Storyline · 1964–1988
Between 1964 and 1968 the Ku Klux Klan held rallies with cross burnings east of Chapel Hill and near Hillsborough, called a night rally beside Interstate 85 and gathered off Highway 54 west of Carrboro. In 1965 a House committee named the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan organization in Orange County, and the sheriff reported three recent Klan meetings in the county. That December Congressman Charles Weltner urged an audience of about 1,700 in Memorial Hall to stop supporting the Klan. In 1987 Klan members marched on Franklin Street beside numerous protesters, and in 1988 about 50 marched through Hillsborough and rallied at the courthouse before a crowd of hecklers.
On March 28, 1964, the seventh day of the Holy Week fast, a Ku Klux Klan rally drew onlookers to the Franklin Street post office, where a UNC senior was struck. That June about 700 people attended a United Klans rally with a cross burning two miles east of Chapel Hill on the old Durham Highway, and at a Klan representative's request the sheriff and some deputies stood by outside the site. On August 1 the United Klans held a second Orange County rally of the summer near the crossing of Interstate 85 and N.C. 86 east of Hillsborough, burning a cross while speakers addressed the crowd. In July 1965 robed Klansmen handed out bills in Hillsborough for a night rally in a field across from the General Sherman Restaurant at Interstate 85 and US 70. That October the House Un-American Activities Committee named the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan organization in Orange County, and the sheriff told the Daily Tar Heel that three Klan meetings had been held in the county recently, the first of them in Chapel Hill, and that he would not investigate Klan members unless they broke the law. On December 13 Georgia congressman Charles L. Weltner, who had called for the House investigation, urged about 1,700 people in Memorial Hall to stop supporting the Klan. In July 1968 the Klan held a rally off Highway 54 west of Carrboro, where a Klansman said he would like to lead a march past UNC students.
On Sunday, June 14, 1987 Klan members marched on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill with protesters walking alongside them; the Summer Tar Heel noted that, unlike at a Klan march in Greensboro, the protesters in Chapel Hill were numerous and vocal. On September 3, 1988 about 50 Klan members marched through downtown Hillsborough for about 15 minutes in an annual membership drive and then held a 90-minute rally on the steps of the Orange County Courthouse, trading insults with a crowd of about 140. UNC students among the hecklers answered with chants of "MLK" and a tape of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and Mayor Fred Cates stayed away from a press conference on the courthouse steps so as not to give the Klan attention.
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.
Government specification for building the United States post office at Chapel Hill, printed by the Government Printing Office in 1917 for the Treasury Department's Office of the Supervising Architect. Topics include post office buildings and building specifications for the town. It sets out the materials and workmanship required, a source for the construction history of the town's federal building.
Photograph of the outside of the Chapel Hill post office, taken in 1978. It belongs to the Chapel Hill Government binder in the Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Two photographs of the Chapel Hill post office and the buildings around it under snow, dated 1950 to 1977. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Real photo postcard of the United States post office in Chapel Hill, from about the 1940s. Card number 50C.
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 Klan in Orange County, 1964–1988.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/klan-orange-county-storyline-1964/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
