Storyline · 1983–1992
Human Rights Week, run by the Campus Y, brought speakers to Memorial Hall each November. Crystal Lee Sutton and Amnesty International USA's director spoke in 1983, James Baldwin opened the 1984 week, Coretta Scott King spoke in 1987 and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young gave the 1988 keynote. The seventh annual week in 1989 brought Arun Gandhi, Dith Pran and a panel on the problems facing Black men, and Randall Robinson gave the keynote in 1990. Winnie Mandela's 1990 appearance was called off, and in 1992 Rep. Maxine Waters praised the students' campaign for a free-standing Black Cultural Center.
From November 14 to 17, 1983 the Campus Y's Human Rights Week, a forum titled Human Rights, Human Wrongs, brought Crystal Lee Sutton, whose union fight at a J.P. Stevens mill inspired the film Norma Rae, to Hamilton Hall on November 15 and Amnesty International USA director Jack Healey to Carroll Hall for the keynote on November 16. The week also included a Carolina Gay Association seminar on AIDS and gay civil rights, a talk by exiled Polish Solidarity leaders and a Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie concert in Memorial Hall on November 17. Novelist James Baldwin opened the Carolina Union and Campus Y's Human Rights Week with a free evening in Memorial Hall on November 12, 1984; the schedule also listed a talk by Fred Battle, local president of the Rainbow Coalition, on being Black in Chapel Hill. On November 17, 1987 Coretta Scott King spoke in Memorial Hall during the Campus Y's Human Rights Week; Black Ink reported that she urged universities and corporations to make total divestment from South Africa a top priority. On November 16, 1988 Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, a former U.N. ambassador, told about 1,000 people in Memorial Hall that the United States should lead on human rights, including against apartheid.
The Campus Y's seventh annual Human Rights Week ran November 12 to 17, 1989. In the keynote on November 13 Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, told about 250 people in Memorial Hall to "build bridges, not barriers," and that day a panel in Murphey Hall, moderated by visiting associate professor Freddie Parker and including Orange County District Attorney Carl Fox, discussed the problems facing Black men. On November 15 Dith Pran, the Cambodian survivor of Khmer Rouge rule, told several hundred people in Memorial Hall about the killings under Pol Pot. Alexander Cockburn spoke on the Amazon that week. In November 1990 the Campus Y's Human Rights Week Committee brought Randall Robinson to Memorial Hall for a keynote and educator Jawanza Kunjufu to Hill Hall to speak on the education of Black youth. That week opened on November 12 at a rally in the Pit, where Mayor Jonathan Howes proclaimed Human Rights Week in Chapel Hill and Carrboro alderman Jacquelyn Gist spoke for Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird, with Vice Chancellor Donald Boulton and Provost Dennis O'Connor. That day ninety-year-old civil rights activist Modjeska Monteith Simkins of Columbia, S.C., spoke to about 40 students in Hamilton Hall after a showing of the documentary on her life, Makin' a Way Out of No Way, and urged them to vote and carry on the work. On November 13 exiled Chinese student leader Li Lu, one of the organizers of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, gave a Human Rights Week keynote to about 300 people in Hill Hall on the history of resistance in China and nonviolence. Winnie Mandela, booked as the week's main speaker in the Smith Center on November 15, did not come: the Boston-based Fund for a Free South Africa called off her appearance by telephone, and the Campus Y said no reason was given.
The 1992 week opened with Rep. Patricia Schroeder's King Memorial Lecture on November 9, and TransAfrica's Randall Robinson spoke on November 10. On November 12 U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles gave the week's fourth keynote, telling about 150 people in Memorial Hall that the Los Angeles riots grew from the nation's neglect of poor young people; at a dinner at the Sonja H. Stone Black Cultural Center she said the students' success in winning Chancellor Paul Hardin's support for a free-standing center had brought her to UNC.
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.
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.
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.
R. W. Foister of Chapel Hill published this postcard of the university library among the campus trees, about 1905. The building is the one now known as Hill Hall.
The Carnegie Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, on an undated card. Andrew Carnegie's library grants paid for hundreds of such buildings.
David Merritt's 1994 production argues that press coverage misrepresented the facts of the campaign for a free standing Black Cultural Center named for Dr. Sonja Haynes Stone at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It runs about 52 minutes and is accompanied by a text of sixteen leaves with five preliminary pages. Topics include African American students at the university and race relations.
Donyell L. Roseboro's 2005 doctoral dissertation on the student movement for the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It examines African American student activism and student organizations on the Chapel Hill campus. A typescript of 307 leaves with illustrations, distributed through UMI.
A promotional sheet on the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, issued in 2003 by the Office of University Development at Chapel Hill. One folded sheet of three unnumbered pages with illustrations, 28 by 44 centimeters. Topics include the center itself and the buildings of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A 1993 report on the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center at Chapel Hill, based on the deliberations of the Black Cultural Center Working Group and the center's advisory board, with the endorsement of the working group alone. Twenty three pages and twelve unnumbered leaves, including a folded map. Topics include African American college students in Chapel Hill and university buildings.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
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.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
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.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
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. “Human Rights Week at UNC, 1983–1992.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/human-rights-week-storyline-1984/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
