Storyline · 1965–1969
A UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society organized in 1965, invited the barred speakers Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker in 1966 and started a paper, the Left Heel. In 1968 the Southern Student Organizing Committee founded a UNC chapter, ran a "Disorientation" for new students, backed the Durham Black Solidarity boycott, petitioned for dormitory visitation and started the Radish, and that October the University stopped sending security officers to campus political meetings. The Chapel Hill Revolutionary Movement formed in the fall of 1969 and disbanded in December.
About 35 people came to the organizing meeting of a UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in Gerrard Hall on May 5, 1965, with work against the Speaker Ban, local political action and the study of Viet Nam among its proposed projects. In January 1966 Stuart Matthews and Gary Waller invited Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker to speak under the chapter's sponsorship. Waller served as temporary chairman that February, and on March 1 the Daily Tar Heel named Matthews the newly elected chairman; the court's findings in Dickson v. Sitterson later listed him on the steering committee of the chapter, one of the campus organizations whose officers brought the suit. In October the chapter brought out the Left Heel, a mimeographed paper that sold about 700 copies in Y-Court. In September 1968 the Southern Student Organizing Committee ran a four-day "Disorientation" for incoming students, and more than 150 people came to the founding meeting of its UNC chapter, which took up women's closing hours and course credit for ROTC. In October the committee sold Pepsi in Y-Court in support of the Durham Black Solidarity boycott of Coca-Cola products and handed the dean of student affairs a dormitory visitation petition with 3,904 names. On Time-Out Day, October 29, the University announced that its security officers would no longer attend meetings of the committee and similar groups, after the New University Conference wrote that two security men had been attending campus political meetings to spy and intimidate. In December the committee began a weekly paper, the Radish, whose first 1,000 copies sold out by 3 p.m. In the fall of 1969 UNC students, workers and Chapel Hill residents organized the Chapel Hill Revolutionary Movement, which disbanded in December; former members said it had split into factions and had given its dues to the striking cafeteria workers.
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 the 1 with a known location.
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.
Brian Brigman's short illustrated pamphlet on the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, the debating societies founded at the University of North Carolina in 1795, with the Latin phrase virtus, libertas et scientia in its subtitle. Published by the societies themselves in Chapel Hill in 1988, eleven unnumbered pages with portraits.
Joseph K. L. Reckford's honors essay in American Studies at the University of North Carolina, submitted in 1981, reproduces the portraits acquired between 1795 and 1868 by the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, the university's two debating societies, and adds selected biographical data on the sitters. 211 pages with a short bibliography.
Kevin Cherry's lecture on 215 years of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, the student debating societies at the University of North Carolina, delivered on April 7, 2011 in Wilson Library for the Gladys Hall Coates University History Lecture series. Seventeen pages as published online, covering student oratory and society life at Chapel Hill from the 1790s onward.
Evangeline Burbank Murphy traces the growth of the library built up by the Philanthropic Society at the University of North Carolina between 1797 and 1822, in a thesis the university issued in 1979. Subjects include academic libraries in Chapel Hill and the society and the university library of the 1793 to 1962 period. Seventy three leaves.
Anne Queen (1911-2005), director of the Campus Y at UNC, interviewed by Joseph Herzenberg on April 30, 1976 for the Southern Oral History Program. Queen grew up in Canton, North Carolina, in a working family, finished school in 1930 and spent ten years with Champion Paper and Fibre, where she came to identify with the New Deal Democrats and took an interest in labor. She also discusses Berea College, Yale Divinity School, and student political activity and civil rights work at Chapel Hill. Two hours thirty-eight minutes.
Second of two Southern Oral History Program interviews with Anne Queen (1911-2005), who came to Chapel Hill after years as an industrial worker and went on to direct the Campus YWCA-YMCA, a center of student activism. Recorded November 22, 1976, by Joseph Herzenberg, this hour-long conversation covers how Queen saw politics in the South and the nation change through the mid-twentieth century, and student political activity at UNC. Published online in 2007 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Law professor Daniel H. Pollitt remembers Anne Queen (1911-2005), director of UNC's Campus Y, in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded November 19, 1990, by Cindy Cheatham. Queen's commitment to social justice matched Pollitt's own work for racial equality and support of student activists, and he describes her Campus Y as the place where students concerned with civil rights in segregated Chapel Hill gathered and learned to organize. Published online in 2007 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
William C. Friday, UNC system president from 1957 until 1986, was interviewed by Cindy Cheatham in December 1990 about Anne Queen (1911-2005). Queen came to the campus YWCA as associate director in 1956 and led the merged YMCA-YWCA from 1964 to 1975. Friday recalls working with her through the years of student political activity in Chapel Hill and reflects on the place of the Y in university life. About forty minutes; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2007, through Documenting the American South.
Kenneth Joel Zogry's history of the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC Chapel Hill student newspaper, published by UNC Press in 2018, 361 pages with illustrations, online edition. Zogry follows the paper from its 1893 start as organ of the Athletic Association through the eras his chapter titles name: 'Crack-brained professors and baby radicals' (1923 to 1941), 'The truth in eight-point type' (1941 to 1959) and 'A free press must prevail' (1971 to 1993).
Reviewed in The Southeastern Librarian (2018), American Journalism (2019), Journal of American History (2019), The Journal of Southern History (2019).
Brian Sopp's 2007 textual analysis of news coverage in three Chapel Hill student publications, the Carolina Critic, the Carolina Review and the Daily Tar Heel, from 1987 onward. It concerns college student newspapers and periodicals in Chapel Hill. A piece of student research rather than a trade book, useful to anyone studying campus journalism and student politics at the university.
Centennial edition of the Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina student newspaper, produced at Chapel Hill in 1993 to mark one hundred years of publication. Jen Pilla is named as centennial edition editor. Topics include the paper's history along with college student newspapers and periodicals in Chapel Hill, which makes the issue a source for the paper's own record.
Conservative sheet aimed squarely at the campus daily, published in Chapel Hill from 1984 by a group calling itself the U.N.C. Committee to Liberate the Tar Heel, whose subtitle turns editorial page into editorial plague. Volumes measure 28 to 36 cm, and student political activity at the University of North Carolina runs through it.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
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.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
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.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
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).
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. “SDS, SSOC and the student left at UNC, 1965–1969.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/unc-student-left-storyline-1965/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
