Storyline · 1972–1992
In 1972 UNC's Faculty Council urged departments to give first priority to hiring Black faculty, then about half of one percent. In 1982 the Black share was 2.7 percent, down from 3 percent in 1979 and 1980, and students marched to South Building through the winter of 1982-83. The Faculty Council adopted new resolutions in March 1983, and by that fall the count of Black faculty had reached 59, the most in UNC's history. The Faculty Council faulted the slow pace again in 1985, and in 1986 it heard that Black faculty had not grown and that none of 56 new appointments was Black. In 1988 Chancellor Christopher Fordham said Black faculty had fallen from 50 to 48 over three years. University counts from 1989 to 1992 ranged from 42 to 62 Black faculty members, and in 1992 the Committee on Black Faculty reported a gain of only two since 1986. That fall Chuck Stone's survey found 13 of the nation's 61 Black holders of endowed chairs at UNC.
On September 15, 1972 UNC's Faculty Council approved by voice vote an advisory report from its Committee on the Recruitment of Black Faculty, which called the University's hiring record embarrassing, with about 10 or 12 Black teachers, roughly half of one percent of the faculty, in a state a quarter Black, and asked departments to give first priority to finding a qualified Black candidate for any opening. On April 20, 1973 Professor John W. Dixon reported that the University had 19 Black teachers as of April 1, 14 full time and five visitors. He said the main cause was the small number of qualified candidates, though some had been turned down because they were Black, and urged every department to make hiring at least one Black teacher its top priority.
The chancellor's report of September 30, 1981 listed 54 Black faculty members, and law professor Burnele Powell, chairman of the Committee on the Status and Recruitment of Black Faculty, said departments needed to recruit Black faculty more aggressively. In mid-September 1982 the Black Faculty/Staff Caucus, chaired by social work professor Audreye Johnson, released a position paper finding that only 7 of 179 UNC staff in the top executive and managerial category were Black in 1981. At the Faculty Council's first meeting of the year, on September 17, 1982, Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III said UNC had done poorly in recruiting Black faculty and that departments simply had to appoint Black colleagues; affirmative action officer Gillian Cell reported a net gain of only one Black professor. The annual report issued on November 19 found that Black professors made up 2.7 percent of the faculty, down from 3 percent in 1979 and 1980, and Fordham told the Faculty Council that day that the faculty had to do better at recruiting Black and women teachers.
From mid-November 1982, after the report showed 51 Black members among 1,884 faculty, students marched from the Carolina Union to the steps of South Building, at times nearly 200 strong, and Sonja Stone spoke at one rally. A pilot race relations course was not offered in the spring of 1983; Vice Chancellor Harold Wallace cited the state salary freeze. On January 20, 1983 about 30 students marched in the cold from the Pit to South Building chanting that 2.7 percent was not enough. About 12 of the protesters met Fordham in late January, and he said no hiring could be done before the salary freeze ended July 1. On February 4 about 40 students marched to South Building, aiming this protest at the department heads who did the hiring. By April a Student Committee on Faculty Hiring had formed to meet faculty candidates.
On March 18, 1983 the Faculty Council passed the five resolutions of its Committee on Black Faculty, whose report found the number of Black faculty falling while Black doctorates nationally rose. The council asked the Affirmative Action office to watch hiring in departments with no Black faculty and called for a program to bring minority scholars to the University. About 1983 Regina Sherard joined the School of Journalism, its first Black woman faculty member, Black Ink reported. On November 18, 1983 Fordham reported 59 Black faculty members, 3.1 percent of 1,917 and the highest level in UNC's history, after 12 were hired in the year to September 30; he called the progress substantial but inadequate, and the report set a goal of 83 Black faculty on the tenure track by the end of 1986. In September 1984 a pilot survey by Oklahoma State University found that 4.1 percent of UNC-Chapel Hill's faculty was Black, against an average of 1.4 percent at 47 other state universities, and affirmative action officer Robert Cannon said the University's affirmative action goals were not yet met.
On April 19, 1985 the Faculty Council passed a resolution voicing dissatisfaction with the lack of progress after Audreye Johnson, chair of its Committee on the Status of Black Faculty, called for an end to the "revolving door" of Black professors; the committee's report said many departments excused their failure by claiming there were no Black scholars to hire. At the same meeting the council chose classics professor George Kennedy to succeed Doris Betts as its chairman. On February 21, 1986 the Committee on Black Faculty reported 52 Black members in tenured and tenure-track posts on a faculty of 1,761, no gain, and said the goal for the end of 1986 was unlikely to be met; in the year to September 30, 1985 eight Black candidates had been offered posts and five had accepted, but five Black faculty members had left. On April 18 Kennedy told the council that of 56 faculty appointments made since it set goals in September of 30 Black and 34 women faculty, 19 were women and none was Black, and warned that failure would bring serious criticism.
On March 20, 1987 the council approved committee reports showing that the number of Black faculty had fallen by two between 1983 and 1986; the Black faculty committee proposed recruiting Black doctoral graduates, training more Black doctoral students and rewarding Black faculty already at UNC. The Affirmative Action Office's Faculty Review that September counted 108 minority members among 1,687 tenured and tenure-track faculty, 6.4 percent, in fiscal 1987; the University had hired seven minority members for 89 open positions that year, while five Black faculty members left. On February 19, 1988 the Committee on Black Faculty counted 55 Black faculty members, 18 of them full professors, well under five percent of the faculty, noted that about 30 of the 311 doctorates granted in 1987 had gone to Black students, and urged recruiting Black scholars from other institutions, paying competitive salaries and drawing more Black students into doctoral programs. On March 18 Chancellor Christopher Fordham told the council that the number of Black faculty members had dropped from 50 to 48 over three years, though UNC still had more than comparable research universities. The committee's annual report on March 31, 1989 included a list of Black faculty and student concerns from the Association of Black Faculty, among them that admissions changes in the School of Public Health would hurt Black student presence. Public Health dean Michel Ibrahim called the statement irresponsible; the association's recording secretary said the list dated from spring 1988 and was not meant for public use, and that its main concern was getting more Black undergraduates into graduate study.
A report by the University's affirmative action office, released late in the fall 1989 semester, counted 42 Black faculty members as of September 1989, down from 50 in September 1984. Its director, Robert Cannon, blamed a small pool of candidates and recruiting by other universities; a letter from Lee Greene of the Association of Black Faculty answered that thousands of Black Americans had earned doctorates since 1975. Figures from the Office of Institutional Research showed 62 African-American professors among 2,134 in 1990, up from 50 of 2,002 in 1988, with 153 non-white professors in all. On February 21, 1992 George Noblit, chairman of the Committee on Black Faculty, told the Faculty Council that the number of Black faculty had grown by only two from 1986 to 1991, to 49 of 1,748, about 3 percent, while the faculty as a whole grew by 76. The report said Black faculty were often asked to do double duty on minority affairs and proposed making diversity part of the University's mission and enlarging the national pool of minority doctorates. In September an informal survey by journalism professor Chuck Stone found that 13 of the 61 Black scholars holding endowed chairs at American colleges were UNC professors, more than 20 percent of the national total and far ahead of second-place Princeton with four.
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People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
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Photograph from about 1903 of South Building on the university campus in Chapel Hill. Work on the building started in 1798 under Samuel Hopkins, was later carried on by John Clare, and finished in 1814. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Draft minutes of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina for 14 April 1798, recording the Masonic ceremony for laying the cornerstone of the University of North Carolina's Old South Building in Chapel Hill.
South Building at UNC on 22 April 1987, showing its columns with flowers in bloom, in a Hugh Morton color photograph. Mounted 35 mm slide.
South Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, probably shot on infrared film by Hugh Morton in late 1946 or early 1947. Morton gave six photographs to the Alumni Office that autumn, and this one ran on page 216 of the April 1947 Alumni Review. Black-and-white sheet film negative.
Episode of the North Carolina People television program, broadcast in 1988 by North Carolina Public Television as program number 1750 and recorded here as a 29 minute videocassette. The guest is Christopher C. Fordham III, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Chancellor's office records from the tenure of Carol L. Folt at Chapel Hill, 2013 to 2018, 8 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40024. Topics include university administration and educational fund raising, curriculum planning, health occupations schools and medical education, and race relations and college integration in North Carolina. Holden Thorp and Christopher C. Fordham also appear.
Groundbreaking for the George Watts Hill Alumni Center at UNC-Chapel Hill on 13 May 1989. The group includes Ralph Strayhorn, George Watts Hill, Doug Dibbert, trustees chairman Robert C. Eubanks and Tom Lambeth, with Paul Hardin and Christopher C. Fordham also pictured. Hugh Morton photograph.
Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III posed with the scholar Robin Hadley in 1985. A single print among the UNC Faculty and Administration photographs of the Chapel Hill Historical Society, CHHS.002.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1991), The American Historical Review (1991), Journal of American History (1991), The Journal of Southern History (1992).
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.
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.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (2017), Journal of Social History (2017), London review of books (2017), The Journal of the Civil War Era (2018), The Journal of Southern History (2018), Environmental History (2018), The Alabama review (2019), The Oral History Review (2019), The Register - Kentucky Historical Society/The register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2020).
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.
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.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2011), Journal of American History (2012).
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.
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.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2005).
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. “Pressing UNC to hire Black faculty, 1972–1992.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/black-faculty-hiring-storyline-1972/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
