University Archives, together with the Office of Student Activities & Organizations presents:
When I Was at UNC: Documenting the Legacy of Student Organizations
Next Tuesday, March 26, from 5:30-7:30pm, please join us in Student Union room 3201 to learn how student organizations can make their mark on Carolina permanent. Even though you graduate and leave UNC, the work you do through student organizations will remain vital to future students.
We will present strategies on creating and organizing your group’s records, passing those records on to your successors, and finally depositing them in University Archives.
We will also have a small exhibition of materials from student organizations that are currently held in the archives, including materials from the Campus Y, the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, and the Black Student Movement.
We’ll have pizza and drinks and a chance to ask questions about preserving your org’s history. In the meantime, you can check out the University Archives’ webpage “Ten Tips for Preserving Your Organization’s History,” which has helpful information on documenting the work of your student group and preserving those documents for future students.
1959 program from the Southern Conference’s Dixie Classic. (Records of the Athletic Communications Office, #40308, University Archives.)
Eighty-nine years ago this past Monday, the Tar Heels basketball team won the first championship tournament of the then newly formed Southern Conference. The men’s basketball team went on to win seven more SoCon tournaments before joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, which it helped to form, in 1953. Collegiate sports regulations have changed over the decades but the reputation of Tar Heel athletes remains stellar across myriad sports.
First page of President Graham’s statement to faculty. (Records of the Office of the Vice President for Finance, #40011, University Archives.)
College athletics has long played an important role in the university’s history. President Frank Porter Graham addressed faculty in 1938, extolling “the spirit of youth in the democracy of sports.” He believed that sound regulations and codes would allow a stadium to become a rallying place full of “high devotion expressed in music, songs, cheers, struggle, and drama, deep with loyalties called forth by the precious meaning of the alma mater.” Graham notes that codes of sportsmanship, like academic study, carry over into “human relations, industrial, inter-racial, and international.”
A new conference is born. (Records of the Office of the Vice President for Finance, #40011, University Archives.)
In 1953, UNC–Chapel Hill founded the Atlantic Coast Conference together with six other schools. In a copy of a letter to Dr. Oliver K. Cornwell, the temporary secretary of the as-yet unnamed conference, Chancellor R.B. House confirms the university’s withdrawal from the Southern Conference. Today, N.C. State, Duke, Wake Forest, Clemson, and Maryland, along with UNC, are still members of the ACC. Thus began an illustrious history that continues to the present.
While women were permitted to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill beginning in 1896, the enrollment numbers remained small until the 1920s.
UNC’s enrollment statistics for women (Robert Burton House Records, #40019, University Archives).
In 1940, Edith Harbour, woman’s editor of the local News & Observer, wrote to then–Dean of Administration Robert B. House for information about the enrollment of women at UNC. He wrote back and included these surprising enrollment statistics: Whereas in 1920, there were only 57 women enrolled at UNC, by 1939, there were 504.
As of January 12, 2013 there are a total of 16,282 women, including foreign exchange and independent studies students enrolled at the university, according to the University Registrar. Women make up 57.9% of the student body. How times have changed.
Inez Koonce Stacy, Adviser to Women, writes to Dean R.B House (Robert Burton House Records, #40019, University Archives).
One early advocate for women on campus was Inez Koonce Stacy, adviser to women from 1919-1946. When she wrote to Dean House in 1940, women could be admitted no earlier than their junior year. It was expected that the first two years of study would be done at a women’s college and then they might transfer. Whether this was fair to the women of Chapel Hill was the subject of debate on campus at the time.
Stacy writes, “I definitely approve our return to a policy of full service to those girls who live at home and are prepared for entrance to college.” Her argument rests on the public nature of the university: “Do we have a right to deprive any young woman the privilege of a college education when she lives within the sound of the bell of an institution which is, in all probability, partially supported by her parents’ taxes.
1940 memo on a vote by the Board of Trustees (Robert Burton House Records, #40019, University Archives).
The issue of Chapel Hill women attending UNC prior to their junior year came to a head in 1940 when the Board of Trustees voted on the matter. Dean House issued a brief memo to report that the vote had gone in favor of admitting local women as underclass students. A small step, but this change paved the way for more. Who would have guessed then that women would become the majority of all Tar Heels less than 100 years later?
Letter from K.P. Lewis. (Race Relations: Langston Hughes and the Contempo Controversy, 1931-1932, in the Office of the President of the University of North Carolina: Frank Porter Graham Records #40006, University Archives.)
Eighty-one years ago this week, Langston Hughes visited UNC and gave a reading at Gerrard Hall, which was preceded by the publication of an essay by Hughes on the Scottsboro Boys in Contempo, a local periodical, alongside his poem “Christ in Alabama.” While not an official student publication, Contempo was coedited (along with Anthony J. Buttitta) by Milton Abernethy who was a law student at UNC at the time. (The magazine’s archive is held in the Southern Historical Collection.)
Hughes’s essay and poem caused quite a stir among some local residents and led to a flurry of editorials and articles as well as a slew of angry letters sent to then-President Frank Porter Graham. Many letters are collected in the Frank Porter Graham Records in University Archives.
One critical letter came from K.P. Lewis, secretary and treasurer of the Erwin Cotton Mills Company (see oral histories related to the company in the Southern Historical Collection). Lewis wrote to express his outrage and, since he was to become a university trustee the following year, inquire what university policy allowed “this Negro [. . .] to use the buildings at the University.”
President Graham's response to K.P. Lewis. (Race Relations: Langston Hughes and the Contempo Controversy, 1931-1932, in the Office of the President of the University of North Carolina: Frank Porter Graham Records #40006, University Archives.)
President Graham’s response to Lewis describes Buttitta and Abernethy as “taking advantage” of Hughes, convincing him to write a “sacrilegious poem and sensational article,” both of which Hughes read at the Gerrard Hall performance.
Contempo’s editor, Anthony Buttitta, also wrote to President Graham. His letter describes his fellow editor’s decision to leave UNC to join William Faulkner in New Orleans. Buttitta later did the paperwork and footed the bill to make Milton Abernethy’s withdrawal official.
Letter from A.J. Buttitta. (Race Relations: Langston Hughes and the Contempo Controversy, 1931-1932, in the Office of the President of the University of North Carolina: Frank Porter Graham Records #40006, University Archives.)
Not all of the letters to President Graham were negative, however. A librarian at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College wrote to President Graham to request that they be added to Contempo’s mailing list.
For more about this event, read Hughes’s description of his visit, “Color at Chapel Hill,” in The Langston Hughes Reader and this blog post from the Southern Historical Collection. The North Carolina Collection has copies of Contempo as well as a history and index of the magazine.
UNC President William Friday greets US President John F. Kennedy (University Day, John F. Kennedy Visit: Photographs, 1961, in the Office of President of the University of North Carolina (System): William C. Friday Records #40009, University Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
On October 12, 1961, Present John F. Kennedy came to UNC at Chapel Hill to celebrate University Day.
William C. Friday, president of the Consolidated System of North Carolina (before it became the University of North Carolina system) remembers that day:
It’s an experience to go through a visit of the President of the United States. . . . I had called every high school around here. Because I wanted the children to have the experience I had. . . . We invited all the faculty here. And everybody in town. And they filled the place up. It was a glorious day of sunshine. . . . Well, the big limousine rolled up, and Governor Sanford got out, and President Kennedy walked up to me and said, ‘Happy Columbus Day.’ October 12 was Columbus Day also. And that meant a lot to him, you know. . . . A lot of people asked, you know, “What did he say to you?” Well, I say, “Well, his first question was, ‘Who won the game last Saturday?'”
(Oral History Interview with William C. Friday, December 3, 1990. Interview L-0147. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)
