Storyline
How Chapel Hill answered the 1979 Greensboro killings and the trials that followed: the 1979 vigil and the march kept to the sidewalks, the November 1980 vigils, rally and petitions after the acquittals, the 1981 symposium, and the April 1984 rally, vigil and teach-in after the federal verdict.
In briefAfter five people were killed at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro in 1979, about 200 people held a silent vigil at the Chapel Hill post office. When a Greensboro jury acquitted six Klansmen and Nazis in November 1980, UNC students held a vigil, more than 800 marched to South Building and 1,526 signed petitions to the Justice Department. After the 1984 federal acquittals, Chapel Hill held a rally, a vigil and a teach-in.
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On November 7, 1979, four days after five people were killed at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, about 200 people stood silently for an hour in front of the Franklin Street post office. The organizers, among them the Chapel Hill War Resisters League, held matching vigils in Durham and Raleigh. On November 19 the Chapel Hill Town Council turned down a Community Church petition to close Franklin Street for a December 2 "march for brotherhood" answering the killings at the Communist Workers Party rally, and said the march must keep to the sidewalks. Jonathan Howes said the plans were too indefinite, and Mayor James Wallace told the town manager to work out the route with the church and the police.
The day after an all-white Greensboro jury acquitted six Klansmen and Nazis in the killings, more than 120 students held a silent vigil in the Pit in front of Lenoir Hall on November 18, 1980. Associate Dean Hayden B. Renwick blamed the jury selection. The same day about 150 people came to a Rock Against Racism rally in the New Tin Can. The widow of a Communist Workers Party member killed in Greensboro spoke of her anger at the acquittals, and Black Student Movement chairperson Mark Canady spoke on racism. On November 20 more than 800 people marched from the Pit to South Building in a Rally for Justice sponsored by the Black Student Movement, Student Government and the Daily Tar Heel. Student body president Bob Saunders called for a special independent prosecutor, and Canady, law instructor Richard Rosen and law professor Charles E. Daye spoke; the paper called it the largest gathering at South Building since May 1970. The next day students mailed petitions from the Franklin Street post office bearing 1,526 signatures of UNC students and faculty, asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the acquittals, and 52 faculty members signed a separate petition urging state, local and federal authorities to review the trial.
The Rally for Justice became the UNC Coalition for Social Justice, which on March 19, 1981 held a "Sheets and Swastikas" symposium at the UNC Law School, with a videotape of the shootings, a talk on the Klan by historian Nell Painter and talks by lawyers for the Legal Alliance for Greensboro Justice. A second session, on fascism, followed on March 26.
Two days after an all-white federal jury in Winston-Salem acquitted nine Klansmen and Nazis of violating the civil rights of the five demonstrators killed in Greensboro, about 150 people gathered on the steps of Lenoir Hall on April 17, 1984 for a 'Rally for Justice'. The widow of one of the dead and Yonni Chapman, Chapel Hill spokesman for the Communist Workers Party, were among about 13 speakers. On April 19 about 75 students and residents held a vigil in front of the Franklin Street Post Office, called for a congressional investigation of racial violence in North Carolina and backed the Greensboro Civil Rights Fund's planned civil suit. Chapman, who organized it, the pastor of the Community Church and Carolina Gay Association chairman Robert Pharr spoke, and the group then stood outside Carmichael Auditorium asking Gary Hart to address racial violence, with no reply. On April 25 about 70 people heard a 'Greensboro Verdict' teach-in panel in Carroll Hall. Fred Harwell, defense attorney for the acquitted Klan leader, argued the verdict was justified; Gail Korotkin of the Greensboro Justice Fund said anti-communism had served as a defense for murder; and historians William Chafe of Duke and Harry Watson of UNC and political scientist David Garrow discussed government ties to the Klan and the all-white jury.
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Jonathan Howes, a former mayor of Chapel Hill who served in Governor Hunt's cabinet and later worked in the UNC chancellor's office on urban planning, gave this illustrated talk on the past and future of the Chapel Hill campus. Cassette, 1998.
Papers of Charles Edward Daye, 1975 to 2012, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 05704. Topics include community development and housing in North Carolina, minorities in higher education, and politics and government, with the faculty and the early twenty-first century history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also among the subjects.
Sydney Nathans's biography of Mary Walker, an enslaved woman from Orange County who escaped to the North in the mid nineteenth century and spent the following decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working to free the family she had left behind. Chapter titles trace her flight, her years among Northern friends, a rescue plot, a long silence, and the reunion that gives the book its close. Published 2012 by Harvard University Press, 330 pages with 20 pages of plates, illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2012), Civil War Book Review (2012).
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.
John Ehle's account of the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963 and 1964 and the young people who led them, first published by Harper & Row in 1965. This reprint from Lewisville, North Carolina adds an afterword by Wayne King. Civil rights and race relations in Chapel Hill are its subjects. 340 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
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).
Collected first-hand and second-hand stories from the Eno River valley as told from the standpoint of African Americans and Native people who have lived along the river in Orange and Durham counties, from prehistory to the present day. Issued by the Eno River Association in Durham as volume 10, number 2 of the Eno Journal, 2021, 106 pages with illustrations.
Rosetta Austin Moore's survey of Black education in Orange County from the colonial era to 1970, in a revised edition published in 2015 through Lulu in Morrisville. After chapters on slavery nationally and on schooling for enslaved people in North Carolina, the book turns to the county: its formation, the growth of its schools, the arrival of free public schooling for all, and the schools and African American educators of the twentieth century. 265 pages with maps, portraits and facsimiles.
Sydney Nathans's history of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, whose founders were enslaved people sent there before the Civil War from the Cameron family's plantations in Orange County, North Carolina. Instead of following the Great Migration out of the South, this group stayed, moved from bondage to owning the land they had worked, and held onto it across generations. Published 2017, 342 pages with plates and maps; this is the e-book edition.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (2017), Journal of Social History (2017), London review of books (2017), The Journal of the Civil War Era (2018), The Journal of Southern History (2018), Environmental History (2018), The Alabama review (2019), The Oral History Review (2019), The Register - Kentucky Historical Society/The register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2020).
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
Jeffrey A. Turner's study of student activism on Southern campuses between 1960 and 1970, arguing that the region's own movement has been overshadowed by attention to national groups such as SDS. Nine chapters move from the 1960 sit-ins through white students and desegregation, the rise of student power, Black Power on Black and white campuses, and the war's effect on the region. Chapel Hill is among the campuses treated. Published 2010, 366 pages, online edition.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2011), Journal of American History (2012).
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
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).
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