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Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1940s
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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.
- 1960s
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Watts Restaurant protests
Sit-ins at the segregated Watts Restaurant and Motel on South Columbia Street began on January 2, 1964. Over the next days demonstrators were urinated on, hosed and struck with a broom handle, and Duke and UNC faculty were among those arrested. The owners held out after the Civil Rights Act and desegregated on July 10, 1964.
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Chapel Hill aldermen vote down a public accommodations ordinance
The Board of Aldermen rejected, 4 to 2, an ordinance that would have required all town businesses to serve Black customers, and set up a nine-member committee on race relations instead. Integration leaders promised more demonstrations.
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Institute of Government delivers its report on Chapel Hill's power to pass a public accommodations law
A report prepared by George Esser at the aldermen's request, gathering cases from all fifty states on a town's power to pass a public accommodations law, was completed and handed to Town Manager Robert Peck for the aldermen days before their vote. Esser said it showed the probable attitude of North Carolina courts toward a town using its general welfare power for that purpose.
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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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The Holy Week fast began on the Franklin Street post office lawn
At sunrise on Palm Sunday, Freedom Committee members John Dunne, Pat Cusick, James Foushee and the Rev. LeVert Taylor began an eight-day, water-only fast on the grounds of the Chapel Hill post office, planned to last through Easter. The fast was aimed at the Board of Aldermen, and a fifth faster joined within two days.
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A Klan rally gathers at the post office fast and a UNC student is struck
On the fast's seventh day a Ku Klux Klan rally drew onlookers to the Franklin Street post office, where textile worker Milford Cordell Hill of Gold Hill struck UNC senior Louis S. Calhoun Jr. and knocked off his glasses; police officers who saw it swore out complaints.
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The Holy Week fast ends on Easter Sunday and the Rev. LaVert Taylor is hospitalized
The five fasters finished their eight-day water-only fast in front of the post office on Easter Sunday. The Rev. LaVert Taylor of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was admitted to Memorial Hospital with an upset stomach afterward; James Foushee had been treated there during the fast and released.
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The Committee of Concerned Citizens raises about $400 for injured demonstrators and the hospitalized faster
Committee members served bread and cheese for donations twice a day in the basement of the First Baptist Church, raising about $400 to cover the hospital bills of demonstrators hurt in sit-ins and of the Rev. LaVert Taylor after the fast.
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Judge Mallard sentences fasters Pat Cusick and John Dunne to a year in jail
In Orange County Superior Court at Hillsborough, Judge Raymond B. Mallard gave Pat Cusick a year in jail on April 23 and John Dunne twelve months on April 24 for the February street-blocking demonstrations, among a dozen active sentences and about 100 suspended ones that stripped the Chapel Hill movement of its leaders four weeks after the fast.
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Chapel Hill Recorder's Court fines the man who struck a student at the post office fast
Judge William S. Stewart fined Milford Cordell Hill $50 and costs for striking Louis S. Calhoun Jr. at the scene of the fast on March 28, on complaints sworn out by the police officers who saw it.
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The Civil Rights Act changes the legal ground for local integration
The Civil Rights Act, signed on July 2, 1964, barred segregation in restaurants, hotels and theaters. Within a week, testers found eight of 13 previously segregated Chapel Hill-area businesses serving Black customers, while five, including a Franklin Street beer parlor, still refused.
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Austin Watts and his staff attack civil rights testers at Watts Restaurant
The night after the Civil Rights Act was signed, a mixed group of testers seeking service at Watts Restaurant was turned away and, the testers said, attacked with fists and clubs, and owner Austin Watts was charged with striking Pete Leak. Watts was convicted of assault in Chapel Hill Recorder's Court on July 21 and fined the costs of court.
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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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Harper and Row publishes John Ehle's The Free Men, an account of the Chapel Hill protests
Ehle's nonfiction book traced the 1963–1964 civil rights campaign in Chapel Hill through three of its leaders, John Dunne, Pat Cusick and Quinton Baker, from the first pickets at a cafe to mass arrests and long prison sentences.
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Supreme Court hears Klopfer v. North Carolina
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Peter Klopfer’s speedy-trial case, arising from an Orange County trespass prosecution.
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The U.S. Supreme Court decided Klopfer v. North Carolina, the speedy-trial case that grew out of a Chapel Hill sit-in arrest
The Supreme Court applied the constitutional speedy-trial right to state prosecutions in Peter Klopfer’s case.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 2020s
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The Town of Chapel Hill unveils the Chapel Hill Nine marker at the Colonial Drug site
On the sixtieth anniversary of the sit-in the town dedicated sculptor Stephen Hayes's stone-based marker at 450 West Franklin Street, naming the nine students; four of them, Dave Mason Jr., James Merritt, Douglas Perry and Albert Williams, attended the unveiling.
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