Racial incidents and race relations at UNC, 1981–1992

At a November 1981 meeting the Black Greek Council and the Black Student Movement disclosed incidents of harassment and violence by white students: two Black women had been assaulted, one in a physical education class and one in Hinton James dormitory, and a Black custodian had been moved after threatening notes. On December 1 the two groups sent administrators and faculty a letter listing seven recent verbal and physical assaults on Black students by white students and asking that students be told whom to contact. Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III answered that a letter naming contacts would be read in every class and sent to the residence halls. On January 20, 1982 BSM chairperson Wende Watson and three other students met Fordham and asked for clearer procedures for reporting racial incidents and swifter punishment of those who provoked them; Fordham said his administration would act on both.

By March the University had set up a Study Committee on Race Relations of students and faculty, a new course on Black and white relations had been approved, and Orientation and the minority Pre-Orientation were to be combined. A 1981 mail survey of Black undergraduates, part of Walter R. Allen's study at six state universities, found that about 63 percent of the 184 who answered had met some racial discrimination in Chapel Hill. On November 12, 1982 Vice Chancellor Harold Wallace told a mostly white Campus Y audience that Black complaints were not "alibis": Black students were 8 percent of the student body against about 25 percent of the state's population, and only 51 of 1,800 faculty members were Black. He urged white students to join Black organizations.

In the spring of 1987 racial slurs written on class assignments were twice slipped into the mail file of a Black second-year student in the business school, one of eight Black students in an MBA class of about 160. On October 15 Dean Paul Rizzo told a meeting of MBA students and faculty that he felt shame over the incidents, apologized to the school's Black students, announced racial awareness sessions for MBA orientation and for the faculty, and turned the investigation over to the Graduate Student Honor Court. By November 12 junior Christopher Mumford had founded Racial Awareness through Campus Interaction and Learning (RACIAL) to promote racial awareness through discussion rather than demonstrations. It planned a forum of the Black and white Greek systems, which he called the most visible segregation on campus, and former associate dean Hayden Renwick, whom Mumford had consulted, said frank discussion was the first step. On April 14, 1988 about 60 students in the Pit heard leaders of six campus organizations, among them the Black Student Movement, the Daily Tar Heel, Student Government and the Residence Hall Association, describe the racial problems they met in office, at a forum moderated by the Rev. Robert Seymour, the last in RACIAL's series. BSM president Kenneth Perry said the BSM's aim was to improve the condition of Black students rather than to make the races comfortable together, and the president of the campus NAACP chapter faulted the paper's treatment of Black students.

An April 21, 1988 party at the all-male Teague Residence Hall was followed by racial and sexual harassment of the Scott Residence College area director, including slurs written on her apartment door. On May 23 housing director Wayne Kuncl announced that Teague would house women and men in the fall and that its 72 returning residents would be spread among other halls; Dean of Student Affairs Donald Boulton upheld the change on May 31, and a trustees' committee let it stand on June 24 despite protests from the hall's alumni foundation. On February 8, 1989 North Carolinians Against Racial and Religious Violence released its fifth yearly report, which counted 12 incidents of bigotry in Orange County in 1988, the most of 38 counties, centered on the UNC campus, Chapel Hill and Hillsborough; among them were the April incident at Teague Residence Hall and the harassment of students who backed a Robeson County activist. Chapel Hill police captain Ralph Pendergraph disputed the figures, saying the town had seen no rise in bigoted violence.

On March 7, 1989 about 75 students, faculty and administrators met in Lenoir Hall for what the Daily Tar Heel called UNC's first race relations symposium, sponsored by the Campus Y, the Carolina Union and the Black Cultural Center to launch Race Relations Week. Chancellor Paul Hardin pledged the administration's support and said race relations had slipped in recent years, and Mumford proposed a standing council of administrators, faculty and students to deal with racism on campus. In April former Georgia senator Julian Bond opened what the Daily Tar Heel called UNC's first Race Relations Week, telling about 90 people in Hamilton Hall that the 1980s revival of the civil rights fight had begun as if it had no history; the week also brought workshops, a talk by Black Student Movement founder Valerie Batts and a closing step show whose proceeds went mainly to the Harvey Beech Scholarship Fund for keeping minority students in school. On November 17, at "Racism: Our common bondage," a program of the Black Cultural Center and the Chapel of the Cross, six mixed groups of students, faculty, staff and residents who had met weekly for about six weeks compiled recommendations for Hardin. They included housing all freshmen in one area to end the concentration of Black students on South Campus, more race-relations study in the curriculum, a required non-Western culture course and a monument to a prominent Black alumnus to balance the Silent Sam statue.

After the hate incidents and the Rally Against Hate of fall 1990, which have their own page, incidents went on into 1991. During the King birthday week in January someone painted the advertising cubes on North and South Campus with a message mocking King, and a poster announcing the celebration was defaced the same way; Black Ink counted these, with defaced notices of the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association and UNITAS, among a rising number of campus hate incidents that year. On January 25 twenty to thirty students marched from the Pit to South Building and gave Provost Dennis O'Connor the Network for Minority Issues' proposal that every undergraduate take at least one course in Asian, Native American, Latin American or African American studies; O'Connor accepted it for Chancellor Paul Hardin. In February North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence reported that Orange County had the second-highest number of reported hate crimes in the state in 1990, eight incidents, some on the UNC campus; executive director Christina Davis-McCoy tied the rise to tensions over Harvey Gantt's Senate race and the Gulf crisis as well as to better monitoring. On February 12 a poster for the Carolina Union's Malcolm X workshop was found slashed across Malcolm X's face in Alexander Residence Hall; Housing Director Wayne Kuncl wrote to the hall's residents that the department was treating it as an act of racism, while the hall's president called it vandalism. On March 5 and 6 posters for a speech by Maki Mandela and a step show were defaced with profanity in Morrison Residence Hall while about 25 other posters on the same board were untouched, and the area director called it racially motivated.

On November 1, 1991 the Chancellor's Committee on Community and Diversity released a report, after an 11-month study, finding the University's climate chilly toward women, minorities, gay and lesbian people and disabled people. Its 24 recommendations included networks to recruit Black and Native American students and faculty, a multicultural course requirement and changes in freshman room assignments to address segregation in the residence halls; Hardin said the University would pick out the most promising ideas and go to work on them. In February 1992 the anti-violence group reported that Orange County had tied for third in the state in racially and religiously motivated crimes in 1991, a year in which such incidents reached a state high. Among the eight Orange County incidents it reported were 911 dispatchers joking about the race of two Black men walking on a highway near Hillsborough before both were struck by cars, one fatally, and a racial slur painted on a Black family's driveway in Chapel Hill. On March 9 two Black students found a small noose hanging on the message board of their Hinton James room door, and two days later a letter signed for a self-styled Klan-like order followed; assistant dean Sibby Anderson-Thompkins said reported racial incidents had risen from 8 in 1989 to 22 in 1990-91.

On May 1, after a forum on race relations at the Sonja H. Stone Black Cultural Center, about 100 members of the University community, led by Black Student Movement president Michelle Thomas, marched to Silent Sam to protest the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Associate dean Marion Phillips, journalism professor Chuck Stone and law professor Daniel Pollitt spoke, and Hardin called the verdict a terrible miscarriage of justice; Thomas later said his appearance was only an effort to avoid criticism. In early May about 150 residents marched from the Chapel Hill Post Office to the Town Hall against the verdict in a march organized by the local NAACP chapter under James Brittian, who with Mayor Ken Broun said racism was a problem in Chapel Hill but not as bad as in other places. On August 17, worried that racial tension on campus would worsen, Hardin met for about three and a half hours at his home with six faculty members and six Black community leaders, among them civil rights activists Lillian Lee, the Rev. J. R. Manley, Lewis Roland and R. D. Smith. Hardin said the group might become an advisory committee; former school board member Fred Battle said housekeepers, students and other grassroots leaders should have been included.