Chancellor Taylor at Morehead Planetarium
Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor of UNC-Chapel Hill stands before the sundial at Morehead Planetarium in June 1973, on a color slide by Hugh Morton.
Storyline · 1973–1984
In 1973 UNC's student attorney general ended the Minority Court, which let Black defendants be tried by a court with three minority justices added. After the Black Student Movement pressed for it, the court was restored that November, and a reform of the student courts approved in 1973 and 1974 wrote minority members into the new Undergraduate Court, which took effect in October 1974. Two students' 1974 suit, Uzzell v. Friday, also challenged the guaranteed minority seats on the Campus Governing Council and the Honor Court. A federal appeals court struck them down in 1977 and again in 1979, after the Supreme Court's Bakke decision, and late in 1979 it agreed to hear the case once more. The appeals court sent the case back to the district court in 1980, and in 1984, after a trial in Durham, Judge Frank W. Bullock Jr. ruled the reserved seats unconstitutional.
The Honor Court's Minority Court let a Black student charged under the honor system choose a court of ten, the regular seven justices and three minority justices. The student attorney general ended it when he took office in the spring of 1973, saying it had never been ratified, and Black Ink said Black student leaders had not been consulted. Black Student Movement chairman Willie Mebane pressed Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor, who opposed the court, to restore it, and on November 13, 1973 student body president Ford Runge announced that the court, created by the legislature in 1969, was legal and would stay. On December 3 Taylor approved a reform of the student courts that merged the men's, women's and honor courts into one Undergraduate Court with minority members and let minority and women defendants ask for a panel with at least four of seven judges of their race or sex. Students approved it 2,773 to 804 on February 27, 1974, the Faculty Council approved it unanimously on March 29, and the Instrument of Student Judicial Governance took effect on October 8, 1974, with a 42-member Undergraduate Court that had at least 12 members of non-majority races.
The 1974 suit against student-fee funding of the Black Student Movement also challenged the minority seats on the Campus Governing Council and the Honor Court. On September 17, 1975 Chief Judge Eugene A. Gordon dismissed the suit, holding the funding question moot because the BSM had opened its membership, and dismissed the challenges to the seats. On January 5, 1977 the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the fee funding but ruled that the Student Constitution's guarantee of at least two minority-race members on the council, and the rule letting minority defendants ask for a court mostly of their own race, violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts. In February BSM chair Jackie Lucas told Chancellor Taylor and the state's lawyers that the organization would do whatever it took to keep Minority Court and the council seats. The court refused the University's request for a rehearing on February 28 but agreed on March 21 to rehear the case, and student body president Bill Moss said he would appoint a minority member to the council, which then had one. On July 28 the full court upheld the ruling 4 to 3, and in October the state asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review it, arguing that the appeals court had ignored the difference between benign and invidious uses of racial classifications. In late June 1978 the Supreme Court set the decision aside and sent the case back for review in light of its Bakke decision; student body presidents had made no such appointments while the suit was pending. On February 5, 1979 the full Fourth Circuit ruled 4 to 3 that the council seats and the Honor Court rule letting a defendant ask that four of the seven judges be of his or her own race or sex were reverse discrimination, and the state asked for a stay so the council's appointed minority member could keep her seat. By November the court had agreed to reconsider, after University lawyers argued that a senior judge in the majority could not vote on a full-court review; the case, Uzzell v. Friday, was making its fourth trip to a federal appeals court.
On January 7, 1980 the Fourth Circuit heard the case again, with lawyers from the state attorney general's office arguing once more that no one had been injured by the rules. By late August it had sent the suit back to the district court to be heard again in light of the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision; student body president Bob Saunders wanted the attorney general to carry the case through the full appeals process. Testimony in the trial in U.S. District Court in Durham ended on September 7, 1983. The rules then required at least two minority members on the Campus Governing Council, set aside Undergraduate Court seats for minority students and let a minority defendant ask for a minority majority on the trial panel, and the University defended them as academic freedom and as part of meeting its 1981 desegregation consent decree. In the week of August 20, 1984 Judge Frank W. Bullock Jr. ruled against the University, holding that the rules reserving seats for Black students on the council and the student Supreme Court violated the equal protection clause. Student body president Paul Parker said the provision should stay until the case was appealed.
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.
Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor of UNC-Chapel Hill stands before the sundial at Morehead Planetarium in June 1973, on a color slide by Hugh Morton.
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 Minority Court and the guaranteed minority seats, 1973–1984.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/minority-court-storyline-1973/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
