Storyline · 1991–1994
Council member Roosevelt Wilkerson proposed a task force on violent crime and drugs in December 1990, and Chapel Hill set it up under social work dean John Turner early in 1991. It heard arguments over the downtown shelter and the NAACP's call for jobs for Black youth, and in October 1991 the council began carrying out its 49 recommendations. In 1992 Carrboro joined a joint task force, police planned new patrol districts, and Pine Knolls and public housing residents pressed for action on drug dealing. In 1993 a $30,000 gift from The Village Companies paid for unarmed civilian patrols downtown, and in October 1994 the task force disbanded seven of its nine committees.
Chapel Hill council member Roosevelt Wilkerson proposed a task force of about 15 people on crime and drugs on December 10, 1990, after a November raid on North Graham Street and the December shooting deaths of two women near the Pritchard Avenue Extension. The Town Council set out the Task Force on Reducing Violent Crime and Illegal Drug Use in a resolution of January 17, 1991, and by early February it was organized under John Turner, dean of the UNC School of Social Work, with members from social services, law enforcement and the district attorney's office, citizens at large and, Wilkerson stressed, minority members.
At a task force meeting on August 19, some residents blamed the Inter-Faith Council's Community House shelter for downtown crime and proposed barring people with jail records or busing homeless people out of town. Carrboro alderman Jacquelyn Gist, a founder of the first shelter, and Black Cultural Center director Margo Crawford defended the shelter, and council candidate Mickey Ewell called for tougher enforcement of panhandling laws. On September 25 the task force took up a statement from Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP President James Brittian, who called poverty the root of local crime, asked UNC and other big employers to pay for mentoring and job programs for Black youth, and said the University's nearly all-Black housekeeping staff earned poverty wages. Wilkerson answered that the Black community, its churches and leaders must also take more responsibility, and the task force added a minority mentor program to its recommendations.
On October 14 the council agreed to begin carrying out the report, which found violent crime rising in line with state and national trends and crime and drug use widespread in both Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and made 49 recommendations, among them a joint monitoring committee and stricter state sentencing. In the week of October 28 the council accepted a $136,000 Drug Elimination Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for a two-year plan in the town's public housing, with a drug elimination coordinator, a van for youth outings, youth scholarships, and more patrols and lighting.
On February 4, 1992 the Carrboro Board of Aldermen voted unanimously to adopt Chapel Hill Town Manager Cal Horton's recommendations for a joint task force, with a leadership and monitoring committee reporting to the governing boards and nine committees drawn from businesses and residents. Chapel Hill police figures released by February 11 showed reports of violent crime up 30 percent from 1990 to 1991. In March residents of Pine Knolls met with police to work against drug dealing and gun crime under the slogan "take back our streets"; police said residents had reported 152 incidents involving firearms in six months, nearly all on Johnson Street. By March 25 the Pine Knolls Community Development Association had set up a community watch with block captains on every street, residents asked for officers on foot, and a police officer said the department was considering a satellite station at the Lincoln Center on Merritt Mill Road.
On April 6 Interim Police Chief Ralph Pendergraph told the council that downtown would become one district patrolled by two officers, while each officer in the other three districts kept a fixed neighborhood beat; the department had hired eight more officers. On April 21 the committees formed on the task force's recommendation took the name Violent Crime and Drug Abuse Program, with no chairmen yet found. The next night about 40 people came to a forum on civil liberties and drug enforcement at the Hargraves Center, where public housing residents turned the evening into a grievance session about open drug dealing in their neighborhoods. Pendergraph called for more cooperation between police and residents, and District Attorney Carl Fox likened the war on drugs to the Vietnam War.
On October 4, 1993 The Village Companies, owner of WCHL and The Village Advocate, gave the town $30,000 to hire and train up to 20 unarmed civilian security assistants to watch downtown and radio police on weekend nights. The council approved the plan on October 13, and Police Chief Ralph Pendergraph said the assistants would have no power of arrest. The civilian patrollers, headed by Lt. Tony Oakley, first walked downtown on the night of November 12. In October 1994 the task force's coordinating committee, chaired by council member Rosemary Waldorf, decided that seven of its nine committees had finished their work and disbanded them, leaving the youth and law enforcement committees to go on against substance abuse; Waldorf said some problems could not be addressed without changes in state law.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
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.
Jim Heavner recounts growing up in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, his student days at UNC and how the Village Companies holding company grew in Chapel Hill. Interviewed by Doug Eyre in 2002; oral history cassette in the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Audiovisual Materials Collection, CHHS.012.
Sports broadcaster Woody Durham speaks at a roast in his honor on 25 January 1986, probably in Chapel Hill. Seated beside him is Jim Heavner, at the time head of The Village Company in Chapel Hill. Hugh Morton photograph.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
Albert Coates's own account of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, which he founded, subtitled 'out of a classroom in Chapel Hill' and published in 1981. The 303 pages trace the institute's history and its role in educating North Carolina's public officials.
Kemp Plummer Battle's memoir, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 296 pages with plates and portraits. Battle, a lawyer, state treasurer and president of the university from 1876 to 1891, recalls North Carolina manners, customs and public life across the nineteenth century, with Chapel Hill and the university's reopening after Reconstruction at the center.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1946), The Journal of Southern History (1946).
William J. Billingsley's history of the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 North Carolina statute that barred known Communists from speaking on state campuses, and the fight over it at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The subtitle sets the scope: race, politics and the public university in sixties North Carolina. It treats academic freedom, anti-communist movements and free speech in the state. University of Georgia Press, 1999, 308 pages with eight pages of plates.
Reviewed in Academe (2000), The American Historical Review (2001), The Journal of Southern History (2001), Journal of American History (2001), The Journal of Politics (2001).
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
Howard E. Covington Jr.'s biography of Albert Coates (1896-1989), the law professor who founded the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina and led it through its early years. Topics include Coates as a law teacher and the institute's history as a center for the study of public administration in Chapel Hill. Published in 2010 by the University Library at Chapel Hill, 322 pages with 32 pages of plates.
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.
Abstracts of the minutes of Orange County's Inferior Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for 1777 to 1788, the county court of justices of the peace in the Revolutionary years. The abstracts name the people who came before the court. First published in Charlotte in 1966 and later reprinted from Greenville, South Carolina, in three paginated sections with a map.
David Cook collects the grim side of the Eno River's past in Orange and Durham counties: ghost stories, crimes, train wrecks and accidents, including the hanging of rebels near the river in 1771, a sawmill accident said to have started a run of hauntings, and a dance one Valentine's Day that ended badly. Published by The History Press in 2025, 141 pages with illustrations.
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).
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
Nora Gaskin's short true account of a murder investigation in 1960s Chapel Hill and the judicial error that followed, centered on Frank Rinaldi (1929 to 2009). Published in 2013 by Lystra Books, 52 pages with references.
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. “Chapel Hill's crime and drug task force, 1991–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/crime-drug-task-force-storyline-1991/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
