Named event or history
Nine Lincoln High students sit in at Colonial Drug on Franklin Street.
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 Chapel Hill freedom movement, 1960–1964, the wider history this event belongs to.
Dated events connected with this event, earliest first. See these 6 dated events in the chronology →
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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 Chapel Hill freedom movement, 1960–1964, the wider history this event belongs to (112 works in all). Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
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; a first-person account from a recent year of the society's publishing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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