Storyline · 1982–1994
From 1982 students pressed UNC to sell its holdings in companies doing business in South Africa. Students voted two to one for divestment in 1983, but the endowment board refused, citing its duty to maximize returns. The BSM renewed the campaign in 1984, the endowment board sold four holdings in 1986, and the University agreed to divest in 1987. Students voted for divestment again in 1986 and built shanties at South Building, where some were arrested; UNC had sold more than $4 million in holdings by October 1987. Chapel Hill adopted sanctions against South Africa in 1986 and repealed them in January 1994, and that March the endowment board lifted its ban on such investments.
By October 1, 1982 the UNC chapter of the North Carolina Public Interest Research Group had begun pressing the University to divest the roughly $2 million of its endowment invested in 12 corporations with interests in South Africa, as a protest against apartheid. Acting vice chancellor Wayne Jones answered that the University told its money managers what return it expected and did not judge corporations by politics. At a PIRG rally in the Pit on October 21, exiled South African labor organizer Fred Dube of the African National Congress called on American companies to leave South Africa. About 30 people then marched to Hanes Hall, where IBM recruiters were interviewing, and were barred from entering, then went on to South Building chanting "UNC divest"; a teach-in followed the next day.
On February 8, 1983 students passed a divestment referendum by a two-to-one margin. Citing it, two PIRG members, with about 35 others attending, urged the Board of Trustees of the Endowment, meeting with Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III on February 18, to sell the University's stock in companies operating in South Africa; two South African students asked the board not to divest. Meeting at the Carolina Inn on April 21 while PIRG rallied outside against both the investments and the closed meeting, the endowment board decided not to sell. Its chairman, John A. Tate Jr., told the University trustees the next day that the board deplored apartheid but that divestment was not consistent with its duty to maximize investment returns.
On September 17, 1984 BSM president Sherrod Banks presented the joint position of the BSM Central Committee and the Black Greek Council that apartheid was immoral and called for student funds to be pulled from the trustees' endowment and reinvested responsibly. On September 26 the Campus Governing Council, citing the 1983 referendum, passed two bills to take nearly $13,000 in student fees out of the Trust Funds Office's temporary investment pool, which the trustees controlled, and invest it in the Self-Help Credit Union of Durham; a Daily Tar Heel editor's column later noted that the fees had been in U.S. bonds, not South African holdings. On November 5 about 150 people heard six speakers in the Pit call for divestment at a rally sponsored by the BSM, the Black Greek Council and a dozen other groups. That month the Orange County Rainbow Coalition of Conscience formed a Committee on Southern Africa to work for sanctions and divestment.
By February 8, 1985 UNC officials had agreed, so far only by word, not to invest in companies in South Africa that had not signed the Sullivan Principles, and the University had sold its Black and Decker stock; student body president Paul Parker asked that the policy be put in writing. That year UNC sold 26,000 shares in companies not following the principles. In March visiting professor Julius E. Nyang'oro spoke at Inside Apartheid, a BSM and Afro-American Studies symposium. On September 8 about 120 people held a Rainbow Coalition candlelight vigil at the Franklin Street post office, closing a postcard campaign, run by the committee under Yonni Chapman, that urged Sen. Jesse Helms not to filibuster sanctions against South Africa; speakers included Council member Bill Thorpe and former council member Joe Straley.
That fall students formed the UNC Anti-Apartheid Support Group. At its first rally in the Pit on October 1, where BSM president Sibby Anderson spoke, it said it would seek a student referendum on divestment. After a State Department envoy heard campus views on apartheid at the Carolina Inn on October 7, nearly 400 students rallied in the Pit on National Anti-Apartheid Day, October 11; by October 23 the conservative Carolina Club had put up posters reading "Divestment no!!" On November 14 the endowment trustees turned down Student Government's plan to sell the $5.9 million held in companies operating in South Africa by 1989, though their chairman, J. Clint Newton, said he personally favored it. The next day the Faculty Council voted without dissent to ask for divestment from companies and banks doing direct and extensive business with the South African government, and on November 22 the Board of Trustees approved the resolution 12 to 1 on trustee William Darity's motion and sent it to the endowment trustees.
The support group put a referendum calling for complete divestment on the February 4, 1986 ballot by petition, and students passed it 2,560 to 1,130; that month the group also held a clothing drive for Carrboro and South Africa. On February 18 Motlalepula Chabaku, a South African minister who had urged sanctions at the Community Church of Chapel Hill the September before, told about 200 people at a Great Decisions lecture that divestment was the last chance for peaceful change in South Africa. On February 21 the Endowment Board voted to divest its stock in companies giving "direct and substantial support" to the South African government, but would sell nothing until it had identified the companies. In April the Chapel Hill Town Council adopted sanctions against apartheid, resolving not to deposit town money in any bank with outstanding loans to the South African government or companies there and not to buy South African products.
On March 18 support group members put up shanties in front of South Building with Chancellor Fordham's permission and lived in them for about three weeks, holding teach-ins. On April 7, after Fordham, with encouragement from the trustees, ordered them removed, police and physical plant workers tore them down while about 300 people stood around them, and five protesters were arrested for trespassing. On April 24, after a march to the Carolina Inn, the Endowment Board, which had put off its vote on April 4, rejected total divestment and adopted a partial policy in a six-point resolution; about 30 students then sat in for two hours in South Building, where Fordham talked with them. The next day the trustees agreed to ask the Endowment Board to raise up to $50,000 to match the Campus Y's South Africa Scholarship Fund, and that spring the board voted to sell its CBS stock, then kept it on learning that CBS had withdrawn from South Africa.
On October 16 the trustees voted 8 to 3 to table Newton's motion urging full divestment; support group chairman Robert Reid-Pharr told the board that minority students felt endangered by its inaction. The next day about 30 members of the group protested silently at C. D. Spangler's inauguration as UNC system president on Polk Place and dropped a DIVEST NOW banner from South Building windows.
Black Ink reported in November 1986 that the town of Chapel Hill had decided to divest its holdings in South Africa after the spring 1986 campus anti-apartheid rallies. On November 17 support group members built a shanty in front of South Building, and Vice Chancellor Donald Boulton let it stand until Friday noon. On November 20 the UNC Endowment Board sold its holdings in four companies doing business in South Africa, Dresser Industries, Nalco Chemical, Goodyear and 3M, but did not take up total divestment, and students protesting the decision chained themselves to office furniture and water pipes in South Building. Police arrested eight students and a University employee for disorderly conduct; Fordham, whose motion for full divestment got no second, talked with the protesters. At the Friday noon deadline workers tore the shanty down while more than 400 students held hands and sang, and police arrested 13 students who would not leave. On December 12 the trustees voted 6 to 5 against asking the Endowment Board to sell the University's $4.6 million in such holdings, and the Faculty Council urged the Endowment Board to vote for full divestment.
On January 15, 1987 District Court Judge Lowry Betts acquitted 12 students charged with criminal trespass at the shanty, ruling that University Police had only asked them to leave, not ordered them. In February students who had left the support group formed Action Against Apartheid, which put up an information booth in the Pit in March, and on February 27 the trustees defeated 7 to 3 Darity's "conscious buying" resolution to limit University purchases from companies doing business in South Africa. On April 3 about 250 students marched with hands joined from the Pit to South Building, where new BSM president Kenny Perry gave his first speech in office, and on April 7 Action Against Apartheid spoke at South Building before seven empty chairs, since none of the Endowment Board members it had invited came. In June trustees chairman S. Bobo Tanner named a 13-member joint committee on apartheid and divestment, with Dale McKinley of Action Against Apartheid among its students; by September McKinley said he would quit because Tanner would not let it vote on recommendations, and at a September 18 rally for Steve Biko he called for UNC to divest the $8 million to $10 million it still had invested in South Africa. After the shanties, the protest at President Spangler's inauguration, the chain-in, a BSM march to South Building and student and faculty petitions, the University agreed in 1987 to divest from South Africa, a Black Ink column reported in January 1988. The University had announced on October 1, 1987 that it would divest from companies doing direct business in South Africa, and by October 31 it had sold more than $4 million in such holdings, said Wayne Jones, associate vice chancellor of finance. On October 13 about 75 students and residents held a candlelight vigil at the Franklin Street post office for South African political prisoners, and on November 6 Action Against Apartheid picketed the North Carolina National Bank office on Franklin Street over loans to South African businesses; an NCNB senior vice president answered that the bank had done no new South African business since 1985.
In February 1988 Action Against Apartheid held another candlelight vigil at the post office, where members said the work had to go on after the University's October announcement. In April it and the Anti-Apartheid Support Group said UNC was not fully divested, since it kept about $3.9 million in companies that sold in South Africa through licenses and franchises, and trustees chairman Bob Eubanks said no further divestment was planned. On November 15, during Human Rights Week, Action Against Apartheid held a candlelight vigil in the Pit, where a former African National Congress youth leader in exile urged divestment.
On January 25, 1994, on Mayor Ken Broun's motion, the Chapel Hill Town Council voted unanimously to repeal its 1986 sanctions, a step Broun called a symbolic gesture of help for the government to be elected in South Africa that April. On March 21 the seven-member board of the University's Endowment Fund, led by trustees chairman John Harris, rescinded the investment ban it had adopted in October 1987, and Vice Chancellor Wayne Jones said investment managers were free to consider companies doing business with South Africa again on economic grounds.
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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.
Episode of the North Carolina People television program, broadcast in 1988 by North Carolina Public Television as program number 1750 and recorded here as a 29 minute videocassette. The guest is Christopher C. Fordham III, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Chancellor's office records from the tenure of Carol L. Folt at Chapel Hill, 2013 to 2018, 8 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40024. Topics include university administration and educational fund raising, curriculum planning, health occupations schools and medical education, and race relations and college integration in North Carolina. Holden Thorp and Christopher C. Fordham also appear.
Groundbreaking for the George Watts Hill Alumni Center at UNC-Chapel Hill on 13 May 1989. The group includes Ralph Strayhorn, George Watts Hill, Doug Dibbert, trustees chairman Robert C. Eubanks and Tom Lambeth, with Paul Hardin and Christopher C. Fordham also pictured. Hugh Morton photograph.
Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III posed with the scholar Robin Hadley in 1985. A single print among the UNC Faculty and Administration photographs of the Chapel Hill Historical Society, CHHS.002.
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 South Africa divestment campaign at UNC and Chapel Hill's sanctions, 1982–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/south-africa-divestment-storyline-1982/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
