Key local figure
Cheek grew up in Chapel Hill's Northside neighborhood and worked as a janitor in UNC's Venable Hall from about 1920. When Black campus workers founded the Janitors' Association in 1930 he was elected its first president, and he helped raise money to rebuild St. Joseph CME Church. He died in 1940.
Source: UNC Names in Brick and Stone: Cheek Clark Building
1 indexed record is connected with this person.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
… 5 photographs in the Society's People A-O binder: At work as a nurse; 3 photos; Posed with sign of Kennon Cheek-Rebecca Clark Building, UNC building named for her and Kennon Cheek; Portrait with granddaughters; Portrait with grandsons.
Dated events connected with this person, earliest first. See the whole chronology →
Cheek began working for the university as a boy, helping his father Rubin Cheek, a stonemason born in slavery in Warren County, lay the stone walls around the campus. Around 1920 he joined the janitorial staff of Venable Hall.
Cheek's daughter Marian Cheek Jackson said he was instrumental in negotiating the 1924 land swap that moved Hackney's Educational and Industrial School from South Merritt Mill Road into the Northside community.
Facing a threatened 10 percent pay cut, janitors Kennon Cheek, Frank Hairston, Elliot Washington and Melvin Rich organized the Janitors' Association, with Cheek as its first president. Its early gains included a week's paid vacation and showers in the janitors' bathrooms.
People: Kennon Cheek
Frank Porter Graham came to an association meeting to tell the janitors that the Depression would cut their wages but that everyone would come through together. Cheek then moved that the Janitors' Association give five dollars to the fund set up to keep students in school, the first campus organization to contribute to it.
Henry Baldwin, Margaret Burnette and Kennon Cheek mortgaged their homes for the down payment on the Rosemary Street lot, which Black leaders had judged too small for a new high school. A frame church went up under Rev. Joseph S. Miller and was dedicated as St. Joseph Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.
People: Kennon Cheek
Cheek, born in Chapel Hill about 1890, lived out his life in the house he built on land in Northside bought from the university's holdings, and died there in 1940 after diabetes and overwork wore him down in the late 1930s.
On January 28, 1998 the trustees voted to rename the 1920s University Laundry for Kennon Cheek and Rebecca Clark, who led campus housekeepers in the 1930s and 1940s. The building was rededicated on September 17, 1998.
People: Rebecca Clark · Kennon Cheek
A lobby exhibit in the renovated Kennon Cheek and Rebecca Clark Building presents the lives of Cheek, Clark and groundskeeper William Hubbard with a timeline of the university's housekeeping and facilities work.
People: Rebecca Clark · Kennon Cheek
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