Storyline
How Chapel Hill rewrote its town charter between 1973 and 1979: the Charter Commission and its call for eight aldermen and a four-year mayor, the charter sent to the General Assembly without a referendum, the fight over its human services powers, the 1977 fair-housing amendment and the board’s new name, Town Council.
In briefIn 1973 Chapel Hill's aldermen created a Charter Commission, which recommended eight aldermen with staggered four-year terms and a four-year mayor. In 1975 the board sent the rewritten charter to the General Assembly rather than to a referendum, and Mayor Howard Lee broke ties to keep it there and to limit its human services powers. The new charter was first used that November. In 1977 the board sought a fair-housing power, and in 1979 it renamed itself the Town Council.
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On October 22, 1973 the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen formally created the Charter Commission Mayor Howard Lee had proposed to review the town charter, including aldermen's terms and a possible ward system. The board named ten members, with Alderman Joe Nassif as chairman and one UNC student, Lee Corum; the Daily Tar Heel objected that student leaders said the mayor had promised two. On October 15, 1974 the commission voted to recommend enlarging the board from six to eight members with staggered four-year terms, half elected every two years, and lengthening the mayor's term from two to four years, with a limit of two consecutive terms and a vote on every issue rather than only on ties. Corum's motion for some two-year seats died without a second. In November the aldermen also asked the 1975 General Assembly for authority to spend town money on day care and child care, which Lee said the town would not be obliged to spend.
A public hearing on January 20, 1975 drew only six citizens, and the next day the commission held its final meeting and sent its whole package to the aldermen unchanged: two more aldermen with overlapping four-year terms, a four-year mayor and a vote for the mayor on every question. It asked that the rewritten charter go to the General Assembly rather than to a local referendum. On February 24 the aldermen dropped the mayor's vote on all issues, and on March 3 they voted 4 to 2 to send the final draft to the legislature, bypassing a referendum that would have fallen in the summer while students were away.
The revised charter also added a Human Services Department, a town day care program and absentee voting in town elections. The county social services board charged the town with taking over county duties, and the Daily Tar Heel reported that the charter's grant of power to run social services had no precedent among North Carolina towns. On April 7 the aldermen split 3 to 3 on Alderman Alice Welsh's motion to recall the charter from the House Local Government Committee, and Lee broke the tie to keep it there. He broke a second tie, 4 to 3, to pass his own amendment saying a town Department of Human Services would not compete with, duplicate or supersede the Orange County Department of Social Services. The new charter, adopted that summer, gave the mayor a four-year term and enlarged the board to eight, and it was first used in the November 1975 election, when voters filled five seats on the enlarged board from 14 candidates.
On January 31, 1977 the aldermen amended the charter, subject to the General Assembly's approval, to let the town adopt ordinances making housing available without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin. They turned down the Carolina Gay Association's request to add sexual and affectional preference and marital status, and a student's request to add age; Alderman Robert Epting said the law should reach discrimination that is historically based. On February 26, 1979 the board voted to change its name from Board of Aldermen to Town Council, and the new name took effect on July 1, 1979.
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Howard N. Lee (born 1934) tells his own story, from a farm childhood in Lithonia, Georgia, through college, army service in Korea at Camp Casey and the move from Savannah that planted him in Chapel Hill, to his election as mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969 and his later run for Congress and years in the state legislature. Published by Cotton Patch Press of Chapel Hill in 2008, 199 pages with plates.
Edwin Caldwell, Jr. reviews a life in Chapel Hill politics in a three-hour Southern Oral History Program interview recorded March 2, 2001, by Oliver White. A skilled organizer, Caldwell worked in the campaign that made Howard Lee the town's first Black mayor in 1969, ran for office more than once without winning, and became a local political power. The conversation also covers race relations, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board and the Church of Reconciliation. Published online in 2006 in Documenting the American South.
Interview recorded June 21, 2000 with Rebecca Clark (1915-2009), a Black Chapel Hill resident, for the Southern Oral History Program at UNC. Clark, educated in Chapel Hill's segregated schools, describes working life under segregation and the economic discrimination she met in it. Topics also include Lincoln High School, school integration, and Howard Lee, elected mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969. Interview K-0536 in collection #4007.
Howard N. Lee's account of his own career, published in 2021 by the North Caroliniana Society with the society award given to him that year, together with tributes from Angela Lee, Valerie Foushee and others. Lee became mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969, the town's first Black mayor.
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.
Albert Coates's own account of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, which he founded, subtitled 'out of a classroom in Chapel Hill' and published in 1981. The 303 pages trace the institute's history and its role in educating North Carolina's public officials.
William J. Billingsley's history of the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 North Carolina statute that barred known Communists from speaking on state campuses, and the fight over it at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The subtitle sets the scope: race, politics and the public university in sixties North Carolina. It treats academic freedom, anti-communist movements and free speech in the state. University of Georgia Press, 1999, 308 pages with eight pages of plates.
Reviewed in Academe (2000), The American Historical Review (2001), The Journal of Southern History (2001), Journal of American History (2001), The Journal of Politics (2001).
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).
Ruth Blackwelder's study of political and intellectual leadership in Orange County and North Carolina from 1752 to 1861, published in Charlotte by W. Loftin in 1961. Topics include state politics and government, intellectual life before the Civil War, and county genealogy. It runs 216 pages with illustrations and a bibliography. Part of the Wall Local History Collection.
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
Howard E. Covington Jr.'s biography of Albert Coates (1896-1989), the law professor who founded the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina and led it through its early years. Topics include Coates as a law teacher and the institute's history as a center for the study of public administration in Chapel Hill. Published in 2010 by the University Library at Chapel Hill, 322 pages with 32 pages of plates.
Warren Ashby's biography of Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972), president of the University of North Carolina from 1930 to 1949 and later a United States senator. Published by Blair in 1981, x and 386 pages with sixteen leaves of plates and a bibliography.
Reviewed in The American Historical Review (1981), Journal of American History (1981).
Hugh Talmage Lefler and Paul W. Wager's history of Orange County across its first two centuries, 1752 to 1952, prepared for the county's bicentennial. It covers government and politics, biography and the county's families, and doubles as a genealogical reference. Published in Chapel Hill by the Orange Printshop in 1953, 389 pages with illustrations and an index; this copy is a later reprint.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
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).
The papers of Willie Person Mangum, 1792 to 1861, a lawyer, judge and United States senator from the part of Orange County that later became Durham County. Five volumes of correspondence published by the State Department of Archives and History beginning in 1950, arranged by date from 1807 to 1894, with illustrations, portraits and folding maps. A source for antebellum North Carolina and national politics, the Whig Party and the Mangum family.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1951), Journal of American History (1951), The Journal of Southern History (1953), Journal of American History (1953), The Journal of Southern History (1954), The Journal of Southern History (1955), The Journal of Southern History (1957), Journal of American History (1957), The American Historical Review (1957).
Address by Bishop Joseph Blount Cheshire at St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough on 24 August 1924, marking the parish's hundredth anniversary. Printed in Durham in 1925 at the vestry's order, with a foreword by the rector. Cheshire discusses George Micklejohn, William Mercer Green and Moses Ashley Curtis.
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