Storyline
Sit-ins, marches and the Holy Week Fast that desegregated Chapel Hill’s businesses.
In briefNine Lincoln High students began Chapel Hill's sit-ins at Colonial Drug on February 28, 1960. Through 1963 and 1964 Black residents and UNC students picketed, marched and sat in, and held a Holy Week fast at the post office, but the aldermen narrowly rejected a public accommodations ordinance and many businesses stayed segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In April 1965 John Ehle's The Free Men traced the 1963-1964 campaign through three of its leaders, John Dunne, Pat Cusick and Quinton Baker, and the new interracial Chapel Hill-Carrboro Council on Human Relations named a steering committee on housing, education and employment, its leader saying he foresaw no protests like those of 1964. In May James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, speaking in Chapel Hill for the first time since January 1964, told about 300 people in Memorial Hall that the movement would turn toward the economic upgrading of Black communities and political organizing.
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115 works about Chapel Hill freedom movement, 1960–1965 are indexed here. 2 held at OCPL →
Episodes in this history, in date order. Each has its own page.
Other events in this storyline, in date order. See these 101 dated events in the chronology →
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 14 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.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Filter these works by material, period, or place. Counts refer to works, not individual copies. A work may appear under more than one period or place.
Theodore Parrish's memoir of a Black life in Chapel Hill and of gentrification in the town, subtitled race, gentrification, and the path of my own life. Published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in August 2025, 243 pages with illustrations. Subjects include African Americans in Chapel Hill, race relations and gentrification in North Carolina.
Included because: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
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.
Included because: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: African Americans -- History -- 20th century -- North Carolina -- Chapel Hill -- Civil rights.
Jim Wallace photographed the civil rights movement in Chapel Hill in the early 1960s while on assignment there, and this 2012 Dover volume prints his pictures with text. Sections cover pickets, sit-ins and the police, the speaker ban, the March on Washington, mass protest and human chains, passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Ku Klux Klan's response and the movement's resolution, with a chronology and a 'where are they now' section. 109 pages, oblong format.
Included because: Catalog heading in the Durham record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations -- History -- 20th century -- Pictorial works.
A longer Southern Oral History Program interview with Presbyterian minister Charles M. Jones (1906-1993), recorded November 8, 1976, by Joseph A. Herzenberg. Jones traces his civil rights work in Chapel Hill from the 1930s into the 1960s. He characterizes town and university leaders, Frank Porter Graham among them, as cautiously liberal on race, willing to allow a little integration at performances and student activities, and describes the church's place in the town's social conflicts. Published online in 2008 in Documenting the American South.
Included because: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
Seventh of nine Southern Oral History Program interviews with Daniel H. Pollitt, a professor at the UNC School of Law. Recorded April 5, 1991, by Ann McColl, this session of just under an hour is devoted to the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 act of the General Assembly that barred Communists and certain other speakers from state campuses, and to the fight over it at Chapel Hill in the mid-1960s, in which Pollitt took part. Published online in 2008 in Documenting the American South.
Included because: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Civil rights workers -- North Carolina -- Chapel Hill -- Interviews.
Sixth Pollitt interview, recorded March 21 and 22, 1991, by Ann McColl, about an hour long. Its single subject is the 1969 strike by food service workers at UNC, which Pollitt supported. He sets the strike in its local and national context, the labor and civil rights currents of the late 1960s, then follows how it unfolded among the workers, their union backers, the faculty and the university administration. Published online in 2008 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Included because: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Pat Cusick, a civil rights worker in Chapel Hill during the 1960s, was interviewed by Pamela Dean in June 1989. He explains how his schooling and military service changed his thinking about race, his frustration with campus liberalism at UNC, and his turn to civil disobedience as a student organizer in the town. Topics include civil rights workers, college student political activity and race relations in Chapel Hill. About two and a half hours; electronic edition issued by the UNC library in 2008 through Documenting the American South.
Included because: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
Quinton E. Baker, a Black gay man who took part in the Chapel Hill civil rights protests of the 1960s, was interviewed by Chris McGinnis in February 2002. He describes growing up under segregation with little contact with white people, an early awareness of his sexuality, and the way race and sexual identity together shaped his activism as a college student. About two and a half hours; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2008, through Documenting the American South.
Included because: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
Catalog of an exhibit mounted by the Manuscripts Department of Wilson Library from January 23 to May 31, 2007, on student protest in Chapel Hill during the 1960s. Topics include civil rights demonstrations, the Speaker Ban Law, the Black Student Movement, restaurant strikes and Vietnam War protests at the university. Compiled by Biff Hollingsworth, 59 pages with illustrations and facsimiles, published by the university library.
Included because: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Civil rights movements -- North Carolina -- Chapel Hill -- History -- 20th century -- Exhibitions.
Charlene Regester (born 1956) recalls being one of the first Black children to attend Chapel Hill's white elementary schools, in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded February 23, 2001, by Susan Upton. Her parents, convinced that integrated schools would give Black children better resources, petitioned for her transfer to Estes Hills Elementary, then all white, and Regester describes what those years were like for her. About 45 minutes. Published online in 2007 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Included because: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
A separate interview with Daniel H. Pollitt, recorded February 22, 2001, by David Potorti for the Southern Oral History Program, 75 minutes long. Pollitt traces his liberal convictions on race and religion to a family of ministers, soldiers and lawyers, describes clerking for an appeals court judge, and recounts his part in the civil rights movement in Chapel Hill: opposition to local segregation, school integration in North Carolina, and student movements at the university. Published online in 2007 in Documenting the American South.
Included because: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
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.
Included because: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Chapel Hill (N.C.) -- Race relations.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this storyline. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this storyline itself.
William H. Chafe's study of race relations and the Black freedom struggle in Greensboro, where the 1960 sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter opened the protest phase of the civil rights movement. Chafe, a Duke University historian, treats the city's story as the nation's struggle with racism in small. Oxford University Press published it in 1980, 436 pages with illustrations, notes and an index; it won the first Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1981.
Christina Greene's history of Black and white women in Durham's freedom movement, from the fight against Jim Crow in the 1940s through the protests of 1957 to 1963, neighborhood organizing among poor residents, the War on Poverty, Black Power politics and a boycott. Revised from her 1996 Duke doctoral thesis, it was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005; 366 pages with bibliography and index.
The 1960 Democratic primary for governor, in which Terry Sanford, campaigning on education and a moderate line on integration, beat the segregationist law professor I. Beverly Lake, is the subject of John Drescher's book. Part campaign history and part biography of Sanford, it argues that his approach became a model for later Southern Democrats such as Jim Hunt, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2000.
Reflections by incarcerated students at Orange Correctional Center in Hillsborough, written for a Stepping Stones seminar on the pursuit of justice in African American literature that Patrick Elliot Alexander and Allison Curseen taught from June 20 to August 22, 2011. Writings by Pauli Murray and Martin Luther King Jr. figure in the 54-page collection.
Sources and research tools for this storyline. Research guide: Follow an event across several accounts.
Picture: St. Joseph C.M.E. Church on West Rosemary Street. CC0. Photograph by Jun0002o; via Wikimedia Commons
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