Storyline
How University police officers contested the promotions in the department’s June 1987 reorganization: the grievances and the student rallies of 1987, the chancellor’s denial, Officer Keith Edwards’s appeals and hearings, the public safety director’s reassignment in 1989, the federal inquiries and the 1992 jury verdict.
In briefIn 1987 University police officers charged racism and favoritism in the promotions of the department's June reorganization, and students rallied for them. The chancellor denied the grievances in 1988, but Officer Keith Edwards pressed hers to a state hearing. In 1989 a sergeant won back pay and the public safety director was reassigned, and in 1992 a jury found three former officials had discriminated against Edwards. A state judge ruled for Edwards in 1990, but the State Personnel Commission and the Superior Court ruled against her and two federal agencies found no discrimination in 1991. The officials appealed the verdict, and in October 1992 UNC asked the N.C. Supreme Court to review a ruling that sent her 1987 grievance back to the commission. The N.C. Supreme Court declined review in December 1992, and in December 1993 the commission ruled against Edwards again. In 1994 the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial of her suit, and Judge Gordon Battle ordered her promoted to sergeant with back pay to 1987; UNC withdrew its appeal of that ruling in October.
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On September 1, 1987, at a hearing closed to reporters, officers of the University police told UNC's personnel department that promotions in the department's June reorganization had been made by appointment instead of being posted, contrary to equal opportunity and affirmative action guidelines. A Black officer told the Daily Tar Heel that the 40-employee department had two Black supervisors for 13 Black employees. On September 17 the University answered the 14 officers, who charged racism and favoritism in 12 promotions: security services director Robert Sherman acknowledged poor communication but said every officer had been considered, and the University offered to reopen six of the posts to an advisory panel while leaving the June promotions in place. The officers rejected the offer, which left the final say with the director who had approved the promotions, and took their grievance to a chancellor's committee. On October 30 the department announced that the two officers promoted to major in June had been chosen for the permanent posts.
Students took up the officers' cause. On October 2 the Anti-Apartheid Support Group held a noon rally and a one-hour sit-in at the University police station against racism in the campus police. On October 29 the Black Student Movement rallied against what it called favoritism and racism in the department; its president Kenneth Perry spoke, and its vice president cited 1986 figures showing that Black employees held 669 of 847 service and maintenance jobs at UNC but 15 of 212 executive and managerial posts.
On August 2, 1988 Chancellor Paul Hardin denied the grievances of eight officers who charged that discrimination played a part in the June 1987 promotions of white officers, after their supervisors and the personnel office had turned them down. Seven dropped the matter. Keith Edwards appealed to the N.C. State Personnel Commission, saying she was the only Black woman the department had ever hired in her 14 years there, and Vice Chancellor Harold Wallace said she had a legitimate complaint. On October 3 a Black officer of more than 25 years appealed a written warning for a time-sheet error for which a white supervisor got only a verbal warning, and the next day Edwards met with Hardin and Wallace and said Hardin was the first administrator who listened, according to the Daily Tar Heel. In January 1989 the attorney general's office moved to dismiss her state appeal as late, which University personnel officials called an administrative error.
In August 1989 Edwards told UNC's affirmative action office that Black women applicants had been turned down or never interviewed while white women were hired; two white officers backed her account, and public safety director Robert Sherman had said race was not a factor. By September 22 Vice Chancellor Ben Tuchi had said he would bring in a police officer unconnected with the University to investigate. In the week of October 9 Hardin awarded a sergeant 18 months' back pay for duties he had taken on without the promised promotion and ordered oral warnings for the public safety director and the police chief, finding "hints of reprisal"; the Daily Tar Heel called him the first officer to win a grievance from the reorganization. On October 9 leaders of the Campus Y, the Black Student Movement and other student groups wrote to Hardin urging that Edwards get a hearing, and on October 10 Administrative Trial Judge Delores Nesnow overruled the University's motion to dismiss her grievance. Assistant Attorney General Lars Nance had argued that she forfeited her claim by not reapplying; her lawyer, Alan McSurely, said discrimination and retaliation were the central issues. Her hearing opened on November 2 after she refused settlement offers of $25,000 and then $50,000, and she testified that white officers had been favored in the reorganization and disciplined less harshly than Black officers, and that she was punished for protesting.
On November 3, at the end of a weeklong study of the department by two outside consultants, Hardin granted Sherman's request for reassignment. Hardin had warned him in writing that making two officers wash patrol cars when they were due as witnesses at a colleague's grievance hearing at least hinted of interference with the grievance process. On November 14 the University named John DeVitto, director of parking and transportation, interim director until a national search was finished. In late November Edwards took a new grievance charging her white shift supervisor with sexual and racial harassment, discrimination and retaliation straight to a state administrative law judge. On December 3 about 40 people rallied for her at the Hargraves Community Center before her December 18 Step 4 hearing, and Fred Battle, chairman of the Orange County Rainbow Coalition, said UNC kept 'a plantation' for Black workers.
In January 1990 three officers who had protested how a lieutenant's post was filled in 1989 won promotions, raises, letters of apology and, for two of them, back pay in a settlement. On January 23 the two consultants reported favoritism rooted in long friendships rather than race and urged a review of every promotion since the 1987 reorganization. By January 28 police chief Charles Mauer, on medical leave, had asked to retire; several witnesses at Edwards's hearing had testified that he was racist, and McSurely said his superiors had made him a scapegoat. The hearing closed on February 9 without Mauer's testimony.
On March 12 acting director DeVitto recommended taking non-police duties off the officers, recruiting more minorities and women and writing a formal promotions policy, and on the consultants' advice the officers moved to 12-hour rotating shifts on July 1, though some objected. On June 27 about 15 officers who had asked Chancellor Hardin to meet with them alone walked out when he opened the meeting to all officers and senior police administrators attended; their spokeswoman said they feared retaliation, and Hardin said he would not hear complaints in private sessions.
On June 22 Edwards sued the trustees and Hardin in Orange County Superior Court. On July 19 Nesnow found that the University had discriminated against her because she was a Black woman when it passed her over in the 1987 reorganization, and recommended that she be made lieutenant for four months; the University chose to contest the ruling. Other employees brought cases too: that month Nesnow found discrimination in a UNC Physicians and Associates promotion, and by February 1991 the commission had overturned a judge's finding for a UNC Physicians employee who said she was denied a supervisor's job because of her race.
In the spring Edwards filed a grievance saying DeVitto had given the vacant crime prevention officer's post to a white officer without letting her apply. DeVitto reopened the post to all University employees, and on October 31, after an outside panel unanimously recommended him, the other officer was named to it; Edwards said she would file another grievance. On October 28 a group of officers had charged that the department tied merit raises to citation quotas and had fallen from 43 to 27 employees in three years, which DeVitto denied. On November 29 Carolyn Elfland, acting associate vice chancellor, announced that the department's unarmed security guards would grow from five to 21, and denied that the University meant to phase out its police department.
On November 18 about 70 people at a state NAACP rally at the Hargraves Community Center heard state president Kelly Alexander on UNC employees' discrimination complaints, and many joined a move led by James Brittian to revive the dormant Southern Orange County chapter. On December 7 Edwards asked the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Education to investigate UNC's employment practices, after the state NAACP declined to file with her while Alexander negotiated with Hardin. On December 18 the State Personnel Commission overturned Nesnow's ruling, finding that the University had not discriminated against Edwards; McSurely said the decision simply restated the University's position.
Ernest Margalot replaced DeVitto as interim director in January 1991 and resigned after two weeks, and in February Elfland chose Arnold Trujillo of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs from 70 applicants; he took charge in March. On February 15 the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP's president, James Brittian, and its legal redress chairman, McSurely, asked the two federal agencies to intensify their investigations, saying they feared witnesses could be intimidated. On February 18 Superior Court Judge Gordon Battle denied the University's motion to dismiss Edwards's civil rights suit, letting her claims against officials such as Hardin go forward against them as individuals.
By March both agencies were investigating the University on her complaint of discriminatory hiring and promotion. On March 20 the Office for Civil Rights investigator left a day early after a threatening telephone call to his hotel room; Edwards said he had heard only UNC officials. On May 20 the office reported that of seven discrimination charges at UNC it found the University negligent only in responding slowly to a harassment complaint in the School of Dentistry, and found no discrimination in Edwards's promotion complaint; she called the investigation one-sided. By May 23 Superior Court Judge Henry McKinnon had upheld the commission, holding that the 1987 reorganization created no promotions, and by August 30 the EEOC had dismissed Edwards's complaint over the 1990 crime prevention post.
On January 31, 1992 Edwards, seeking $250,000 under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, agreed to non-binding mediation of her suit against current and former University officials, Hardin among them; she ended it on March 14 to go to trial. Trujillo resigned on February 18, and Elfland, as acting director, chose Alana Ennis, a Durham police captain, to head the 54-member University Police; Elfland said Ennis might be the state's first woman to lead a university police force, and Ennis took office on May 4. From June 10 to 12 Edwards and McSurely argued before Administrative Law Judge Beecher Gray, in a Step 4 hearing, that she had been denied the 1990 crime prevention post because of her race and sex. On June 22 her suit went to trial in Hillsborough. On July 9, 1992 an Orange County jury found that former UNC officials John DeVitto, Charles Mauer and Robert Sherman had discriminated by race and gender against Edwards, then an 18-year veteran of the UNC police, and ordered them to pay $116,000 in damages. McSurely won his first jury trial with the case.
In mid-July supporters of Edwards began circulating petitions at Black churches in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, run from the Abundant Life Center on West Rosemary Street, asking Hardin to accept the jury's verdict, not to appeal, and to see that employees' discrimination complaints got a fair hearing. In early August, after Judge Battle rejected their motion for a new trial, the three former administrators filed notice of appeal to the N.C. Court of Appeals. On October 6 the Court of Appeals ruled 3 to 0 that the State Personnel Commission must decide whether the changes in the 1987 reorganization were promotions or transfers and whether Edwards had been discriminated against, sending her grievance back through the Superior Court. Later that month University lawyers asked the N.C. Supreme Court to review the decision, and the court granted a stay barring any ruling by the commission until it acted.
In December 1992 the N.C. Supreme Court turned down the University's appeal, and Edwards's grievance over a sergeant's post created in the 1987 reorganization went back to the State Personnel Commission. In a recommendation dated January 15, 1993, Administrative Law Judge Beecher Gray found that she had not proved she was passed over for the 1990 crime prevention post because of her race and sex. On October 6 the commission heard arguments a second time; McSurely argued that it could not judge fairly because the attorney general's office advised it while also representing the University. In December it ruled against her again. By February 16, 1994 the Court of Appeals had set aside the 1992 jury verdict and its $116,000 award and ordered a new trial, holding that the judge's instructions to the jury left the verdict ambiguous. On June 8 Edwards argued before Judge Battle that the state grievance procedure and its length violated her right to impartial justice without delay, and on July 8 Battle overturned the commission's decision and ruled that she should receive back pay to 1987, attorney's fees and a retroactive promotion to sergeant. The University appealed in August, but by October 11 it had withdrawn the appeal; University attorney Tom Ziko said it had been premature and would wait on the commission's decision on the award.
In mid-April 1994 Chief Alana Ennis hired two white outside candidates over in-house Black candidates for new security supervisor and commander posts, then reversed and restarted the selection; two Black security guards filed grievances in May, and Associate Vice Chancellor Carolyn Elfland acknowledged flaws in the process. On October 28 the department settled for $60,000 the grievance of a security guard commander hired in April and dropped after Ennis reversed three appointments when a Black officer complained that racism had shaped the hiring of a white outside candidate.
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The papers of the lawyer Alan McSurely, born 1936, span 1928 to 2003 with the bulk from the 1960s to the 1980s. Topics include the civil rights movement, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, employment discrimination in Chapel Hill and the UNC Housekeepers Association. Part of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 4928.
Fred Battle grew up in Chapel Hill under segregation and describes that world in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded January 3, 2001, by Bob Gilgor. He portrays the Black community of his youth as centered on the church and on Lincoln High School, recalls his schooling there, and tells of his college years in Greensboro and the civil rights demonstrations he joined there. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
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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