Storyline
How Chapel Hill banned selling on Franklin Street’s sidewalks from 1970 to 1974: the merchants’ complaint about the flower ladies, the 1970 ban that spared flowers, the young vendors’ guild and lawsuit, the 1971 ban on all street selling and the flower ladies’ move into an alley, and the board’s refusal to reopen the sidewalks.
In briefIn June 1970 Chapel Hill banned selling on its streets and sidewalks except by the flower ladies, the Black women who had sold flowers on Franklin Street since about 1950. Young vendors organized and kept selling, and in June 1971 a judge struck the ordinance down as discriminatory. The aldermen answered by banning all street vending, flower ladies included, and the flower ladies moved into an alley off Franklin Street. Vendors came back on rented private space in 1972, and in 1974 the board refused to let them return to the sidewalks.
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Chapel Hill's aldermen had banned selling on the town's streets and sidewalks once before, in 1929, on a merchants' petition aimed at the peddlers who worked the football crowds. The flower ladies, Black women who sold fresh-cut flowers on the Franklin Street sidewalk, had set up there around 1950. In January 1970 the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Merchants Association asked the Board of Aldermen to regulate them, and Mayor Howard Lee named three aldermen to study street vending. On June 22 the board made it unlawful to sell goods on the town's streets and sidewalks, exempting civic fund drives and flowers sold in the business district, which the flower ladies could sell under a $10 yearly license. Thirteen young street vendors formed the Chapel Hill Craftsman's Guild, went back to Franklin Street giving away candles and leather goods with each flower they sold, and gathered about 700 signatures asking that licensed vendors be allowed to sell handcrafted goods.
In March 1971 the aldermen ordered the ban strictly enforced against the leather goods, candle and toy sellers crowding Franklin Street, and a leather goods maker selling under a flower license won a restraining order. On June 14 Superior Court Judge Thomas D. Cooper ruled that the ordinance discriminated by sparing only the flower sellers. Rather than appeal, the aldermen voted on June 22 to let the ban stand without its flower exemption, so that all sidewalk selling would end when the licenses ran out at the end of June; Lee, who favored stalls or zones, called the decision hypocrisy. On July 1, the first day of the ban, vendors and supporters spread blankets on the sidewalks and circulated petitions, and when police arrested one of their leaders for obstructing the sidewalk, Lee had him released after 15 minutes and named an advisory committee of vendors, two flower ladies among them. The flower ladies moved together into the alley George Watts Hill owned between the Varsity Theatre and the Intimate Bookshop, where the Daily Tar Heel still placed them in 1973 and 1974. By March 1972 vendors were selling again on Franklin Street from rented private space beside the Dairy Bar, after the Community Appearance Commission had proposed a regulated market in the planting strips. On April 22, 1974 the aldermen turned down a permit ordinance from the downtown implementation team that would have let licensed vendors sell from small stalls, and the ban stayed in force.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 14 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, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
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.
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.
George Watts Hill (1901-1993), Durham banker and philanthropist, interviewed by James Leutze on January 30, 1986 for the Southern Oral History Program, over seven hours in all. Hill grew up in Durham, entered UNC in 1918 and describes student life in Chapel Hill in the early twentieth century before leaving in 1924 with two degrees. He also discusses banking, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, dairy farming, the Duke family, his father John Sprunt Hill, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Research Triangle Park.
Craig Phillips, C. D. Spangler and George Watts Hill Sr., left to right, seated in the stands on 3 December 1986, probably at a UNC-Chapel Hill men's basketball game. Spangler was then president of the UNC system. Hugh Morton photograph.
Frank H. Kenan and George Watts Hill Sr. together at an unidentified event, probably at UNC in Chapel Hill and likely in the 1980s. Both men were North Carolina business leaders. 35 mm black-and-white negative by Hugh Morton.
Frank H. Kenan in the center and George Watts Hill Sr. at far right, with Jeanelle Coulter Moore at front left, at an unidentified gathering, probably at UNC-Chapel Hill, likely in the 1980s. Hugh Morton black-and-white 35 mm negative.
Ross E Scroggs, recorded on cassette in 1978 for the Chapel Hill Historical Society. Part of the society's CHHS.012 Audiovisual Materials Collection.
Edward G. Danziger's memoir of love and cooking, published by J. F. Blair in 1967. Danziger (1893 to 1972) ran Danziger's Old World Restaurant in Chapel Hill, and the book tells his life as a restaurateur in the town.
William M. Rohe's history of Research Triangle Park and the region around it, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011. Topics include regional planning and the economic and social conditions of the Research Triangle Park region, one corner of which is Chapel Hill and the university. 298 pages with illustrations and maps.
Herbert G. Gutman's 1976 history of African American families from 1750 to 1925, published by Pantheon Books in New York, 664 pages with 38 leaves of plates. Its Orange County connection is the Bennehan and Cameron family plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh: the book discusses the people enslaved by Richard Bennehan (1743-1825) and the Camerons, and follows family ties among them under slavery and after emancipation. Subjects include African American families and enslaved persons in Orange County.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1977), The William and Mary Quarterly (1977), The American Historical Review (1977), Journal of American History (1977), The History Teacher (1977), Political Science Quarterly (1977), Journal of Black Psychology (1978), Journal of Social History (1978), Civil War history (1978), Signs (1978).
Orvin Lee Shiflett's biography of William Terry Couch, 1901 to 1988, the editor who built up UNC Press at Chapel Hill over four decades in publishing, with a subtitle that calls his career a lightning rod for controversy. Chapters treat culture in the South, a case history in book publishing, objectivity and social science and 'The Sainted Book Burners'. It bears on scholarly publishing and university presses in the twentieth century. McFarland, 2015, 268 pages with illustrations.
Albert N. Link's early history of Research Triangle Park, published in 1995 by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina. Topics include research parks, research institutes and industrial research in the state, with the park's own history at the center. 149 pages with illustrations and maps.
Annette Marie Council's book about her family and Mama Dip's Country Kitchen, the Chapel Hill restaurant, published by NP Press in 2005. Subjects include African Americans in Chapel Hill, the restaurant's history and family biography. Fourteen introductory pages and 223 pages of text with illustrations, part local history and part family account.
Albert N. Link's history of the Research Triangle Park, the research park founded to draw on the universities at Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, published in 2002 by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina in 278 pages with illustrations. Topics include research parks, research institutes and industrial research in North Carolina and the history of the park itself.
Charles X. Larrabee's history of the Research Triangle Institute over its first thirty one years, published in 1991. Topics include research institutes and research parks in North Carolina and the history of Research Triangle Park, the research district that lies between Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
Alex Sayf Cummings's 2020 book on the knowledge economy of the Research Triangle, technology research and the history of Research Triangle Park. Chapel Hill and its university form one corner of the Triangle.
A tour guidebook prepared for the 2016 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference in Durham, leading visitors through buildings in Orange and Caswell counties. It takes in the architecture of the bright leaf tobacco economy and the work of Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Caswell County who worked in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Account of student protest in 1960s Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 with illustrations. It draws together the civil rights movement and segregation in the town, discrimination in restaurants, academic freedom and university autonomy, protest against the Vietnam War, Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Student Movement on campus.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
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