university named its new Cobb Dormitory in honor of the geologist Collier Cobb, who had taught at UNC for forty years.
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UNC trustees set aside Mason Farm land for a botanical garden
The university's Board of Trustees allocated about 72 acres of its Mason Farm property for the North Carolina Botanical Garden, officially establishing it. Botanist H. R. Totten's efforts helped procure the site.
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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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University trustees give Albert Coates the O. Max Gardner Award
By unanimous vote the trustees named Coates the faculty member of the Consolidated University who had done most that year for the welfare of humanity, under the award created by the late governor's will. Coates accepted it for the Institute, and it carried $10,000.
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Howard Mumford Jones gives the address at the dedication of the university library addition
Howard Mumford Jones, a former member of the university's English faculty then at Harvard, gave the principal address, on the library in higher education, at the dedication of the $1.6 million addition to the university library, held in Memorial Hall.
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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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North Carolina Memorial Hospital opens
North Carolina Memorial Hospital opened to patients on Tuesday, September 2, 1952, without a formal ceremony, as the core of the new University Medical Center. Its opening allowed the UNC School of Medicine to grow from a two-year program into a four-year school.
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UNC School of Medicine admits its first third-year class
A month after the hospital opened, the School of Medicine admitted its first third-year class, beginning clinical training in Chapel Hill. The school had offered only the first two years of medical study since its Raleigh clinical branch closed in 1910.
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The Knapp Foundation pledges $500,000 toward a new building for the Institute of Government
University President Gordon Gray secured a commitment from the foundation of the late Joseph Palmer Knapp for a $500,000 grant, to be matched by the same sum from the state, to build the Institute a new home. Coates had wanted the money as an endowment beside a state-built building, but Gray followed the matching plan that Margaret Knapp favored.
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Carroll Hall is built and named for Dudley D. Carroll
The university completed the main building of its business school in 1953 and named it Carroll Hall for the School of Commerce's first dean. It became home to the journalism school in 1999.
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Fletcher M. Green chairs the UNC history department
Green, a Kenan Professor since 1946, chaired the University of North Carolina's Department of History from 1953 to 1960. He retired in 1968.
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Hugh Lefler and Paul Wager edit a bicentennial history of Orange County
For the county's 200th anniversary, Lefler and Wager edited Orange County, 1752-1952, with chapters by about fifteen contributors on early history, agriculture, industry, schools and more, plus a dictionary of county biography and lists of county officials.
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Kay Kyser helps raise the money to put WUNC-TV on the air
Kay Kyser toured the state with William C. Friday and Billy Carmichael Jr. to raise money for UNC's educational television station, which went on the air from Chapel Hill in January 1955.
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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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Robert F. Schenkkan becomes director of the university's educational television venture
After the FCC granted the Consolidated University of North Carolina an educational television license, Schenkkan became director of the new venture, which went on the air as WUNC-TV from the Communication Center in Chapel Hill on January 8, 1955.
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UNC dedicates the Forest Theatre to Frederick Koch
In 1953 the university dedicated the stone amphitheatre in Battle Park to Koch, who had developed the site of the 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary dramas into a permanent theatre after he joined the faculty. The stone stage and seating had been rebuilt with Works Progress Administration funds in 1940.
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North Carolina Memorial Hospital is dedicated
Exercises at Chapel Hill on April 23-24, 1953, dedicated North Carolina Memorial Hospital and marked the new four-year School of Medicine and the schools of dentistry and nursing. The hospital had opened in September 1952.
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Hubert Robinson and Paul Wager are elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
Robinson led the five candidates with 571 votes and Wager followed with 560; Kenneth Putnam took the third seat. The Weekly noted Robinson was the second Black person elected to public office in Chapel Hill, the first since Reconstruction, and it was Wager's first run for office.
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Gardner Hall, named for O. Max Gardner, opens with the new business school buildings
Gardner Hall, named for former governor O. Max Gardner, was one of three new School of Business Administration buildings set between the Library and South Building, with Carroll and Hanes halls. The University Placement Service moved into it, and the formal dedication of the three buildings was set for May 25, 1953.
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Vermont Royster wins the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing
Vermont C. Royster, a UNC graduate, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for his regular editorials in The Wall Street Journal.
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First four-year class graduates from the UNC School of Medicine
In 1954 the UNC School of Medicine graduated its first class of students to complete all four years of medical training. The university's new dental and nursing schools graduated their first classes the same year.
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Louis Graves sells the Chapel Hill Weekly
After 31 years as its editor and owner, Louis Graves sold the Chapel Hill Weekly in 1954 to the Chapel Hill Publishing Company. He stayed on as contributing editor through 1960.
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The Pinetum at Rocky Ridge Farm is deeded to the university's botanical garden
A protected stand of Coker's remaining forest along Meeting of the Waters Creek on the west edge of the development, known as the Pinetum, was deeded in 1954 to the UNC botanical garden for its care.
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The University tears down the Crystal Palace on East Franklin Street for planetarium parking
The University had bought the old building known as the Crystal Palace in 1945. In 1954 it razed it and turned the lot into parking for Morehead Planetarium, with a large sundial in a rose garden at the center.
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The university awards William Picard Jacocks an honorary doctor of laws
The University of North Carolina, where Jacocks had graduated in 1904, gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree while he was living in Chapel Hill in retirement.
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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 University tears down Archer House to make room for the Ackland Art Museum
Demolition of the 47-year-old Archer House on South Columbia Street began in August 1954 and was still under way in late September. Its lot and the Roberson lot next door became the site of the Ackland museum.
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Harry Macklin comes back to Chapel Hill to reopen Harry's Grill in the old Campus Cafe
Harry Macklin, who had run Harry's Grill until 1944, bought the Campus Cafe two doors from the post office and reopened it as a new Harry's Grill and delicatessen. The town board granted him a beer and wine permit.
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Bayard Wootten sells her Chapel Hill studio and returns to New Bern
Bayard Wootten sold the Wootten-Moulton Studio to her longtime manager T. C. Moore, who kept it running, and left Chapel Hill for her old home town of New Bern.
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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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Chapel Hill aldermen elect Oliver K. Cornwell mayor
After Mayor Edwin S. Lanier won the Democratic nomination for county commissioner, the Board of Aldermen chose one of its own members, Oliver K. Cornwell, as mayor and elected Rogers Wade to his seat.
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Daniel Okun chairs UNC's Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Okun, who joined the UNC public health faculty in 1952, headed the department from 1955 to 1973, and it grew from three to 25 faculty members.
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Ed Yoder and Louis Kraar edit the Daily Tar Heel
UNC students Ed Yoder and Louis Kraar were listed together as editors of the Daily Tar Heel in the spring and fall of 1955.
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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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J. Carlyle Sitterson becomes dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at UNC
Sitterson, who had begun teaching history at UNC in 1935 while completing his doctorate, became dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in 1955. He was appointed vice-chancellor in 1965.
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WUNC-TV begins broadcasting
WUNC-TV began broadcasting from Chapel Hill on January 8, 1955.
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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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Jim Tatum returns to Chapel Hill as head football coach
Tatum came back to UNC in 1956 at a substantial cut in salary and reorganized and expanded the university's Educational Foundation, the source of its athletic grants-in-aid. He had the only losing season of his career that year, 2-7-1, and followed it with 6-4 records in 1957 and 1958.
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McGuire's undefeated Tar Heels play their home games at Woollen Gym
McGuire's 1956-57 team won 32 straight games and the national championship, beating Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain in triple overtime as 12-point underdogs. Only eight of those wins came at home in Woollen Gym, where a hole was drilled in the wall for a television camera lens.
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Morehead gives the sundial in front of the planetarium
In 1956 Morehead funded the sundial set in front of the planetarium building in Chapel Hill.
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The Institute of Government's East Franklin building becomes Consolidated University offices
After William Friday moved into the President's House in 1956, the University moved the Institute of Government out of its Franklin Street building and used it for the Consolidated University's offices. Those offices went back to campus between 1969 and 1973, and the building passed to other University programs.
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The Joseph Palmer Knapp Building opens for the Institute of Government
The Institute of Government got a new building in Chapel Hill, paid for by the Knapp Foundation and a legislative appropriation and named for Joseph Palmer Knapp, who had died in 1951. His widow, Margaret Rutledge Knapp, saw that the family foundation funded it.
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William Friday becomes acting president of the Consolidated University
Named acting president at 35 while the trustees searched for Gordon Gray's successor, Friday began his duties on March 1, 1956. The board approved him as president on October 26, 1956, and at his first news conference he named moving the administrative offices from South Building on the Chapel Hill campus to the old Institute of Government building on Franklin Street as a first goal.
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Patriots of North Carolina hold a mass meeting in Hillsborough and form an Orange County unit
An overflow crowd of about 300, observers said all white, filled the courtroom in Hillsborough for a Patriots of North Carolina meeting where I. Beverly Lake urged abandoning the public schools for a private system rather than integrate. W. C. George, the Patriots' state president, presided as members named an Orange County executive committee.
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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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Dr. Ernest Wood, the first radiologist at UNC's hospital, builds a brick Ranch on Fern Lane
The five-bay Ranch has a recessed garage wing and a front cross-gable.
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James L. Godfrey serves as dean of the faculty
Godfrey held the post of dean of the faculty from 1957 to 1965, one of the titles that preceded the office of provost at Chapel Hill.
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O. B. Hardison Jr. teaches in the English department
Hardison, a Renaissance specialist with UNC bachelor's and master's degrees, joined the English department in 1957 and edited Studies in Philology. He left in 1969 to direct the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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Howell's The Kenan Professorships is named one of the best Southern books of
The Kenan Professorships, written by UNC English professor A. C. Howell and published by the University Press with illustrations by William Meade Prince and Adrian Lamb, was chosen for design among 25 best Southern books of 1956.
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UNC men’s basketball wins the 1957 NCAA national championship
UNC defeated Kansas, 54–53 in triple overtime, to win the national title.
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Jerrold Orne is appointed University Librarian
Chancellor Robert B. House announced Orne's appointment as university librarian, effective August 1, with the approval of President William C. Friday and the trustees. Orne came from the Air University library at Maxwell Air Force Base and succeeded Andrew H. Horn.
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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 first televised ACC regular season game is played at Woollen Gym
Television producer C. D. Chesley brought his cameras into Woollen Gym for Carolina's fourteenth meeting with Clemson, the first regular season ACC game ever televised. McGuire's team won 79-55.
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Chapel Hill Elementary pupils play carols with professional musicians at the school Christmas program
At the Chapel Hill Elementary School Christmas programs on December 17, 1957, directed musically by Adeline McCall, supervisor of music in the Chapel Hill schools, children playing psalteries, violins and bells accompanied the carols with two harpists, violinist Dorothy Alden and flutist Dorothy Hickok. The programs also staged the play Alias Santa Claus.
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Anne Firor Scott moves to Chapel Hill and takes a temporary history post at UNC
Anne Firor Scott and her husband Andrew Scott moved to Chapel Hill in 1958, when he joined UNC's political science department and she took a temporary position in history. They lived in the Highland Woods neighborhood for 47 years.
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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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George Brown Tindall joins the UNC history faculty
Tindall, who took his graduate degrees at UNC, returned in 1958 as an associate professor of history and taught until he retired as Kenan professor emeritus in 1990.
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William S. Powell becomes curator of the North Carolina Collection
Powell, who had joined the university library's North Carolina Collection in 1951, was named its curator after Mary Lindsay Thornton retired.
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The University's telephone system plans to double its East Rosemary Street exchange
The University-owned Chapel Hill telephone system announced a $300,000 addition that would double the size of its exchange building on East Rosemary Street, along with better party-line service. Bids for the addition were opened in March.
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Portrait painter Clement Strudwick dies and is buried in Hillsborough
Clement Read Strudwick, who had painted in a workshop behind his parents' Hillsborough home, died on February 26, 1958. His funeral was held in the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church and he was buried in the Hillsborough cemetery.
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The Ackland Art Museum opens
UNC dedicated the William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center on September 20, 1958, the morning after a preview for faculty. Ackland had left his bequest to Duke, which refused it, and nine years of litigation sent it to Chapel Hill; the Georgian building held galleries, an art library, classrooms, studios and offices.
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Binkley Baptist Church organizes
Fifty-six charter members established the congregation, initially worshiping on campus.
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Ruth Faison Shaw brings her finger-painting case histories to the University
The Chapel Hill News Leader reported that Shaw, recently of Chapel Hill, was giving the University more than a thousand case histories on personality diagnosis through finger painting and was working as its consultant in therapy.
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Samuel Selden leaves the Playmakers and Harry E. Davis takes over the Department of Dramatic Art
Selden left Chapel Hill in 1959 to chair the Department of Theatre Arts at UCLA, and Harry E. Davis became chairman of the Department of Dramatic Art.
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The Institute's dormitory lodges sixteen thousand overnight guests in a year
Sixteen thousand people stayed overnight in the Knapp Building's dormitory during the 1959-60 academic year, and attendance at Institute events and instruction had grown about tenfold since the building opened in 1956.
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The University tears down the Abernethy house on South Columbia Street for Ackland grounds and parking
UNC bought the house from the widow of Dr. Eric A. Abernethy, long the director of the University Infirmary, and tore it down to extend the Ackland Art Center grounds and make a gravel lot of about 60 faculty parking spaces. The house dated from 1905 and had housed many students.
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Chapel Hill Public Library shows Bayard Wootten photographs after her death
Weeks after Bayard Wootten died in New Bern, the Chapel Hill Public Library displayed her 1930s photographs of western North Carolina, made to illustrate two UNC Press books, Backwoods America and Cabins in the Laurel.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
McClamroch, one of five candidates for three seats, was elected on May 5, 1959 with F. E. Strowd and Roland Giduz, and was sworn in with Mayor Oliver K. Cornwell the following Monday night. Campaigning, he had called for coordinating town and university planning and for bringing the university's payments for town services above the table.
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Mayor Cornwell presses the state to widen the highways into Chapel Hill
Sworn in for a new term with aldermen F. E. Strowd and Sandy McClamroch, Mayor Cornwell wrote to the state's director of highways urging four-lane roads toward Durham and Raleigh and calling U.S. 15-501 and N.C. 54 major entrances to the university.
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Jim Tatum dies at Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill
Tatum apparently contracted an overwhelming viral infection while visiting Canada with the coaches Peahead Walker and Frank Howard, and died one week after entering Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Brandis returns for the Vickers hearing, then leaves the Chapel Hill school board
Brandis withdrew his August 3 resignation so he could sit at the board's hearing on Stanley Vickers's transfer request on August 31. He resigned again after that meeting, and the board named a committee to find his successor.
- 1960s
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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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Manly Wade Wellman teaches creative writing at the university
Wellman taught creative writing classes in the Evening College of the University of North Carolina and was known for helping new writers.
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North Carolina Memorial Hospital admits its 100,000th patient
UNC A to Z records that the hospital welcomed its 100,000th patient in 1960, eight years after it opened.
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UNC football coach Jim Hickey builds a two-story Colonial Revival house on Iris Lane
The weatherboarded house has a pedimented entrance porch and a garage wing topped by a small cupola. Hickey lived there until 1977.
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UNC gives John Lindsay Morehead an honorary doctor of laws
The university honored Morehead, principal officer of the Morehead Foundation, as the architect of the Morehead scholarship plan.
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W. C. George and Lucius Cheshire are named Orange County managers of I. Beverly Lake's campaign
I. Beverly Lake named W. C. George of Chapel Hill and Lucius M. Cheshire of Hillsborough, both directors of the pro-segregation North Carolina Defenders of States Rights, co-managers of his campaign for governor in Orange County.
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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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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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Governor Luther Hodges accepts the Knapp Building for the state at its dedication
A four-day dedication of the Institute of Government's headquarters, for which officials were invited by congressional district and the Kughler murals were unveiled, closed with Governor Hodges accepting the million-dollar building on behalf of the state. Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. stayed for the whole program.
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Aycock suspends a basketball player in the betting scandal and makes Dean Smith head coach
After the player Doug Moe accepted $75 from a gambler in 1961, Chancellor Aycock suspended him and said the integrity of the institution was involved. Aycock then raised assistant coach Dean Smith to head coach.
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Frank McGuire leaves UNC and Dean Smith succeeds him
McGuire left Chapel Hill in 1961 to coach the Philadelphia Warriors of the NBA. Dean Smith, who had joined his staff as an assistant in 1958, became head coach of the Tar Heels.
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UNC considers the Jordan Reservoir for its water and Okun argues for Cane Creek
While Okun was on sabbatical in 1961 the university began considering the Jordan Reservoir as a water source; on his return he persuaded the board that Cane Creek, which his students had studied in the 1950s, was the better site.
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William Lanier Hunt gives 103 acres of the Morgan Creek gorge to UNC
Hunt gave UNC and the state about 103 acres of creek gorge and Catawba rhododendron bluffs along Morgan Creek, which became the William Lanier Hunt Arboretum, part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden lands.
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UNC moves the Mitchell family graves from the campus to the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Four graves of Elisha Mitchell's infant sons and grandsons, in the old Mitchell garden near the center of campus, were exhumed under archaeologist Joffre Coe to make room for the expansion of the university's television and communications work. They were reburied in the Horace Williams plot in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery with the Rev. Vance Barron officiating.
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University National Bank of Chapel Hill becomes part of Central Carolina Bank
The University National Bank of Chapel Hill merged into the Durham Bank and Trust Company, which took the new name Central Carolina Bank and Trust Company. Both Chapel Hill offices reopened under the new name, with O. Gordon Perry as manager for Chapel Hill.
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President John F. Kennedy speaks at UNC
President John F. Kennedy received an honorary degree at UNC's University Day ceremony, held on the University's 168th birthday, and spoke to an estimated 32,000 people in Kenan Stadium. He pledged that Americans would be neither Red nor dead, and announced a $1 million federal materials research contract for UNC.
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Ruth Faison Shaw holds a finger-painting show in Chapel Hill
The Chapel Hill Weekly ran a page of photographs of a finger-painting show by Shaw, showing her at work and a display in a garden.
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Student Peace Union symbols are painted on UNC's military buildings and the armory gun
In one of the first antiwar acts on campus, someone painted the Student Peace Union insignia on several military buildings and on the antiaircraft gun in front of the Naval Armory.
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Albert Coates gives Chancellor Aycock a 158-page account of the Institute's past and needs
Using staff tallies of thirty years of Institute publications, training and finances, Coates wrote Chancellor William B. Aycock a long report on how the Institute began and grew and what it would need. It also argued for waiving the retirement rule in his case, and it became the core of his later published history of the Institute.
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Four high-rise dormitories go up on UNC's south campus
Between 1962 and 1967 the firm of Graves and Toy built Craig, Ehringhaus, Morrison and Hinton James, steel-framed residence towers faced in brick and grouped around Chase Hall at the south edge of campus. Open metal balconies on the back serve as hallways to the student suites.
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Frederick Brooks gives a guest lecture at UNC
While working on IBM's System/360, Brooks visited UNC for an interview and a guest lecture, Ten Research Problems in Computer Science, which impressed the administration and led to the new department.
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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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Quakers from the Chapel Hill and Durham meetings found Carolina Friends School
Members of the Chapel Hill and Durham Friends meetings founded Carolina Friends School as a purposely integrated school, beginning with early education programs in the two meeting houses. Mildred Ringwalt was one of the seven founders and the first clerk of its board of trustees.
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Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee asks for a Black nurse on the district health staff
At a Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee meeting, Esther Atwater said the district health department needed a Black nurse on its staff. Chairman Dr. William Joyner said he would take the request to District Health Officer Dr. O. D. Garvin.
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Chancellor Aycock chooses John Sanders to succeed Albert Coates as director of the Institute
After Coates would not name a successor through months of talks, Chancellor William B. Aycock picked assistant director John Sanders, then thirty-five, who accepted in a short meeting with Aycock and Dean of Faculty James Godfrey. Sanders, on the staff since October 1956, took over when Coates left the post on August 31, 1962.
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Albert Coates retires as director of the Institute of Government
Coates retired as director of the Institute he founded on August 31, 1962, but stayed on the law faculty, teaching full time until about 1967 and a reduced load until a stroke in early 1968.
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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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Guy B. Johnson is named Kenan professor of anthropology and sociology
Johnson became Kenan professor of anthropology and sociology at UNC in 1963 and retired six years later.
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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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UNC completes Coker Hall and names it for William C. Coker
The university completed a new building in 1963 and named it Coker Hall for William Chambers Coker, Kenan professor of botany and long-time head of the buildings and grounds committee.
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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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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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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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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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Graham Memorial passes from student union to the Department of Dramatic Arts
Graham Memorial, the student union for 27 years, was turned over to the drama department after the new Frank Porter Graham Student Union opened elsewhere on campus.
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Isaac M. Taylor serves as dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Taylor succeeded W. Reece Berryhill as dean in 1964. Student enrollment, faculty and research funding grew during his deanship, and a ten-year capital building program began that produced Berryhill Hall, the first phase of the Health Sciences Library, and the Brinkhous-Bullitt and Burnett-Womack Buildings.
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Joe Straley chairs the Committee of Concerned Citizens
The UNC physics professor Joe Straley chaired the Committee of Concerned Citizens, a group of Chapel Hill residents dedicated to civil rights, in 1964 and 1965.
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UNC founds its computer science department under Frederick Brooks
Brooks, 33, founded what became the Department of Computer Science, the second free-standing doctorate-granting department of its kind in the United States; it was first called Information Science and took the name computer science in 1971.
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William E. Leuchtenburg wins the Bancroft Prize
Leuchtenburg won the 1964 Bancroft Prize for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (Harper & Row, 1963). He was then teaching at Columbia University, where he taught from 1952 to 1982 before joining UNC.
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Institute of Government delivers its report on Chapel Hill's power to pass a public accommodations law
A report prepared by George Esser at the aldermen's request, gathering cases from all fifty states on a town's power to pass a public accommodations law, was completed and handed to Town Manager Robert Peck for the aldermen days before their vote. Esser said it showed the probable attitude of North Carolina courts toward a town using its general welfare power for that purpose.
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Survey finds N.C. Memorial Hospital still separates patients by race
A Daily Tar Heel survey of Chapel Hill accommodations listed North Carolina Memorial Hospital among places keeping segregation, with director E. B. Crawford Jr. saying the hospital had two floors of mostly Black patients and did not generally integrate patient rooms.
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Thirty-nine demonstrators are arrested sitting on the steps of Brady's Restaurant
On a Sunday night, 39 demonstrators, seven of them white, were arrested after sitting three deep on the front steps of the segregated Brady's Restaurant and blocking the door. The night before, 53 had been arrested in sit-downs in front of Brady's and the Rock Pile.
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A Klan rally gathers at the post office fast and a UNC student is struck
On the fast's seventh day a Ku Klux Klan rally drew onlookers to the Franklin Street post office, where textile worker Milford Cordell Hill of Gold Hill struck UNC senior Louis S. Calhoun Jr. and knocked off his glasses; police officers who saw it swore out complaints.
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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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Clarence's Bar and Grill turns away an integrated group the day after the Civil Rights Act
Five white people and one Black person asked for service at Clarence's Bar and Grill on West Franklin Street. Owner Clarence Gray refused them, saying he thought one of them was drunk. Testers visited other Chapel Hill restaurants that weekend as well.
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Paul F. Sharp serves as chief administrator of UNC at Chapel Hill
Sharp was chief administrative officer of the university at Chapel Hill from September 1, 1964 to February 15, 1966. His records document the state's speaker ban law and programs in medical education, and he left to become president of Drake University.
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Albert Coates starts the Institute of Civic Education in the University's Extension Division
With no place offered by the Institute of Government or the law school, Coates set up an Institute of Civic Education under Extension Division director Charles Milner, paid for by the Richardson Foundation and a $50,000 yearly state appropriation approved by Governor Terry Sanford. In the summer of 1965 it brought high school civics and government teachers to Chapel Hill for short courses in state history and government.
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Chase Hall, the campus's first modernist building, goes up on south campus
Chase Hall, a dining hall designed by Milton Small and Associates of Raleigh and built in 1965, is a glass and steel International Style building that appears to hover over a recessed concrete base. The book calls it the first modernist building erected on the campus; Small had studied under Mies van der Rohe.
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Don Stewart's Carmichael Auditorium is completed as the state's largest single-span building
Stewart designed Carmichael Auditorium, finished in 1965, with a roof carried on steel beams held by steel tie rods anchored in the ground. The book says it was the largest single-span building in North Carolina when it was built.
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Eric Van Loon chairs the Carolina Political Union
A Daily Tar Heel profile in May 1966 reported that Van Loon, a junior from Nashville, had spent the past year as chairman of the Carolina Political Union, vice president of the debating team, National Student Association campus coordinator, a Morrison resident adviser and treasurer of the Carolina Symposium.
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James L. Godfrey chairs the history department
Godfrey chaired UNC's Department of History from 1965 to 1973.
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Karen Parker becomes the first Black woman to earn an undergraduate degree at UNC
Karen L. Parker, who transferred from the Woman's College in Greensboro in 1963 as UNC's first Black woman undergraduate, graduated in journalism in 1965. She was the first African American woman to receive an undergraduate degree from the University, and as a student she joined Chapel Hill sit-ins and was arrested in December 1963.
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Morrison Residence Hall opens, named for Cameron Morrison
The university completed Morrison Residence Hall, a men's dormitory, in 1965 and named it for former governor Cameron Morrison, an influential trustee who had backed the university's expansion program in the 1920s.
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Ruth Anderson Stephens becomes the first Black graduate of UNC's School of Nursing
Ruth Anderson Stephens completed the School of Nursing's master's program in nursing education and administration in 1965, the school's first African American graduate.
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UNC names its Chapel Hill gymnasium for William D. Carmichael Jr.
Four years after his death the university named the gymnasium at Chapel Hill for Carmichael. NCpedia lists buildings named for him on three campuses, the television building at Greensboro, the gymnasium at Raleigh and the auditorium at Chapel Hill.
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William F. Little chairs the chemistry department
Little, who had come to Carolina as a chemistry instructor in 1956, became department chair in 1965 at 35. He hired young scholars and nearly doubled the faculty to 30.
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Jim Medford is elected president of the campus YMCA
A Daily Tar Heel photograph taken on the steps of South Building shows Jim Medford as the newly elected YMCA president with the other officers chosen in the campus Y election.
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Howard Mumford Jones wins the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Howard Mumford Jones, who had taught at the University of North Carolina from 1925 to 1930, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for O Strange New World (1964), a study of American culture from the discovery through the Jacksonian era. He was then retired from Harvard.
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Memorial Hospital ends racial segregation
After a federal inspection team found the hospital out of compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chancellor Paul F. Sharp announced it would take immediate steps to obey the law. The hospital had assigned patients to rooms by what it called cultural background, and room assignments now had to be made without regard to race.
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Bob Powell is named executive director of the Carolina Forum
The Daily Tar Heel's list of student government appointments made by Student Body President Paul Dickson gives Bob Powell as executive director of the Carolina Forum for the 1965-66 year.
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Medford is named to the student government State Affairs committee
Student Body President Paul Dickson's committee appointments, printed in the Daily Tar Heel, put Jim Medford on the State Affairs committee along with Henry Patterson and Taylor Branch.
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Eunice Milton is listed among the members of the Order of Valkyries
When the Order of Valkyries, described by the Daily Tar Heel as the highest women's honorary organization on campus, tapped new members in November 1965, Eunice Milton was named among the seven continuing members. She appears again in the honorary's March 1966 list.
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C. Hugh Holman serves as UNC provost
Holman, dean of the Graduate School from 1963 to 1966, served as provost of the University of North Carolina from 1966 to 1968 and later as special assistant to the chancellor.
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Eric Van Loon becomes assistant to the student body president
After Robert S. Powell Jr. was elected student body president in the spring of 1966, the Daily Tar Heel reported that Van Loon had newly taken on the roles of student legislator, National Student Association delegate and presidential assistant to Powell. He had run unsuccessfully for student body treasurer the previous spring.
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Eunice Milton serves as president of the campus YWCA
The Daily Tar Heel called Milton the YWCA president when it reported the filing of the Speaker Ban suit on April 1, 1966, and the former YWCA president when it reported on the case in May.
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John E. Greenbacker Jr. leads the Dialectic and Philanthropic literary society
The federal court's findings in Dickson v. Sitterson list Greenbacker as president of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Literary Society, one of the recognized student organizations whose officers brought the Speaker Ban suit. The Daily Tar Heel likewise named him as Di-Phi president among the ten student leaders who wrote to Chancellor Sitterson on March 1, 1966.
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John E. Greenbacker Jr. serves as associate editor of the Daily Tar Heel
The masthead of the December 7, 1966 Daily Tar Heel lists Greenbacker as associate editor under editor Fred Thomas. He wrote signed opinion pieces, and a letter in the same issue takes issue with his Sunday column profiling the SDS leader Gary Waller.
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Stuart Matthews serves on the steering committee of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society
The federal court's findings in Dickson v. Sitterson list Matthews as a member of the steering committee of Students for a Democratic Society, one of the recognized campus organizations whose officers brought the suit. The Daily Tar Heel adds that Matthews and Gary Waller invited Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker to speak under SDS sponsorship on January 3, 1966.
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Wall speeches at the campus line
In 1966 the trustees barred Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker from the campus under the Speaker Ban law, so each spoke to students across the stone wall at McCorkle Place from the Franklin Street sidewalk. Students and the two speakers sued in Dickson v. Sitterson, a federal court struck the law down in 1968, and a marker went up at the wall in 2011.
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Carolina Forum chairman George Nicholson answers Professor W. C. George on the Forum's speakers
Nicholson told the Daily Tar Heel that the Forum invited both liberals and conservatives, naming Strom Thurmond and Ross Barnett among its recent guests, after the segregationist UNC professor W. C. George said it largely ignored conservative racial views.
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The Botanical Garden Foundation is incorporated, with William Lanier Hunt as its founder
Hunt, a member of the garden's advisory board, led the effort to form a private foundation to raise money, hold land and speak for the North Carolina Botanical Garden. At its first annual meeting in 1967 he was elected its first president, and 291 people and 18 organizations joined as charter members.
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Students for a Democratic Society invites Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker to speak at UNC
The UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society invited Frank Wilkinson, who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment when questioned in California about Communist activities, and the Communist theoretician Herbert Aptheker to speak on campus. After the trustees barred both men, Student Government under Paul Dickson, the Daily Tar Heel, the Carolina Forum, the YMCA and YWCA, the Di-Phi and the Carolina Political Union joined SDS in renewing the invitations.
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Dickson, Nicholson and McCrary invite Herbert Aptheker to speak on campus
Three of the students who later sued invited Aptheker to speak at Chapel Hill on March 9, 1966 under the sponsorship of Student Government, the Carolina Forum and the Daily Tar Heel. Aptheker accepted two days later.
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Gary Waller joins a student panel on the Speaker Ban in Memorial Hall
The Daily Tar Heel reported that student body president Paul Dickson presided over a noon meeting of students and faculty in Memorial Hall, with a panel of four that included Waller, Carolina Conservative Club president Wilson Clark and the SDS faculty advisers Joseph Straley and Lewis Lipsitz. The meeting adopted a resolution about four and a half hours before the trustees' executive committee voted 8 to 3 to bar Herbert Aptheker from speaking.
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UNC trustees' executive committee bars Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker from the Chapel Hill campus
Meeting in Governor Dan K. Moore's office in Raleigh, the executive committee of the UNC board of trustees voted 8 to 3 to deny university facilities to Aptheker and Wilkinson and suspended all other invitations covered by the speaker ban law until the full board adopted rules. Earlier that day more than 800 students and faculty at a Memorial Hall meeting had backed Aptheker's right to speak.
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Nicholson criticizes SDS over the Aptheker invitation while backing the principle
The Carolina Forum chairman called the Students for a Democratic Society invitation to Herbert Aptheker ill-timed and planned for sensationalism, and said the Forum had joined the invitation only in support of the principle of free speech.
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Nicholson rebuts the Conservative Club chairman's charge about Forum speakers
Answering Carolina Conservative Club chairman Wilson Clark, Nicholson said the Forum's budget was 2,000 dollars rather than 6,000, that it had invited conservative speakers, and that John Birch Society founder Robert Welch was coming to campus later that month.
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J. Carlyle Sitterson serves as chief administrator of UNC at Chapel Hill
Sitterson was the chief administrative officer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from February 16, 1966 to January 31, 1972. His records as chancellor cover desegregation and the federal HEW lawsuit, the Speaker Ban law, protest against the Vietnam War and campus unrest.
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Stuart Matthews and Gary Waller write to Chancellor Sitterson inviting Herbert Aptheker
On the day the full board of trustees adopted new speaker regulations, Matthews and Waller wrote to Acting Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson for the UNC Chapel Hill chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, asking that Herbert Aptheker be allowed to speak on campus about the war in Vietnam on March 9. The letter set out his publications, speaking engagements and his Supreme Court passport case.
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The UNC Board of Trustees adopts visiting-speaker procedures under the amended Speaker Ban
Acting under G.S. 116-199 and 116-200, the full Board of Trustees adopted procedures requiring recognized student groups to clear invitations to covered speakers with the chancellor. The students complied with them when they renewed the Wilkinson and Aptheker invitations, and the court later found the procedures as vague as the statute.
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Gary Waller becomes chairman of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society
A UNC Libraries exhibit states that Waller, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, was vice chairman of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and became chairman when Jim McCorkel resigned on February 2, 1966 to spend more time on his graduate studies.
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Eight student groups re-invite Frank Wilkinson under the trustees' new speaker rules
The day after the full board of trustees adopted speaker regulations on February 28, Paul Dickson and leaders of the Carolina Forum, the YMCA, the YWCA, the Daily Tar Heel, the Di-Phi, Students for a Democratic Society and the Carolina Political Union formally told Acting Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson that Wilkinson was invited for March 2 and Aptheker for March 9. Wilkinson spoke to the Duke Bar Association in Durham that day.
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