Storyline · 1973–1977
From 1973 UNC women used federal sex-discrimination rules to press for equal treatment, filing complaints over intramurals and tuition residency rules. Under Title IX the University set up a grievance committee, opened single-sex groups and a men's dormitory to women and raised the athletic fee to build women's sports, while a 1977 report counted three athletic grants for women against 257 for men. Chapel Hill High began a coeducational gym class in 1976.
In September 1973 the Association of Women Students filed a complaint with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare charging discrimination in UNC's intramural program, where women's managers worked as volunteers while part of women's fees helped pay men's managers. On January 31, 1974 UNC confirmed a grant-in-aid for the state's top-ranked woman tennis player, a 17-year-old from Lexington; the Daily Tar Heel called it the first athletic scholarship awarded to a woman in North Carolina history, and Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor called it part of the University's leadership role toward full coeducation. That April Virginia R. Holt, who had begun the women's intercollegiate program three years earlier, said physical education head Carl Blyth had decided without consulting her to hire a new women's athletic director and basketball coach; Blyth said nothing was settled, and Angela Lumpkin confirmed she had been hired as an assistant professor for the fall. In the fall of 1974 the Housing Department began making men's dormitories comparable to women's under new HEW guidelines, adding kitchens to the North Campus men's dormitories, and in December the AWS and the Chapel Hill chapter of NOW filed a Title IX complaint against the tuition residency rules, under which a North Carolina woman who married an out-of-state man lost in-state tuition.
By October 1975 Susan H. Ehringhaus, the assistant to the chancellor in charge of Title IX, had set up a committee under Associate Dean James O. Cansler to hear students' written complaints of sex discrimination, and the Association of Women Students had admitted men and renamed itself the Association for Women Students. In November women's basketball coach Angela Lumpkin protested to Women's Athletic Director Frances Hogan after a starting player broke her wrist against an unpadded wall 58 inches from the end line of the crowded Women's Gymnasium; the team had been refused Carmichael Auditorium while the men's varsity got practice time there. Told that it must admit women or lose recognition and its headquarters in the Smith Building, the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity agreed in December to take women from the spring semester. On February 24, 1976 Housing Director James Condie announced that Aycock, a men's dormitory, would house women from that fall to bring housing into line with Title IX, and on February 27 the Board of Governors raised the Chapel Hill student athletic fee by $10, to $35 a semester, which Athletic Director Bill Cobey said was needed in part to build up women's athletics. That fall Chapel Hill High School began a coeducational physical education class.
On April 1, 1977 the Committee on Athletics told the Faculty Council that women had received three grants-in-aid worth $7,670.50 in 1975-76, against 257 worth $519,789.32 for men; with 12 women's varsity teams against 13 for men, it said, parity had been reached in opportunities though not in money. On November 14, 23 students, faculty and staff filed grievances charging that the physical education department broke Title IX by giving men 85 percent of the lockers in Woollen Gym, though women physical education students outnumbered men, and on November 29 Blyth announced that the men's faculty locker room would become a women's locker room, nearly doubling women's lockers and baskets for the spring of 1978.
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.
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.
Linen-finish postcard published by Gray and Thompson of Chapel Hill showing Woollen Gymnasium at the University of North Carolina, built in 1937 and 1938 and regarded then as a modern, high-quality basketball building. Black and white with a white border and divided back, issued after the gym opened. Ellen Payne Odom Genealogy Library Postcard Collection.
Robert A. Fetzer and Oliver K. Cornwell describe the new gymnasium at the University of North Carolina, Woollen Gym. The paper was detached from the proceedings of the forty-second annual meeting of the College Physical Education Association and printed at Ohio State University in 1938. It concerns college buildings in Chapel Hill.
The Charles T. Woollen Gymnasium at Chapel Hill, published by the Graycraft Card Company of Danville, Virginia, and undated. Chapel Hill and Orange County are the place terms attached.
Children in the pool at Woollen Gymnasium on the University of North Carolina campus, undated. One photograph in the Chapel Hill Life: General binder of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Barbara Lorie, interviewed by Melissa Froemming for the Southern Oral History Program on February 26, 2001, recalls her career as a teacher and civil rights worker in Chapel Hill. After a year at Durham Academy she was hired by principal May Marshbanks to teach literature at the newly integrated Chapel Hill High School, where she tried unconventional classroom methods to bridge racial divisions among students. The interview runs one hour fifteen minutes. Electronic edition 2007, Documenting the American South.
Burnis Hackney entered Chapel Hill High School, newly integrated, in 1966, one of the first Black students there after Lincoln High School closed. In this Southern Oral History Program interview, recorded February 5, 2001, by Bob Gilgor, Hackney weighs his conviction that integration was right against what was lost when Lincoln's traditions were set aside, and how the merger played out for students. About an hour and a half. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Gloria Register Jeter (born 1952) attended both segregated and integrated public schools of Chapel Hill and offers a critical view of how desegregation was carried out, in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded December 23, 2000, by Bob Gilgor. Jeter argues that the merger of Lincoln High School into Chapel Hill High School cost the Black community its school traditions and institutions, and describes the student protests that followed. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Joanne Peerman, a Chapel Hill native and the daughter of a well-known coach, was in one of the first classes to integrate Chapel Hill High School. In this Southern Oral History Program interview, recorded by Bob Gilgor in February 2001, she describes her schooling under segregation and after it, the last years of Lincoln High School, and the civil rights demonstrations that accompanied school integration. About an hour and a half; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2006, through Documenting the American South.
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).
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Hope Summerell Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), published in 1926, which doubles as a picture of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century. It runs 325 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Selected writings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), the Chapel Hill writer who campaigned for the university's reopening after Reconstruction, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1953. The 753 pages touch on Chapel Hill life, education and the university in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Sarah Brandes Madry's history of the Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treating both its architecture and the ideas attached to it. It takes in drinking fountains and water use in Chapel Hill and the university's history, with a chapter on Edwin Anderson Alderman, the president under whom the well took its present form in 1897, and one on water at the university. Published by iUniverse in 2003, 399 pages with illustrations.
Jennifer Fleischner's double biography of Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the dressmaker who had been enslaved, including years in Hillsborough, before buying her freedom and becoming the First Lady's confidante. Published by Broadway Books in New York in 2003, 372 pages with illustrations and a map. Topics include enslaved women in Hillsborough and the United States, dressmakers and women's friendships in the nineteenth century.
Mary Claire Engstrom's biographical register of the young women who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough, subtitled lives of educated women in the antebellum South. The school was kept by Margaret Anna Burwell and her husband, and the book bears on women's education in nineteenth-century North Carolina. Published by the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1979, 256 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's account of the closing weeks of the Civil War in North Carolina, reissued in 2005 as an electronic edition by the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics include the 1865 campaigns, Sherman's march through the Carolinas, Stoneman's raid, and the history of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century, where Spencer, 1825 to 1908, spent her working life.
Scotti Cohn's short biographies of notable North Carolina women, including Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Annie Lowrie Alexander and Cornelia Phillips Spencer of Chapel Hill. Published by Twodot in 2000, 198 pages with illustrations.
A Women's History Month project of 1993 and 1994 from the Orange County Women's History Month Committee, profiling women who were firsts in the county. Published in Chapel Hill in 1994, 13 pages plus unnumbered leaves with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits.
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. “Title IX at UNC and in the Chapel Hill schools, 1973–1977.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/title-ix-storyline-1973/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
