Named event or history
Two Chapel Hill congregations of the 1950s: the interracial Community Church, and Binkley Baptist, refused by the local Baptist association in 1966 over its open membership and cut off by the state and Southern conventions in 1992.
In briefThe Community Church of Chapel Hill formed in 1953 as an interracial congregation and started an integrated preschool in 1955; Binkley Baptist organized in 1958 under Robert Seymour. The Baptist association refused Binkley membership in 1966 over its open membership, the state and Southern conventions disassociated from it in 1992, and the Community Church joined the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1993.
The dated events and research sources on this page document this event. Explore the dated events, or browse the research sources.
Orange County Indexed has not yet linked any indexed works directly to this event. The background reading below is about Churches & Faith, the wider history this event belongs to.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 38, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 38 dated events in the chronology →
An interracial congregation organized with Charles M. Jones as minister.
People: Charles M. Jones · Joe Straley
Subject: Community Church of Chapel Hill
The Yates Baptist Association's church extension committee chose the Glen Lennox side of Chapel Hill for a new congregation and asked Dr. Fred W. Ellis to join the committee. The church that grew from it, Binkley Memorial, began as an association extension project backed by University Baptist Church, not as a split.
The Ellis, Berkut, Moffitt and Wagoner families met at Fred Ellis's home to begin a long series of studies on what the new church should be, agreeing to stay active at University Baptist until it launched. The book credits these studies with setting the church's open-membership and interracial course.
For about six years after its founding the Binkley congregation worshipped in Gerrard Hall on the UNC campus, held church school in other university buildings and used a large house at 508 East Franklin Street as its church house.
Subject: Gerrard Hall
Robert Seymour came to Chapel Hill in 1959 as the first minister of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, organized the year before. He led it until 1988.
Having traded its bypass lot for a larger one just to the north, the congregation broke ground for a fellowship hall and education wing designed by F. Carter Williams. A $25,000 gift from Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte made it possible to award the building contracts.
The congregation occupied its first permanent building.
Kept off campus, Aptheker gave his evening talk to about 350 people at the interdenominational Community Church on Purefoy Road. Paul Dickson then announced a Free Speech Defense Fund to pay for a lawsuit.
Part of Speaker Ban controversy, 1963–1968 · 31 events
People: Paul Dickson III · Herbert Aptheker
Subject: Community Church of Chapel Hill
A growing congregation needed more church school space, and in 1968 Binkley built a wing addition, with David Basile leading the building committee. The church paired the project with an outreach effort in Carr Court.
In 1970 the firm added a two-story International Style sanctuary with stained siding and large south windows to the Community Church at 106 Purefoy Road, tied to the congregation's plain brick building of 1957 by George Matsumoto through a glass link. The integrated, nondenominational church had been founded in 1953 by the Rev. Charlie Jones and members who left Chapel Hill Presbyterian with him.
People: Arthur Cogswell · Werner Hausler · George Matsumoto · Charles M. Jones
Subject: Community Church of Chapel Hill
In July 1971 Binkley lent a room to the Orange County Association of Retarded Children for a daycare program. Starting with five children it grew into a five-day school with 18 pupils and seven teachers, sponsored by the Orange Mental Health Association and the church, before moving in June 1978 to county space at the Northside Center.
When the Community Church and the Housing Authority withdrew in 1976, Binkley took on the whole daycare operation and housed it at the church. It renamed it the Binkley Child Care Center to show where it was, serving the same families. The summer day camp the church had hosted moved to the Ridgefield center that year.
In June 1976 the Town of Carrboro, through its Recreation Commission, planned to take full charge of the Carr Court program and condemned the old center building, ending Binkley's eight years of support.
An ecumenical housing effort that began at Binkley Baptist Church in late 1982 became Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, incorporated in April 1984. Its first house was a donated building moved to what became the Chestnut Oaks neighborhood in Chapel Hill.
State and Southern conventions acted after the church licensed an openly gay ministerial candidate.
Members approved affiliation after years of discussion.
Subject: Community Church of Chapel Hill
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 and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.
These works give background on Churches & Faith, the wider history this event belongs to (633 works in all). Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Nancy Learned Haines tells the story of the Quaker families who left Pennsylvania around 1750 for the Eno River valley near Hillsborough, where they farmed, traded and built a school, and asks how a community committed to peace fared through the unrest of the colonial years. Published by Pleasant Green Books in 2026, 122 pages with bibliography and index. Subjects include Quakers in North Carolina and the history of Hillsborough, Orange County and the Eno River valley.
Community cookbook from the Ridge Garden charge, the pairing of Clover Garden United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill and Chestnut Ridge United Methodist Church in Efland, published by Clover Garden in 2025. Topics include both congregations' histories as well as cooking in Chapel Hill and Efland. Seven preliminary pages and 130 pages.
Transcription of the first register kept by Chapel of the Cross, the Episcopal parish on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, with its entries from 1842 to 1881. Published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2024 with an introduction and a bibliography, 142 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Andrew Gardner's history of Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, named for Olin T. Binkley, covering the years between the late 1950s and the 2010s and tracing how a congregation with Southern Baptist roots came to be known for liberal Christianity. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2023, 213 pages with illustrations.
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
Community cookbook from Hillsborough United Church of Christ, published by the congregation in 2019. A collection of recipes from Hillsborough cooks in the familiar form of the church cookbook, gathered from members of the congregation. 122 pages plus four preliminary pages, 22 cm.
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).
Sybil Austin Skakle's history of Amity United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, combining the congregation's story with sketches of its members. Published by Righter Books of Graham, North Carolina in 2017. 218 pages.
Randy Biddix traces his Biddix ancestors across western North Carolina, including branches in Burke, McDowell, Mitchell, Yancey, Surry, Stokes, Randolph, Chatham and Orange counties, the Pendleton District of South Carolina and Chester County, Pennsylvania. The family's ties to the Cane River area of Yancey County and Cane River Baptist Church form part of the story. Self-published in 2016, 349 pages with illustrations, for Biddix family researchers.
Anniversary tribute to Judea Reform Congregation, the Reform Jewish congregation serving Durham and Chapel Hill, published in 2011. The volume concerns the congregation's history and Jewish congregational life in the two towns.
Community cookbook from Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, printed by Morris Press Cookbooks of Kearney, Nebraska, in 2008 and bound in a three-ring binder. Contributors are named with their Southern recipes. 376 numbered pages plus front and back matter, with illustrations.
Community cookbook from Mars Hill Baptist Church in Hillsborough, published by the church in 2008, about 150 pages in several sequences. Subjects include cooking in Hillsborough and the church itself.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this event. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this event itself.
The centennial history of Mount Adar Baptist Church at Cedar Grove in northern Orange County, marking 1889 to 1989 under the motto a century of remembrance, a future of vision. Prepared by a centennial committee co-chaired by Nancy Rogers and Jackie Oakley and published by the church in 1989, 36 unnumbered pages with illustrations. Topics include Baptists in North Carolina and church history for Cedar Grove.
Roger H. Crook's history of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh through its first hundred years, 1884 to 1984, published by the church's history committee in 1985. The congregation began in 1884 as a First Baptist Church mission, was organized as Fayetteville Street Baptist Church, and took the name of its lay leader John T. Pullen after his death in 1913.
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