Storyline
How the UNC trustees wrote a policy against campus disruption in 1969 and how it was used: the executive committee’s rule during the food workers’ strike, the disorders subcommittee, the hearing boards, the Moratorium Day warning and hearing, and the protests against it into 1970.
In briefDuring the March 1969 food workers' strike the UNC trustees' executive committee made disrupting the University grounds for expulsion or dismissal, and over the following months the trustees adopted a full policy against disruption by force, threat or intimidation, with hearing boards on each campus. Student leaders said it ran against the student-run judicial tradition at Chapel Hill. The full board made the policy permanent in October 1969, and in November a hearings committee took up the case of a lecturer who had skipped a class on Moratorium Day. In May 1970 students sat in at South Building against the policy's use after the December cafeteria strike. The University brought its first charges under the policy in April 1970, the trustees revised it that October, and the UNC-Chapel Hill trustees rescinded it in October 1974.
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On March 14, 1969, during the food workers' strike, the executive committee of the University trustees resolved that any student who disrupted the University's work, or urged others to, could be suspended or expelled, and passed a like rule for faculty members. A trustees' subcommittee on campus disorders first met on May 13 at Morehead Planetarium with President William Friday, the chancellors and student and faculty representatives, and student body president Alan Albright said most of the ideas under discussion ran against Chapel Hill's student-run judicial tradition. That year the trustees adopted a policy making any student, faculty member or employee who disrupted University operations by force, threat or intimidation subject to suspension, expulsion or dismissal, and barring any official from promising amnesty. In September the executive committee had each chancellor name a Board of Inquiry and a University Hearings Committee; Albright refused to nominate students, and Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson named four himself. Friday and the chancellors warned that faculty who willfully refused their duties on Moratorium Day, October 15, would come under the policy. On October 27 the full board, with Governor Robert W. Scott presiding, made the policy permanent by unanimous voice vote, after Archie K. Davis traced it to the March seizure of Lenoir Hall. On November 12 the Hearings Committee took up the case of a UNC-Charlotte part-time lecturer who had skipped a class on Moratorium Day, whom the Daily Tar Heel called the first person tried under the policy, while about 250 rallied beforehand. On December 3, during the second food workers' strike, the campus security chief told about 150 strike supporters in the South Building lobby that they were violating the disruption code and were under arrest, and they left. The campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors had asked in October 1969 for a review of the policy's faculty provisions, and in February 1970 the Faculty Council asked that it spell out when a professor could be dismissed. In April 1970 the University brought its first charges against students under the policy, three of them against Black students, over a December clash between food-strike pickets and police; the Black Student Movement condemned the policy as aimed at Black students, one case was dropped when Chapel Hill police declined to testify, and the Student Legislature voted $1,500 for a legal fund to test the policy. In May 1970 seventy-five to 100 students sat in at South Building against the policy and its use against three students charged after the December strike, and handed Sitterson a petition of 800 students saying they too had violated it. In October 1970 the trustees revised the policy to make each chancellor responsible for bringing charges and to let him suspend a student at once with the consent of a panel of faculty and students. On October 10, 1974 the UNC-Chapel Hill trustees rescinded it at Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor's proposal, since the Board of Governors had taken faculty out of it that April and the same student offenses now came under the new Instrument of Student Judicial Governance.
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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.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
Georgia Carroll Kyser's brief biographical tribute to William Clyde Friday and his wife Ida Howell Friday, published by the North Caroliniana Society in 1984. It runs 25 pages with eight pages of plates and illustrations. Friday led the consolidated state university from Chapel Hill, where the couple made their home.
Robert W. Scott (1929-2009), North Carolina's governor between 1969 and 1973 and son of Governor Kerr Scott, interviewed by William Link on April 4, 1990 for the Southern Oral History Program. Scott discusses his student years at North Carolina State College in the early 1950s and his dealings with university president William Friday, including the food workers' strike at Chapel Hill, college integration, and the consolidation of the state's universities into the UNC System during his term. One hour thirty-seven minutes. Electronic edition 2007.
William C. Friday, UNC system president from 1957 until 1986, was interviewed by Cindy Cheatham in December 1990 about Anne Queen (1911-2005). Queen came to the campus YWCA as associate director in 1956 and led the merged YMCA-YWCA from 1964 to 1975. Friday recalls working with her through the years of student political activity in Chapel Hill and reflects on the place of the Y in university life. About forty minutes; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2007, through Documenting the American South.
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.
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.
A four page article clipped from Life, volume 61, number 20, dated November 11, 1966, on a dispute over academic freedom at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The article concerns the instructor Michael Paull, Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson, Jesse Helms and Andrew Marvell's poem 'To His Coy Mistress'. Illustrated, with portraits.
Southern Oral History Program interview with J. Carlyle Sitterson (1911-1995), chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1966, recorded by Pamela Dean on November 4 and 6, 1987, and running an hour and a half. Sitterson recalls the university in the 1960s: student demands over visitation rules, dress codes and privacy, the student movement, and the integration of the faculty. Interview L-0030 in collection #4007, published online in 2007 in Documenting the American South's Oral Histories of the American South.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
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.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
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.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
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