Storyline
How Black students at UNC pressed for the Office for Student Counseling after Dean Hayden Renwick left in 1988: the BSM’s demands, the South Building rally that kept the office whole, the search that chose Rosalind Fuse-Hall, and the 1989 protests against Dean Gillian Cell’s reappointment.
In briefWhen Dean Hayden Renwick left the Office for Student Counseling in January 1988, Black students pressed for a stronger, independent office, and a rally of more than 400 at South Building turned back Dean Gillian Cell's plan to fold it into a new unit. Rosalind Fuse-Hall was named to lead it in 1989. That fall Black student groups opposed Cell's reappointment, but the trustees approved her second term in December 1989. The UNC Board of Governors gave its approval in January 1990.
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In January 1988 Associate Dean Hayden B. Renwick resigned as director of the Office for Student Counseling, the office chiefly charged with keeping minority students in school, and took a post at Fayetteville State University. Black students called it a heavy loss. On January 27 Black Student Movement leaders said a committee of about 10 students from groups such as the Carolina Indian Circle and the Campus Y would meet weekly with Arts and Sciences Dean Gillian Cell on filling the post, and urged that the office stay independent. At a press conference on March 1 BSM president Kenneth Perry cited University figures showing that 45.6 percent of Black freshmen who entered in 1981 had graduated within five years, against 75.9 percent of whites, and called for a stronger Office for Student Counseling; on March 15 he gave administrators until March 18 to respond.
That March Cell proposed folding the office into a new Academic Support Services under Associate Dean Elson Floyd and abolishing Renwick's post. On March 22 more than 400 Black students gathered on the steps of South Building to protest, and Cell wrote Perry withdrawing the proposal; on March 23 she said the office's structure would be kept and a new associate dean named to head it. A Black Ink columnist later called the rally the most memorable show of Black student unity of the period. On August 15 associate English professor J. Lee Greene became acting associate dean and head of the office until a permanent choice could start on January 1. In September, after Perry told the BSM's first meeting that members wanted more say, history chairman Colin Palmer, who led the search committee, agreed to meet the group and welcomed student advice. After a national search with 108 applicants, Cell named Rosalind Fuse-Hall of St. Lawrence University, a former UNC undergraduate who had worked in the office as a student, to succeed Renwick from June 1989, and Perry welcomed the choice.
In November 1989 Chancellor Paul Hardin said he would recommend reappointing Cell as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as Provost Dennis O'Connor had, despite a petition from UNC's chapter of the National Collegiate Black Caucus, the Black Student Movement, the Black Greek Council, the Alliance of Black Graduate and Professional Students and the Ebony Readers. The groups faulted her accessibility, her record on hiring and keeping Black faculty and her handling of the African and Afro-American Studies curriculum, which had gone four years without a chair. That month Cell recommended Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English, as the curriculum's permanent chair from July 1, 1990, with Greene as acting chair in the spring; BSM president Kim McLean called the timing a response to publicity over Cell's record. On December 5 students from the caucus, the BSM and other groups protested outside the Morehead Building, where the Rev. Lorenzo Lynch of White Rock Baptist Church addressed them, and then stood at the back of the trustees' open session. The trustees unanimously approved a second five-year term for Cell, turning down the caucus's request to wait until students could put their concerns to the board's academic and student affairs committee; chairman Earl Phillips said the problems the students raised could not be blamed on Cell. The same day Cell approved a Student Advisory Committee proposed by student government's director of minority and women's affairs, with permanent seats for the Black Student Movement, the Carolina Indian Circle, the Campus Y, the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association and other groups. On January 11, 1990 the UNC Board of Governors approved Cell's second five-year term, the final step after the trustees' vote, over objections from Black students who said she had been inaccessible to minority students, and Chancellor Paul Hardin praised her leadership.
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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.
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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.
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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