Storyline · 1979–1981
In 1979 UNC denied tenure to Sonja Haynes Stone, director of the Afro-American Studies curriculum, and Black students marched to South Building and sat in. After she appealed and students rallied again, the trustees asked for a rehearing and then recommended tenure, which the Board of Governors granted in July 1980 without promoting her to associate professor. By 1981 she was pursuing the promotion in court. Students gathered outside South Building for her again in April 1980, the day the trustees met.
By the end of March 1979 the University had denied tenure to Sonja H. Stone, director of the Afro-American Studies curriculum, and Black Student Movement leaders who met Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor on March 30 said he told them the matter was out of his hands. On April 4 some 200 students in a BSM demonstration marched in the rain to South Building to protest what they called the administration's growing insensitivity; when Provost J. Charles Morrow would not come out they held a 30-minute sit-in, and Morrow promised to study funding for Afro-American Studies but not a separate department. Stone appealed. On November 30 about 200 Black students rallied on the steps of South Building for her tenure, for hiring and keeping Black faculty and for recruiting Black students, and then waited two and a half hours in the faculty lounge of Morehead Planetarium while the trustees heard her appeal. On December 14, after a brief public hearing, the trustees asked that the case be heard again. On April 25, 1980, the day the trustees met, students backing her appeal gathered for a "show of faces" outside South Building, a demonstration the Black Student Movement endorsed at a later meeting, and after the rehearing the trustees recommended on May 19 that she be granted tenure. The Board of Governors granted it on July 11, after 18 months of appeals in which she charged racism, sexism and denial of due process, but did not promote her from assistant to associate professor. By November 1981, back from a year at Ohio State, Stone said she was pursuing the promotion in the courts.
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Photograph from about 1903 of South Building on the university campus in Chapel Hill. Work on the building started in 1798 under Samuel Hopkins, was later carried on by John Clare, and finished in 1814. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Draft minutes of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina for 14 April 1798, recording the Masonic ceremony for laying the cornerstone of the University of North Carolina's Old South Building in Chapel Hill.
South Building at UNC on 22 April 1987, showing its columns with flowers in bloom, in a Hugh Morton color photograph. Mounted 35 mm slide.
South Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, probably shot on infrared film by Hugh Morton in late 1946 or early 1947. Morton gave six photographs to the Alumni Office that autumn, and this one ran on page 216 of the April 1947 Alumni Review. Black-and-white sheet film negative.
A picture book for children about Tony Jenzano, 1919 to 1997, the Morehead Planetarium director who trained the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts in celestial navigation at Chapel Hill. Michael G. Neece's account, published in Chapel Hill in 2020, covers astronaut training, the teaching of astronomy and the planetarium itself for young readers.
Donald S. Hall's 1965 booklet on the Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, published by the university. Illustrations, floor plans and a portrait fill its twenty eight pages. Topics include planetariums in Chapel Hill and the building itself, so it reads as a guide to the facility.
A guide to the meeting rooms and services of the Morehead Building at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, issued by the university in 2000. It concerns convention facilities in Chapel Hill. A short promotional piece for groups booking space on campus, and a record of what the building offered visitors at the turn of the century.
Marguerite E. Schumann's booklet on the Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, printed in 1976 by the university print shop, with her authorship noted on the cover. Planetariums in Chapel Hill is the subject given, and the booklet is a published guide to one of the campus landmarks.
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.
Four days of events, from 20 to 23 August 2004, marked the grand opening of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at Chapel Hill, and this twenty six page illustrated program lays them out. The center issued it.
Organizational records of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, 1984 to 2013, roughly 10,500 items across 12.5 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40341. Topics include African American students at Chapel Hill, race relations at the university, student movements, the building itself, and Sonja Haynes Stone (1938-1991), for whom the center is named.
An article by Wekesa Olatunji Madzimoyo on race relations and African American students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, printed in Change for January 1980 and separately issued by the Council on Learning. It follows an earlier piece by Randall Williams on the same campus. Sonja Haynes Stone is among the people discussed. Nine pages.
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. “Sonja Haynes Stone’s tenure case, 1979–1981.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/sonja-stone-tenure-storyline-1979/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
