Storyline · 1971–1994
Women in Chapel Hill organized against sexual assault in the early 1970s: a 1971 rally asked for self-defense classes, a women's assault line opened in 1972 and students began an escort service from the Undergraduate Library. In 1974, as police reported more rapes, volunteers sponsored by NOW founded the rape crisis center that became the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. In 1978 the district attorney added a staff member to work with rape victims, and the rape crisis center hired its first paid worker with town funds. From 1980 students ran night escort services and marched to Take Back the Night, and in 1982 UNC put a written sexual harassment policy into effect. In 1984, as Chapel Hill police linked four rapes to one attacker, the student escort service extended its walks to nearby apartments. Take Back the Night marches returned in 1985, after a UNC graduate student was kidnapped from the Morehead Planetarium lot and killed, and in 1988 and 1989; students held a rape awareness week in 1986, and the escort service became SAFE Escort in 1987. In 1989 UNC made date rape and sexual and racial harassment offenses under the student code. Take Back the Night marches went on in 1990 and 1992. After a rape and two assaults on campus in the fall of 1992, UNC locked its residence halls around the clock and added lighting, and District Attorney Carl Fox, picketed over his acquaintance-rape guidelines, replaced them in November. In 1993 and 1994 Women Against Rape and others pressed the Honor Court, the Faculty Council approved a rape shield and then new sexual assault rules with complainants' rights, and Take Back the Night marches went on.
During Women's Week in October 1971 a rally in the Pit asked the physical education department for a self-defense program for women, which a Female Liberation speaker said women had sought for two years. By March 1972 a group of women had opened the Women's Assault Line through the Switchboard counseling service, with ten trained counselors and a car on call, and in April the Residence College Federation began a trial escort service from the Undergraduate Library, its sponsors citing an average of three reported assaults a week on campus. In 1974 Chapel Hill police counted nine rapes and nine attempted rapes from July 1973 through January 1974, and a female social worker went with officers to women who reported attacks. By August 1974 a volunteer group sponsored by the National Organization for Women, then called the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Center, was giving programs on rape and planned to open a 24-hour crisis line on September 16; it became the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. In January 1978 District Attorney Wade Barber Jr. added a staff member to interview rape victims in Orange and Chatham counties and keep in touch with them through their cases, and his office began telephoning victims instead of sending subpoenas, hoping more women would report rapes and prosecute; only 11 rape cases had reached the Orange County courts in 1977. That September, with its first town funding, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Center hired its first paid, part-time worker and moved its offices to the Orange-Person-Chatham Mental Health Center on North Street. By December the emergency room rape program at North Carolina Memorial Hospital had handled at least 20 cases in 1978, up from 13 in 1977, and its nurse liaison credited a changed attitude among police; officers said the county's "blind report," which let a victim report an attack without giving her name, was unique to Orange County. On December 10, 1979 the Orange County commissioners granted the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Rape Crisis Center its request of $2,100 and the Women's Health Counseling Service its request of $4,150, and asked the county health department and the mental health board to study whether the groups duplicated other services; the Chapel Hill Town Council had refused both groups more money and was phasing out its funding of outside agencies. On January 16, 1980 a ten-week self-defense course for women, sponsored by the center, the Chapel Hill Police Department and the town, began at the Umstead Center, taught by police Captain Arnold Gold. On February 3 about 120 men living in UNC's Olde Campus dormitories began a nighttime escort service, Rape and Assault Prevention Escorts, after a series of assaults on women near campus; women could call a central number from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., Sunday through Thursday, and about ten called the first night. On April 18 several hundred women and men marched at night from the Franklin Street Post Office to a rally at Carr Mill Mall in Carrboro to Take Back the Night, protesting rape and violence against women and the lack of safety on Chapel Hill streets. A coalition of women's groups including the center and the Association for Women Students (AWS) sponsored the march, and organizers said onlookers harassed some marchers. In the first nine months of 1981 the center took reports of 54 rapes and attempted rapes in the county, against 37 in all of 1980. Of those, 30 were in Chapel Hill, 10 of them on the UNC campus, 11 in Carrboro and 13 elsewhere in the county, and more than half of the victims knew their attackers.
In January 1982 a new written University policy on sexual harassment, covering students as well as employees, took effect; Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III said it was meant to discourage abuse and provide redress, and one of its drafters, who wrote it with affirmative action officer Gillian Cell, said it was the first time such a policy had been codified. On September 13, 1982 the student-run Rape and Assault Prevention Escort service began walking women students across campus and the Franklin Street area from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., Sunday through Thursday, using volunteers screened through the residence halls. That year the Orange County Rape Crisis Center developed its Child Advocate Program, with advocates on call to help child victims of sexual abuse and their families, a brochure for adolescents and a workbook teaching younger children about good, bad and confusing touches. By April 22, 1983 the State Bureau of Investigation had joined University, Chapel Hill and Carrboro police investigating five assaults since March 5 on women students in residence halls and a Carrboro apartment complex, and University Housing had written more than 6,800 dormitory residents urging them to lock their doors. In February 1984 the rape crisis center and the Chapel Hill Police Department offered a six-week self-defense course for women at the Umstead Recreation Center. On March 14 AWS members held a Rape Awareness Day, handing out red ribbons in the Pit and tying others on dormitories and places where rapes were thought to have happened, and stressed that most campus rapes were date or acquaintance rapes and that victims were not at fault; Mary Ann Chap, director of the center, described why many victims did not go to the police. By April 3 the escort service, which the Daily Tar Heel said had been founded in 1980 and had about 400 escorts, had extended its walks from the campus and sorority houses to Townhouse Apartments and Northampton Terrace and Plaza after assaults in the Airport Road area. On April 4 Major Arnold Gold told a news conference that four rapes between the Airport Road and Hillsborough Street areas since July 1983 were believed to be one man's, and that police had asked Gov. Jim Hunt for a reward, had State Bureau of Investigation help and had added foot and car patrols and an undercover operation; the center counted eight rapes in the area since July.
On January 14, 1985, after four female police officers accused a Chapel Hill police officer of verbal sexual harassment, Dana Baldwin, second vice chairman of the Orange County Commission for Women, asked the Town Council for a clear and effective town job policy on sexual harassment; the commission took no position on the charges but wanted every complaint investigated and the guilty disciplined. On September 18 about 225 people, about 30 of them men, marched from the Morehead Planetarium parking lot to a rally at North Graham and West Franklin streets, organized by a Take Back the Night Coalition formed for the event with Sisters Against Violence and Exploitation as one of its core groups. Organizers said the August kidnapping and murder of a UNC graduate student taken from that parking lot was a main reason for the march; national activist Nikki Craft spoke, and council member Beverly Kawalec took part. From April 7 to 10, 1986 the Carolina Union's Human Relations Committee and eleven other groups, among them the Residence Hall Association, Student Health Service and the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, held Confronting Rape, four days of programs on rape and sexual assault with Tin Drum Theatre skits in the Pit, a film on rape culture at a fraternity house, a Chapel Hill police self-defense workshop and a mock date-rape trial in Great Hall with a student jury; an organizer told the Daily Tar Heel that nothing on this scale had been tried on campus before.
Students had founded the Rape Action Project in 1986, with Kathleen Benzaquin of the Office of Student Affairs as adviser, to educate students about rape. By April 1987 a Rape Action Project survey of 417 students had found that 70 percent of women and 50 percent of men living on campus called rape an important issue, that more than half recalled no information about it at UNC and that half the women felt at risk walking on campus at night, and University officials began meeting with the group about better lighting, a student patrol and programs on rape. By the end of August the student escort service had changed its name to SAFE Escort (Students Averting Frightening Encounters), planned safety programs with University Police and for the first time used women escorts, in pairs. In March 1988, short of money after its funding sources gave less than it asked, the Orange County Rape Crisis Center added a Keep the Center Alive Drive to its annual membership drive from March 14 to 16 to close a $20,000 deficit; director Mary Ann Chap said it should be a one-time effort. By then the Orange Durham Coalition for Battered Women was extending to Orange County its CHANGE program, begun in Durham County in 1981 to counsel men who assault women, with the district attorney helping decide which men the courts referred to twelve sessions of group counseling led by trained volunteers from the community; director Fred Stang hoped to see 75 to 100 men in the first year on a budget of about $24,000. On April 13 about 150 students and town residents gathered in Coker Arboretum and marched along Franklin and Columbia streets to the Pit in the Campus Y Women's Forum's Take Back the Night march; Chap spoke before it, and money was collected for the center, which had lost federal funds.
On February 24, 1989 the Faculty Council approved amendments to the Instrument of Student Judicial Governance, passed by Student Congress two days earlier, that named sexual intercourse without consent and the sexual or racial harassment of students as offenses under the Code of Student Conduct. Chancellor Paul Hardin, who urged the council to adopt them, described such acts as an affront to personal freedom and dignity, and by March 27 he had given final approval, letting the student court try campus date rape cases from July 1; he called it a protection the women on the campus needed. The student attorney general's staff said the change, in force for the 1989–90 year and heard by the student Honor Court, would make students more aware that such acts happened on campus and encourage victims to bring them to the confidential student courts. On April 13 sixty-three students, townspeople and administrators, about a third of them men, marched in a Take Back the Night march the Campus Y's Women's Forum called after an assault near Joyner Residence Hall and a reported rape near Finley Golf Course; they went from Coker Arboretum through campus and the Chapel Hill streets past places where assaults had been reported, stopping in the Morehead Planetarium lot where a student had been kidnapped in 1985, and ended with a rally in the Pit. Turnout was about half of 1988's. By June 22 the center's report on sexual assaults reported in Orange County from 1986 to 1988 found that 53 percent were by family members or acquaintances, 41 percent took place in the victim's home and 80 percent were within one race, and Chap said assaults were rising in southern Orange with its growing population.
On April 19, 1990 about 65 students and residents joined the Campus Y Women's Forum's Take Back the Night march with candles through the campus and down Franklin Street; Orange County Rape Crisis Center volunteer Mary Townsend told them the county had had 152 rapes and sexual assaults the year before. That fall the Office of the Dean of Students sent a survey to 600 sophomore, junior and senior women. Reported in February 1991, it found that 91 percent of those who answered had experienced at least one form of sexual harassment by a male student and 60 percent had been treated in a sexually offensive way by a professor, though few called it harassment; assistant dean Kathleen Benzaquin said the results would support education programs. By June the center reported 111 rapes, attempted rapes and other sexual assaults in the county in 1990, 63 of them in Chapel Hill, 19 in Carrboro and 11 at the University, with the victim knowing the assailant in almost half the cases. In January 1992 Student Health Service director Judith Cowan told the trustees that 17 sexual assaults had been reported to the service in the fall 1991 semester, against an average of 13 to 15 for a whole academic year; staff credited the University Response Plan for Sexual Assault, begun in 1990, and the center reported a rise in its own cases.
On June 18, 1992 about 20 students, faculty and residents of the Committee for the Prosecution of Acquaintance Rape picketed for about 45 minutes outside the Franklin Street Post Office, where District Attorney Carl Fox had his Chapel Hill office, against his guidelines that he would not prosecute second-degree rape cases without clear proof of force and refusal, and planned more protests during orientation. By early July Fox said he would study other states' laws, hold a public forum and might ask the legislature for a third-degree rape charge. After a student was raped in her Granville Towers room on August 29 and two women were attacked on campus paths on August 31 and September 1, University housing put its 30 residence halls on 24-hour lockup through September 9. On September 10 B-GLAD and the Feminist Alliance held a "Take Back the Campus, Take Back the Night" rally and march from the Pit through South Campus; the Daily Tar Heel counted about 150 students and residents, and Lambda later said the march drew hundreds of people. A newly formed student group, Women Against Rape, joined the march and said it would press the Honor Court to change how it handled rape cases, including letting victims see hearing records. The next day a subcommittee of the Campus Security Committee ruled that the lockup would stay in effect indefinitely, and on September 23 the Physical Plant finished installing $47,000 in new lights at nine campus locations after an April survey and a string of assaults on campus. Discussing campus security at the trustees' meeting on September 25, trustee John Pope said that a woman who goes home with drunken men late at night and then reports rape the next morning "does not have much sympathy" from the general public, the Daily Tar Heel reported; he said afterward that he meant students had to take responsibility for their own safety. On October 27 the Campus Safety Committee decided to keep the lockup for the long term, rejecting the Housing Advisory Board's call to suspend it. On November 16 Fox issued a memorandum replacing his May guidelines, which women's groups had criticized, stating that rape victims need not fight their attackers and could refuse consent by any clear word or phrase. He also proposed changes in state law, among them life without parole for first-degree rape, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 and ending the marital rape exemption.
By February 1993 Women Against Rape was giving women who filed rape charges with the Honor Court a letter on the court's procedures and their shortcomings, among them attention to a complainant's sexual history and her exclusion from the courtroom except while testifying. On March 19 the Faculty Council approved amendments limiting evidence of a victim's past sexual behavior in Honor Court sexual assault hearings and letting the victim attend with a support person, though Women Against Rape said the rape shield would not work. On March 25 the Campus Y and other groups held a 24-hour Rape-Free Zone in Polk Place, hung with shirts from the national Clothesline Project, and Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred spoke in Memorial Hall. On March 31 a committee of University and town groups that worked with rape victims recommended at least indefinite suspension for any student convicted of sexual assault, and Student Congress passed a similar resolution the same night. On October 28, after a jury acquitted five men on 16 of 18 charges in a gang-rape case, the Orange County Rape Crisis Center and the Orange-Durham Coalition for Battered Women called for the censure and removal of Superior Court Judge George Greene, who had told the attorneys during the trial, with the jury out of the room, that he would acquit the defendants; District Attorney Carl Fox said he did not think the remarks had swayed the jury. About 100 people marched from the Pit to Franklin Street and back on November 1 in the Take Back the Night march that opened the University's Rape Awareness Week.
In January 1994 the Rape Crisis Center opened an emergency fund, paid for by private gifts, for victims' medical and court costs, and a 15-member University task force on domestic and relationship violence held its first meeting. On January 20 the Committee on Student Conduct voted 7 to 1 against letting complainants seek appeals of sanctions, and on February 1 it passed amendments letting sexual assault complainants decline to testify in some circumstances, ask for their own student investigator and make a statement in court, with a minimum sanction of indefinite suspension for sexual invasion. The Faculty Council approved new rules for the student courts on March 18, adding a statement of complainants' rights and making sexual touching a violation, and Student Congress passed them 17 to 1 on March 23. That year the center, which its director said had been at 406 West Rosemary Street since 1978, had four full-time staff and 132 volunteers and was looking for a larger, safer building on a bus line. On November 9 nearly 250 women rallied in the Pit and marched down Franklin Street and through campus in the annual Take Back the Night march.
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Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Albert Coates's personal narrative of his stay in North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill after a stroke, published by the University of North Carolina in 1968. Topics include cerebrovascular disease patients and their rehabilitation, hospital care in Chapel Hill and Coates himself, the founder of the university's Institute of Government. 30 pages; also titled What the NC Memorial Hospital Meant to Me.
Illustrated look back at fifty years of North Carolina Memorial Hospital and the UNC School of Medicine, with stories by Dick Broom edited by Lynn Wooten. Published by the Medical Foundation of N.C. in 2002, 93 pages with color illustrations and portraits.
A 19-page audit report issued in Raleigh in January 1998 by a North Carolina state office, reviewing the electronic data processing controls of the payroll and patient accounting systems at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill. Subjects include evaluation of the hospitals and of electronic data processing departments in Chapel Hill. A slim government document for those tracking the hospital's administration in the 1990s.
Anecdotes from the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill, gathered in an unpaged illustrated volume whose colophon is dated September 1993. The pieces are short recollections of care given and received. Issued by the hospitals, 22 cm.
Sydney Nathans's biography of Mary Walker, an enslaved woman from Orange County who escaped to the North in the mid nineteenth century and spent the following decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working to free the family she had left behind. Chapter titles trace her flight, her years among Northern friends, a rescue plot, a long silence, and the reunion that gives the book its close. Published 2012 by Harvard University Press, 330 pages with 20 pages of plates, illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2012), Civil War Book Review (2012).
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Hope Summerell Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), published in 1926, which doubles as a picture of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century. It runs 325 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Selected writings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), the Chapel Hill writer who campaigned for the university's reopening after Reconstruction, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1953. The 753 pages touch on Chapel Hill life, education and the university in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Sarah Brandes Madry's history of the Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treating both its architecture and the ideas attached to it. It takes in drinking fountains and water use in Chapel Hill and the university's history, with a chapter on Edwin Anderson Alderman, the president under whom the well took its present form in 1897, and one on water at the university. Published by iUniverse in 2003, 399 pages with illustrations.
Jennifer Fleischner's double biography of Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the dressmaker who had been enslaved, including years in Hillsborough, before buying her freedom and becoming the First Lady's confidante. Published by Broadway Books in New York in 2003, 372 pages with illustrations and a map. Topics include enslaved women in Hillsborough and the United States, dressmakers and women's friendships in the nineteenth century.
Mary Claire Engstrom's biographical register of the young women who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough, subtitled lives of educated women in the antebellum South. The school was kept by Margaret Anna Burwell and her husband, and the book bears on women's education in nineteenth-century North Carolina. Published by the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1979, 256 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's account of the closing weeks of the Civil War in North Carolina, reissued in 2005 as an electronic edition by the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics include the 1865 campaigns, Sherman's march through the Carolinas, Stoneman's raid, and the history of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century, where Spencer, 1825 to 1908, spent her working life.
Scotti Cohn's short biographies of notable North Carolina women, including Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Annie Lowrie Alexander and Cornelia Phillips Spencer of Chapel Hill. Published by Twodot in 2000, 198 pages with illustrations.
A Women's History Month project of 1993 and 1994 from the Orange County Women's History Month Committee, profiling women who were firsts in the county. Published in Chapel Hill in 1994, 13 pages plus unnumbered leaves with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Answering sexual assault in Chapel Hill, 1971–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/answering-sexual-assault-storyline-1971/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
