Storyline
How Orange County came to a civil rights ordinance between 1987 and 1994: the Human Relations Commission, the draft ordinance and Sen. Howard Lee’s bill, the fight over its threatening-speech clause, the push to add sexual orientation, and the votes that brought it into Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough.
In briefOrange County's Human Relations Commission, formed in 1987, drafted a civil rights ordinance by 1991, and in 1993 Sen. Howard Lee introduced a bill to let the county enforce one. After residents objected to its threatening-speech clause, the commissioners dropped it. They adopted the ordinance in June 1994 without the sexual-orientation clause gay and lesbian residents sought, and Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough brought it into their towns that fall.
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In June 1987, amid a rise in Ku Klux Klan activity, the Orange County Board of Commissioners established a Human Relations Commission to study and address discrimination. By April 20, 1990, citing a rise in racism and discrimination heard at eight public hearings, the commission asked the commissioners for a human rights office with a professional administrator to log and pursue complaints; chairwoman Jean Bolduc traced the trend to Klan marches in 1986 and 1987. By March 1991 it had drafted a county ordinance against discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, lending, law enforcement and hate crimes.
In April 1993 Sen. Howard Lee introduced Senate Bill 807, drafted with the commission, to give the commissioners power to enforce an anti-discrimination ordinance. It drew criticism for reaching threatening speech. At a commissioners' hearing in Hillsborough on September 14 about 100 residents divided over the ordinance, which would give the commission paid staff to handle complaints; several speakers said its clause against threatening speech would curb free speech. By November 9 the commissioners, advised by County Attorney Geoffrey Gledhill, had removed the draft's ban on discriminatory fighting words, and Carrboro alderman Jacquelyn Gist said the town would likely adopt the ordinance without it. That fall a new political group, the Orange Lesbian and Gay Association (OLGA), formed in the county.
On February 15, 1994 OLGA chairman Doug Ferguson asked the commissioners to commit to adding sexual orientation to the ordinance and to take the change to the 1995 General Assembly. Commissioner Moses Carey said that legislature would refuse it and the local ordinance came first, while Carrboro Alderman Mike Nelson, whom the Daily Tar Heel called the only openly gay elected official in North Carolina, urged the board to try. On March 2 the Chapel Hill Town Council, at a hearing where no speaker opposed the ordinance, spoke in its favor and unanimously supported adding the sexual-orientation clause, which had been dropped so the legislature would approve the county's bill. On May 10 the Carrboro aldermen voted their support; gay and lesbian speakers backed the ordinance on the commission's promise to seek the clause later. In early June the commissioners adopted it unanimously, barring discrimination based on race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability and family status, in housing, public accommodations and bias-related incidents from January 1, 1995 and in employment from January 1, 1996, and endorsed seeking legislation to add sexual orientation.
The ordinance needed the towns' consent to apply inside their limits. On September 12 the Chapel Hill council voted unanimously to bring it into the town, so residents could take complaints to the commission; as the town adopted it, it covered veteran status but not sexual orientation, and it did not reach UNC or UNC Hospitals employees. The Carrboro aldermen followed unanimously the next day. On November 7 Hillsborough's town board adopted it 4 to 1, the third and last town in the county to do so; Commissioner Remus Smith voted no, calling it another layer of county bureaucracy.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 13 dated events in the chronology →
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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.
Roughly 2,000 items in 6.5 linear feet kept as the papers of Michael R. Nelson, born 1963, dated from about 1890 to 2012, collection 70140 in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. Topics include politics and government in Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Orange County, campaign paraphernalia, and gay activists and politicians in North Carolina, naming Joseph A. Herzenberg, 1941 to 2007.
Papers of Ellie Kinnaird, born 1931, a North Carolina state senator, spanning 1987 to 2016 and running to roughly 6,400 items across 20.5 linear feet in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5356. The papers focus on capital punishment in North Carolina and the campaigns against it, health insurance legislation, voting technology, and the work of women legislators in the General Assembly.
Eleanor Kinnaird beside an election campaign poster in an undated candid photograph. Kinnaird served as mayor of Carrboro and in the North Carolina Senate. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection (CHHS.002).
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
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.
Kemp Plummer Battle's memoir, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 296 pages with plates and portraits. Battle, a lawyer, state treasurer and president of the university from 1876 to 1891, recalls North Carolina manners, customs and public life across the nineteenth century, with Chapel Hill and the university's reopening after Reconstruction at the center.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1946), The Journal of Southern History (1946).
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).
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.
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.
Abstracts of the minutes of Orange County's Inferior Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for 1777 to 1788, the county court of justices of the peace in the Revolutionary years. The abstracts name the people who came before the court. First published in Charlotte in 1966 and later reprinted from Greenville, South Carolina, in three paginated sections with a map.
David Cook collects the grim side of the Eno River's past in Orange and Durham counties: ghost stories, crimes, train wrecks and accidents, including the hanging of rebels near the river in 1771, a sawmill accident said to have started a run of hauntings, and a dance one Valentine's Day that ended badly. Published by The History Press in 2025, 141 pages with illustrations.
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
Nora Gaskin's short true account of a murder investigation in 1960s Chapel Hill and the judicial error that followed, centered on Frank Rinaldi (1929 to 2009). Published in 2013 by Lystra Books, 52 pages with references.
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