On October 12, 1983, when most Black students lived on South Campus and most white students on North Campus, about 35 students met University housing officials and student leaders in Morrison Residence Hall for an open forum on integrating the residence halls. Housing director Wayne Kuncl said a fully random room lottery might drive students to live off campus. That fall, after a gay freshman's room was trashed twice and threatening notes were left on his door, Kuncl said he saw such harassment as a violation of rights. On November 21 about 50 students came to a Student Government forum in Hamilton Hall, where panelists and speakers opposed random dorm assignment and favored incentives for Black students to live on North Campus, more Black resident assistants, a pilot interracial floor and a North Campus version of the Upendo Lounge; Kuncl said students clearly did not want to lose their choice of dorm.
On February 10, 1984 a task force of Student Government, Black Student Movement and Residence Hall Association members reported that random assignment would be forced integration and recommended a broader roommate questionnaire, joint orientation activities and more minority cultural events on North Campus. BSM president Sherrod Banks said South Campus should not be sacrificed. On March 16 the Faculty Council, told by its committee on the status of minorities that 94 percent of Black students living on campus were on South Campus, voted unanimously to ask University Housing to open a voluntary North Campus floor half minority and half white and to write a freshman housing policy that encouraged integration. On October 28, 1985 the Black Student Movement's Ebony Readers, Opeyo Dancers and Gospel Choir performed for about 35 people in the Connor dormitory lounge in MAFUNZO, an awareness program meant to bring Black culture to North Campus, where fewer Black students lived; BSM president Sibby Anderson said its subgroups had not really performed on North Campus before.
By January 14, 1986 Mitchell Parks, chairman of Unitas, a Student Government plan to house Black and white students together in a North Campus dormitory to promote understanding across races, said he was nearly certain it would not start that fall and had told members to stop trying. He blamed weak support from students and administrators and a split with the Residence Hall Association, whose president wanted selected South Campus floors instead of a whole North Campus dorm. In the 1987–88 school year Unitas opened as a multicultural living-and-learning program in a wing of suites in Carmichael Residence Hall for 47 students, who took a weekly faculty-led seminar for credit; its recruiting invited students of all backgrounds, religions and sexual orientations.
In October 1990, of 1,176 Black students in UNC residence halls, 792 (67 percent) lived in Craige, Ehringhaus, Hinton James and Morrison, with 282 in Morrison alone, and only 170 on North Campus, where eight halls had three or fewer; Housing Director Wayne Kuncl said the housing office was weighing blocks of North Campus rooms for minority students. On March 5, 1991 about 30 students met associate housing director Al Calarco at a Residence Hall Association and Black Student Movement forum on ending the racial separation of campus housing, where 800 of the 1,200 minority students living on campus were in South Campus halls. They discussed a multicultural hall modeled on Unitas, requiring all freshmen to live on South Campus and reserving rooms in each hall for minority students. On April 23, at its last meeting of the year, the Housing Advisory Board formed a committee with BSM members to study voluntary racial segregation in the residence halls and bring a proposal in the fall, and another to consider changes to the visitation policy. By August 28 BSM president Arnie Epps and three other BSM members had left their Mid and South Campus halls for Mangum and Ruffin on North Campus, saying someone had to break the pattern of Black students living on South Campus; Kuncl arranged the moves and said they fit the goal of a more diverse North Campus. The Daily Tar Heel reported that 67 percent of Black campus residents had lived on South Campus the year before, against 94 percent in 1984. A housing department report that September showed Black students at 7 percent of North Campus residents, 16.5 percent in the middle region and 26.4 percent on South Campus in fall 1991, against 8.6 percent of enrollment, and the Residence Hall Association began working with the BSM on a plan to balance the halls.
On October 24, 1991 the Housing Advisory Board approved the association's revised plan to reserve a target of 15 spaces for Black students in each of nine North Campus residence halls, Manly, Grimes, Ruffin, Lewis, Stacy, McIver, Kenan, Winston and Alexander, chosen as the halls most lacking in racial diversity. The voluntary plan was limited to four years, through spring 1995, left out incoming freshmen and still needed the housing department's approval. By late January 1992 Kuncl and his staff had given final approval to the plan, worked out with the BSM, the Black Cultural Center and the Campus Y, as a four-year trial for Black students who wanted to move north in the fall; Black students had made up 1 to 6 percent of those halls' residents in 1990-91. In the program's first year the housing department received 48 applications for the 135 spaces. Kuncl called the number good for a first year, a Residence Hall Association officer blamed weak publicity, and a BSM housing liaison said she urged applications at a BSM meeting after hearing only six had applied. By September 1995 University Housing's Diversity Program, adopted the spring before, had set aside rooms in North and Middle Campus dorms for minority students to spread them beyond the South Campus high-rises, and many moved north that fall; housing officials called it too early to judge.
Further reading
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are the most widely held histories of the theme it is filed under, so they may not discuss it. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Background on Black Life & Civil Rights · the most widely held histories of the theme this storyline is filed under; they may not discuss it
To Free A Family
Nathans, Sydney · 2012 · Harvard University Press
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).
Game Changers
Chansky, Art · 2016
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.
The Free Men
Ehle, Jr., John Marsden · 1965
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.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1991), The American Historical Review (1991), Journal of American History (1991), The Journal of Southern History (1992).
Ribbons of Color Along the Eno River
2021
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.
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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.
A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland
Nathans, Sydney · 2017
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).
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.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2011), Journal of American History (2012).
Rogers Road
Pearce, Emily Eidenier · 2009
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.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2005).
