Storyline
How anti-apartheid students at UNC built shanties in front of South Building in March 1986 to press for divestment: the chancellor’s permission, the rallies, vigils and rival wall, the removal on April 7, the April sit-in, the November shanty and arrests, and the January 1987 acquittals.
In briefIn March 1986 the UNC Anti-Apartheid Support Group built shanties in front of South Building to press for divestment, and Chancellor Christopher Fordham let them stand for about three weeks of rallies and vigils before ordering them torn down on April 7. A November shanty on Polk Place and a South Building sit-in ended in arrests, and in January 1987 a judge acquitted 12 students of trespass.
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About 5 a.m. on March 18, 1986 members of the UNC Anti-Apartheid Support Group began putting up shanties in front of South Building to demand that UNC divest from companies in South Africa, and after hours of talks Chancellor Christopher Fordham gave them permission that morning, first for a week. On March 21 at least 100 students rallied in the Pit and marched to the shanties, and Student Body President Bryan Hassel wrote the trustees asking for an early meeting of the Endowment Board. On March 25 Fordham let the shanties stand past his deadline, said he himself favored divestment and agreed to ask the board to meet early on the group's proposal to divest half of UNC's South African holdings by 1988 and the rest by 1989. The same day the Tin Drum Theatre Company and the group staged a street play that ended with about 100 people joining hands around the shanties chanting "Divest now."
Students lived in the shanties for about three weeks, holding teach-ins and debating opponents, and Mary Frances Berry and the writer Harlan Ellison visited. At a candlelight vigil on March 27 organizer Herman Bennett read a letter in which the College Republicans and Students for America told Fordham they would build a "Berlin-type wall" if the shanties were not gone by noon Monday. On March 31 members of the two groups built a wall of lumber, chicken wire and sheets near the shanties, which they said protested oppression by Communist governments; Fordham, who had approved it, said he would soon set a deadline for removing both. On April 3 more than 125 people carried a flag-draped coffin to mock graves beside the shanties. On April 4 the Endowment Board, meeting early at the Carolina Inn, heard both sides and put off its decision until April 24, while about 150 people rallied in the Pit.
At 7 a.m. on April 7, after Fordham, with encouragement from the trustees, ordered the shanties removed, police and physical plant workers tore them down while about 300 people stood in two circles around them. Five protesters who stayed in the last shanty were arrested for trespassing. On April 24 about 70 members and supporters of the group marched to the Carolina Inn and handed the Endowment Board's chairman a petition the group said carried more than 600 student signatures, and after the vote about 30 students held a two-hour sit-in in South Building, where Fordham sat down and talked with them.
In November 1986 the group built a new shanty on Polk Place in front of South Building, and Vice Chancellor Donald Boulton let it stand until Friday noon as an exception to the facilities use policy. On November 20 the Endowment Board sold its holdings in four companies but would not take up full divestment, and Fordham's motion for full divestment got no second. Members of the group marched to South Building, where five chained themselves to furniture and water pipes, and police arrested eight students and a University employee for disorderly conduct. At the Friday deadline University workers tore the shanty down while more than 400 students held hands and sang, and police arrested 13 students who would not leave.
On January 15, 1987 District Court Judge Lowry Betts acquitted 12 students charged with criminal trespass for refusing to leave the shanty, ruling that University Police had only asked them to leave, not ordered them. The disorderly conduct charges against the nine arrested in South Building had been dropped because of an error in the warrants, and on January 16 Fordham decided not to press trespassing charges against them, saying through an aide that charges would not serve the University's best interests.
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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.
Photograph from about 1903 of South Building on the university campus in Chapel Hill. Work on the building started in 1798 under Samuel Hopkins, was later carried on by John Clare, and finished in 1814. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Draft minutes of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina for 14 April 1798, recording the Masonic ceremony for laying the cornerstone of the University of North Carolina's Old South Building in Chapel Hill.
South Building at UNC on 22 April 1987, showing its columns with flowers in bloom, in a Hugh Morton color photograph. Mounted 35 mm slide.
South Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, probably shot on infrared film by Hugh Morton in late 1946 or early 1947. Morton gave six photographs to the Alumni Office that autumn, and this one ran on page 216 of the April 1947 Alumni Review. Black-and-white sheet film negative.
Episode of the North Carolina People television program, broadcast in 1988 by North Carolina Public Television as program number 1750 and recorded here as a 29 minute videocassette. The guest is Christopher C. Fordham III, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Chancellor's office records from the tenure of Carol L. Folt at Chapel Hill, 2013 to 2018, 8 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40024. Topics include university administration and educational fund raising, curriculum planning, health occupations schools and medical education, and race relations and college integration in North Carolina. Holden Thorp and Christopher C. Fordham also appear.
Groundbreaking for the George Watts Hill Alumni Center at UNC-Chapel Hill on 13 May 1989. The group includes Ralph Strayhorn, George Watts Hill, Doug Dibbert, trustees chairman Robert C. Eubanks and Tom Lambeth, with Paul Hardin and Christopher C. Fordham also pictured. Hugh Morton photograph.
Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III posed with the scholar Robin Hadley in 1985. A single print among the UNC Faculty and Administration photographs of the Chapel Hill Historical Society, CHHS.002.
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.
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.
Ashley Davis, who entered UNC in 1968 and joined the Black Student Movement, recalls the 1969 strike by the university's cafeteria workers and the BSM's decision to stand with them when the workers asked. Recorded April 12, 1974, by Russell Rymer for the Southern Oral History Program, the hour-and-a-half interview touches on Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson, the Southern Student Organizing Committee and race relations among students on campus. Published online in 2007 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Elizabeth Brooks, a cafeteria worker at UNC and a leader of the 1969 food workers' strike, speaks in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded October 2, 1974, by Beverly Jones. Born in Caswell County, Brooks had made her home in Hillsborough since 1949 and raised nine children before her first paid job, at the university. She describes the strike, the Black Student Movement's support for the workers, and the response of Governor Robert W. Scott. Published online in 2006 in Documenting the American South.
J. Derek Williams's 1979 study of the 1969 strike by cafeteria workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examining a chapter in the university's labor and Black history. A typescript of 270 leaves with a bibliography.
Lynn Roundtree covers the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 1957 and 1972 through its three chancellors, William Brantley Aycock, Paul F. Sharp and J. Carlyle Sitterson, set against the student movements of those years. Part of the Coates university leadership series, published by the author in 2024 and running to 926 pages. It is twentieth century campus history.
Program calendar for the 2017 Diaspora Festival of Black and Independent Film, presented in the fall by the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at Chapel Hill and tied to the campus Arts Everywhere initiative. Topics include film festivals in Chapel Hill and Black people in the motion picture industry, so the leaflet records what the festival screened that season.
Derek Sykes's film marking the fortieth anniversary of the Black Student Movement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made in 2007 and first issued in electronic form. Topics include African American student movements and African American students, so the piece records four decades of Black student organizing on the Chapel Hill campus.
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.
Milestones is the newsletter of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the center and dated 2004. African American students in Chapel Hill and the center itself are its subject. As a serial it carries programs, speakers and news of Black student life on campus.
The program guide of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center at Chapel Hill, issued in illustrated volumes and recorded from 2004, with the 2000 to 2001 issue lacking that title.It concerns African American students and their societies and clubs. Volumes range from 18 to 26 cm.
Literary magazine of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published from 2004. Topics include American literature by African American authors in North Carolina and student periodicals in Chapel Hill, so the issues carry student poetry and prose. Volumes with illustrations, 22 to 28 cm.
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