Storyline · 1975–1985
The Black Student Movement drew its budget from student fees set by the Campus Governing Council, which froze its funds in 1975, 1978 and 1982 and cut its requests in 1976, 1977, 1981 and 1982. Members crowded budget hearings and marched on South Building in 1975, and disputes over the Gospel Choir's religious character reached the Student Supreme Court in 1983. In 1984 the council sent the BSM's bid for guaranteed funding to a student referendum. Students voted the measure down in February 1985, 2,261 to 2,203, and after the Elections Board put it back on the runoff ballot over uneven poll closings, rejected it again, 2,350 to 2,256.
Beginning July 27, 1975 the student Campus Governing Council froze the Black Student Movement's funds over alleged treasury-law violations tied to a Gospel Choir bank account. On September 17 more than 200 Black students marched singing from the Pit to South Building, where BSM chairman D. Lester Diggs and others asked Chancellor Ferebee Taylor for $12,000 and an inquiry into the council. Taylor declined; student body president Bill Bates released the general funds that day, and on September 23 the council voted 14 to 2 to release the budget, putting the BSM on financial probation for the year. On November 3 the funds were frozen again over charges that the BSM had paid Muhammad Ali's security in cash from ticket sales outside treasury rules; on November 18 the council released the funds, treating the payments as late requisitions with standard fines.
For 1976-77 the council's finance committee cut the BSM's request of $26,550 to $8,750 plus a $10,000 loan. On April 19, 1977, backed by about a hundred members carrying placards, BSM chair Byron Horton protested cuts to Black Ink and the Black Drama Group at the council's final budget session, and the council restored $2,845, bringing the BSM to $10,495 for 1977-78. In March 1978 the BSM borrowed from student government to co-sponsor a Kool and the Gang concert with the Carolina Union in Memorial Hall; the hall was less than half full, and the BSM was left owing nearly $5,000. On March 31 its funds were frozen because its spending had exceeded the collateral the student code required on its $10,000 loan. On April 3 the council released them and set a repayment schedule, and by fall 1979 Black Ink reported the last $3,000 repaid. In April 1978 the council also refused to pay for Ebony Images, the BSM's tenth-anniversary mini-yearbook, after the finance committee found an unexplained gap between printers' bids and the request.
On April 25, 1981 the council gave the BSM $9,807 of the $24,243 it asked for 1981-82; its Finance Committee had refused to fund minority recruitment by the BSM and other groups, which Student Body President Scott Norberg called a lack of sensitivity to minority affairs. At a hearing on April 17, 1982 attended by about 100 BSM members, the council gave the BSM $8,910 of the $10,167 it sought for 1982-83, cutting Black Ink to $6,000, restoring $250 for a Martin Luther King celebration and, after debate over whether the Gospel Choir was religious, funding the choir in full.
On August 30, 1982 the choir's leaders agreed to the BSM central committee's demands, made to protect the choir's student funding, to drop religious symbols and prayer and widen its music, keeping its name and its own elections. A faction tied to the choir pressed a petition, signed by a majority of members, to impeach the BSM chairperson; the central committee would not co-sign it, several officers resigned, and the chairperson took a leave of absence in mid-November. The BSM's funds were frozen on November 1 after more than five late requisitions, and on November 23, after an Audit Board inquiry, the finance committee unfroze them under an 18-month review. In April 1983 two council members asked the Student Supreme Court to rule the Gospel Choir a religious group that could not receive student fees under a constitutional amendment passed that February; in a unanimous opinion released on December 4, 1983, the court upheld the choir's funding but barred it from reciting prayer or scripture in its performances. On November 28, 1984 the council voted 13 to 8 for the BSM's bill for constitutional funding, which would guarantee it 2.5 percent of student activity fees, about $12,000; the measure went to a student referendum in February 1985.
On January 29, 1985, a week before the vote, eight of the nine candidates for student body president, BSM president Sherrod Banks, student body president Paul Parker and Elections Board chairman Edwin Fountain condemned a poster, found in the Student Union, Davis Library and Phillips Hall, that set George Wallace's "segregation forever" quote beside candidate Patricia Wallace's vote against the BSM's constitutional funding; they called it a scheme to stir racial tension and turn voters against the BSM. On February 5 students turned down the referendum, which would also have placed the BSM under a board of directors, 2,261 to 2,203. BSM supporters protested at once that the polls at Granville Towers, which voted 319 to 123 against, had stayed open about 30 minutes late while 20 to 30 voters were turned away at Hinton James, which voted 202 to 100 for. The next day Fountain, citing the uneven closings and a hard-to-read ballot number not fixed until noon on election day, put the question on the February 12 runoff ballot, calling the closing mix-up "a failure on my part"; Banks called the board fair. In the runoff the referendum failed again, 2,350 to 2,256, and Banks said the vote sent a signal to Black students.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
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.
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.
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.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
Catharine Carter photographed the rebuilding of Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina between 2002 and 2005, and twelve of the images were issued in 2005 as limited edition lithographic prints, numbered and signed by her, in a portfolio with text and illustrations.
Patrick S. Wooten's 1992 guide to the memorial tablets in Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, identifying the people commemorated there. Subjects include university biography, alumni and Confederate rosters, so the volume doubles as a name list for anyone tracing individuals honored on the walls. One volume in various foliations with illustrations.
Robert W. Winston's 1939 address on Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina and the memorial tablets set in its walls, given when tablets honoring Colonel Robert Bingham, Ambassador Robert Worth Bingham and Senator Matt W. Ransom were accepted. Printed at Chapel Hill, it records how those tablets came to be placed in the hall.
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. “The Black Student Movement's student-fee budget, 1975–1985.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/bsm-budget-storyline-1975/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
