Black civic clubs and the Chapel Hill town board, 1935–1956
From 1935 to 1956 Black civic clubs in Chapel Hill took their neighborhoods' needs to the town board and, later, the school board. In July 1935 Black representatives asked the aldermen for more police protection on West Franklin and West Rosemary streets. In 1946 Adolphus Clark asked for sewer service, drainage, street markings and a light on Sunset Drive; the board ordered the light, markings and drainage but said sewer lines had to wait. Requests for sidewalks, traffic lights and sewer pipe followed in 1950, and in 1952 the club reported 344 children crossing West Franklin Street each day. In 1956 a club petitioned for a Black member on the school board, which named druggist William L. Sloan instead.
By May 1935 leading Black citizens of Chapel Hill had formed a civic club to improve the social conditions of the town's Black community, with Charles Craig as president and Eugene White as secretary. On July 10 representatives of a Black organization for social and moral improvement asked the aldermen for more police protection on West Franklin and West Rosemary streets, where they said bootleg liquor, rowdiness and profanity made the streets unsafe; the board promised to cooperate. On January 14, 1946 Adolphus Clark, for a Black civic club and the Community Health Club, asked for sewer service on Sunset Drive, drainage, street markings and a light. The aldermen ordered a blinker light and the marking and drainage done at once, but said sewer lines had to wait for a new system. In October 1950 the club asked for sidewalks on Graham and Church streets, two traffic lights and sewer pipe in the open ditches along Mitchell Lane. In May 1952 it told the board that 344 children crossed West Franklin Street at Merritt Mill Road each day and asked again for safeguards. In July 1956 a Black men's civic club petitioned the school board, with several hundred signatures, to name a Black member to the seat chairman Carl Smith had left; the board named druggist William L. Sloan instead.
Reading on the places and people in this storyline
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.
More than a mentoring program : attacking institutional racism
Meyer, Graig M. · 2018 · Information Age Publishing
Graig M. Meyer's 2018 account, written with George Noblit, of a youth mentoring program in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools that set out to attack institutional racism and close racial achievement gaps. Chapters lay out an antiracist mentoring model, racial identity development, advocacy at the system level, staffing and leadership, and a culture of continuous improvement. Published by Information Age Publishing, 211 pages, online.
Oral history interview with Sam Holton, March 28, 2001: interview K-0206, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Holton, Samuel M. · 2007 · University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
Samuel M. Holton (1922-2010) sat on Chapel Hill's school board during desegregation. Elected in 1968 after a term as PTA president, he took office as racial tension rose after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Talking with Jenny Matthews in March 2001, he describes the board's decisions on integrating the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and the conflicts that came with them. Runs about eighty minutes; electronic edition issued by the UNC library in 2007 through Documenting the American South.
Oral history interview with Edwin Caldwell, March 2, 2001: interview K-0202, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Caldwell, Edwin · 2006 · University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
Edwin Caldwell, Jr. reviews a life in Chapel Hill politics in a three-hour Southern Oral History Program interview recorded March 2, 2001, by Oliver White. A skilled organizer, Caldwell worked in the campaign that made Howard Lee the town's first Black mayor in 1969, ran for office more than once without winning, and became a local political power. The conversation also covers race relations, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board and the Church of Reconciliation. Published online in 2006 in Documenting the American South.
The effects of desegregation on selected variables in the Chapel Hill city school system
Prichard, Paul Newton, 1935- · 1969
Paul Newton Prichard's 1969 study of what desegregation changed in the Chapel Hill city school system, measured against academic achievement and other selected variables. Topics include school integration and achievement in the town, and a bibliography runs to page 115. Written during the district's own desegregation years, which makes it a contemporary source as well as a study.
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.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
John Ehle's account of the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963 and 1964 and the young people who led them, first published by Harper & Row in 1965. This reprint from Lewisville, North Carolina adds an afterword by Wayne King. Civil rights and race relations in Chapel Hill are its subjects. 340 pages with illustrations and portraits.
To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation’s Oldest University
Kapur, Geeta · 2021
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina
Pleasants, Julian M.; Burns, Augustus M., III · 1990 · UNC Press
Julian M. Pleasants and Augustus M. Burns III on the 1950 Democratic Senate primary in North Carolina, in which Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina, lost to Willis Smith after a campaign marked by race-baiting. Primaries, elections and race relations in the state are its subjects. Published by UNC Press in 1990, 356 pages with illustrations.
Collected first-hand and second-hand stories from the Eno River valley as told from the standpoint of African Americans and Native people who have lived along the river in Orange and Durham counties, from prehistory to the present day. Issued by the Eno River Association in Durham as volume 10, number 2 of the Eno Journal, 2021, 106 pages with illustrations.
The Impact of Slavery on the Education of Blacks in Orange County, North Carolina 1619-1970
Moore, Rosetta Austin · 2015
Rosetta Austin Moore's survey of Black education in Orange County from the colonial era to 1970, in a revised edition published in 2015 through Lulu in Morrisville. After chapters on slavery nationally and on schooling for enslaved people in North Carolina, the book turns to the county: its formation, the growth of its schools, the arrival of free public schooling for all, and the schools and African American educators of the twentieth century. 265 pages with maps, portraits and facsimiles.
Sydney Nathans's history of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, whose founders were enslaved people sent there before the Civil War from the Cameron family's plantations in Orange County, North Carolina. Instead of following the Great Migration out of the South, this group stayed, moved from bondage to owning the land they had worked, and held onto it across generations. Published 2017, 342 pages with plates and maps; this is the e-book edition.
African Americans of Durham and Orange counties : an oral history
Bolduc, Jean · 2016 · The History Press
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960-1970
Turner, Jeffrey A. · 2010 · The University of Georgia Press
Jeffrey A. Turner's study of student activism on Southern campuses between 1960 and 1970, arguing that the region's own movement has been overshadowed by attention to national groups such as SDS. Nine chapters move from the 1960 sit-ins through white students and desegregation, the rise of student power, Black Power on Black and white campuses, and the war's effect on the region. Chapel Hill is among the campuses treated. Published 2010, 366 pages, online edition.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
A Traitor and a Scoundrel: Benjamin Hedrick and the Cost of Dissent
Smith, Michael Thomas · 2003 · University of Delaware Press ; London : Associated University Presses
Michael Thomas Smith's biography of Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, the University of North Carolina chemistry professor dismissed in 1856 after he declared support for the antislavery presidential candidate John C. Fremont. Published by University of Delaware Press in 2003, 216 pages with illustrations. Topics include abolitionists and dissenters in North Carolina, the antislavery movement in the state, and the university's biography before 1962.
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.
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Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Black civic clubs and the Chapel Hill town board, 1935–1956.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/black-civic-clubs-storyline-1935/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
