When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 – 50 years ago today – the reactions of UNC students were emblematic of the complex racial landscape at Carolina. Below is a timeline of events on campus in the week following the assassination.
April 4, 1968
In an oral history conducted in 2015, alumnus John Sellars remembered the reaction on campus when students learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination:
John Sellars, from the 1971 Yackety Yack yearbook
The night that Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, I was in Hinton James, in my room, studying for class the next day. And all of a sudden I hear people running up and down the hallways, on the balconies, cheering. And so, I go outside to see what’s going on. And somebody says that Martin Luther King, Jr., just got assassinated. And it hit me that the reason for the cheering was because Martin Luther King, Jr., just got assassinated. Again, it gives you an idea of what the mood, what the attitude, what the social and racial structure was at UNC. Again, we’re talking about 1968.
April 5, 1968
Approximately 60 African American students and local clergy held a memorial service on Polk Place followed by a meeting in Gerrard Hall. Speaking at the meeting, Black Student Movement President Preston Dobbins said, “Martin Luther King’s assassination is the very last time that a black man is going to be killed in this country without violent reaction” (Daily Tar Heel, 6 April 1968).
From the Daily Tar Heel, 10 April 1968.
From the Daily Tar Heel, 6 April 1968.
The Daily Tar Heel reported that approximately 30-40 black students, including Dobbins, walked down Franklin Street and through campus. They purchased several Confederate flags at a Franklin Street store and burned one on the sidewalk and the rest in front of the Kappa Alpha fraternity house.
After learning of violent protests around the country (including in Raleigh, where police used tear gas on student marchers), the Chapel Hill Police enact a voluntary curfew of 8:00pm, asking businesses to close early and suspending alcohol sales. (Daily Tar Heel, 7 April 1968)
From the Daily Tar Heel, 7 April 1968.
April 6, 1968
Approximately 200 students and local residents line Franklin Street in a silent vigil honoring Dr. King (Daily Tar Heel, 7 April 1968).
From the Hugh Morton Photographic Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archive.
Approximately 600 students march from Y Court to the First Baptist Church to pay tribute to Dr. King. Chancellor Sitterson and President Friday are part of the group (Daily Tar Heel, 9 April 1968).
Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial service program. From the Records of the Office of the Chancellor: J. Carlyle Sitterson (#40022), University Archives. Click the image above to read the full program.
April 8, 1968
Approximately 2,000 people attended a memorial in honor of Dr. King at Memorial Hall (Daily Tar Heel, 10 April 1968).
Some students volunteer to clean the Confederate Monument, which was spray painted over the weekend. During the clean-up, two small Confederate flags are placed on the statue, but were removed after an administrator asked them to be taken down (Daily Tar Heel, 9 April 1968).
April 9, 1968
African American students and approximately 90% of UNC’s African American non-academic workers staged a one-day walkout. Their absence forced a cut in many services across campus, with several dining halls having to close. The boycott was encouraged by Preston Dobbins and BSM to give people time to mourn and show respect to Dr. King. Chancellor Sitterson announced that employees could take a half-day off if they chose (Daily Tar Heel, 10 April 1968).
A Daily Tar Heel editorial criticizes the hypocrisy of the white moderates who attend the memorial services but do nothing to support civil rights and social justice for African Americans. On the same page, a letter to the editor criticizes the people who vandalized the Confederate monument, comparing them to King’s assassin (Daily Tar Heel, 10 April 1968).
From April 2-4 of 1976, the Carolina Gay Association (CGA) hosted the first annual Southeastern Gay Conference, a conference dedicated to “furthering the feminist and gay movements.” Tom Carr, the CGA Conference Coordinator, called it “a celebration of the gay lifestyle.” A major theme of the conference was how the gay identity, whether open or hidden, influences society, and that theme was addressed by three out of four of the major spokespersons.
The three spokespeople in question were Dave Kopay, Loretta Lotman, and Perry Deane Young. Dave Kopay was a running back for the Washington Redskins and one of the first professional football players to come out as gay (in December 1975). The Daily Tar Heel reports that in a press conference, Kopay said:
Many athletes are trapped by the feeling of macho heaped on the male in the U.S. To be homosexual and an athlete in unheard of. Hopefully there will be more athletes to come out now.
Young was a former writer for the Durham Morning Herald who was collaborating with Kopay on a book about homosexuality.
Lotman was the media director for the National Gay Task Force, a videotape producer, and additionally founded G-MAN, the Gay Media Alert Network. In her panel she discussed the discrimination faced by lesbians in the workplace and how they dealt with both sexism and homophobia.
The convention’s keynote address was delivered by Franklin Kameny, “the first self-acknowledged homosexual to run for Congress.” Though unsuccessful, he was nonetheless a man described by The Daily Tar Heel as “the country’s leading gay activist.” At the time the article was written, two gay congresspeople had won their seats since Kameny’s campaign. In his address Kameny stated that his campaign, even though it didn’t end with him in Congress, was beneficial to the gay community, partially because of its impact on the government’s political structure and partially as an effort to shift how queer culture was perceived by the minds of the general populace.
From the University of North Carolina Portrait Collection (#P0002), North Carolina Collection.
In an article published Friday, the Raleigh News and Observer‘s Rob Christensen made reference to former UNC president Frank Porter Graham’s plan for intercollegiate athletics, known as the “Graham Plan.” The plan, developed by Graham and colleagues at a 1935 meeting of the National Association of State Colleges, was intended to suppress corruption and de-emphasize the role of athletics in university life. It limited athletic recruiting and abolished athletic scholarships, forbade post-season play, required athletes and athletic departments to provide accounts of their income and expenses, and placed athletics under the control of the faculty. Despite having support from administrators at many other colleges and universities, the plan faced significant opposition and was not successfully implemented.
You can read the plan’s proposed regulations here:
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new digital collection that is certain to be of interest to the UNC community and theater lovers everywhere: Playbills from the first 40 years of the Playmakers Repertory Company are now available online.
The Playbills begin with the first shows from the company in 1975 and continue through 2016. (We’ll add the most recent season shortly).
From the Playbill for The Cherry Orchard, fall 1989.
We’ve digitized the full playbills, so you can see the cover artwork, cast lists, notes, and advertisements. The text of the playbills is also searchable by keyword.
I gave the digital collection a test run by doing a keyword search for Ray Dooley and then sorting the results by season. The top result was the Playbill for The Cherry Orchard from fall 1989, Dooley’s debut performance with Playmakers.
The Playbills complement the extensive collections in Wilson Library on theater at UNC, including photographs and scrapbooks from the Carolina Playmakers and records from the Department of Dramatic Art.
The digital collection covers the years 1893-1992. It contains 73,179 pages in 12,168 issues. For anyone interested in UNC history, it’s a fantastic resource.
The papers were digitized from microfilm (which is why they’re all in black and white) as part of a partnership between Newspapers.com and the UNC Library. The digital DTH is also available on Newspapers.com, along with hundreds of papers from across North Carolina.
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has already digitized papers from colleges and universities around North Carolina, including a few from UNC-Chapel Hill (Black Ink, the Cloudbuster, and the UNC Newsletter).
We’ve had lots of fun looking through the digitized DTH issues. You can browse by year or search by keyword. The transcription was done using optical character recognition, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good (thanks it part to the great quality of the microfilm, which was done here in Wilson Library).
If you’re looking for issues of the DTH that are not available in the digital collection, you can access articles from the past few years through dailytarheel.com and older issues on microfilm in Wilson Library.
Quonset hut area (circa 1946-1947), from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Photographic Laboratory.
Imagine having 19 roommates instead of one. How would you protect your belongings without a lock on your door? What if your only source of heat in the winter occasionally spewed fireballs rivaling the Hunger Games? Male students attending UNC immediately after World War II contended with these issues and more as residents of Quonset huts.
The G.I. Bill provided educational benefits to hundreds of thousands of veterans who served in World War II. Returning veterans flocked to UNC, raising enrollment from around 4,100 students before the war to 7,250 in the fall of 1947. (DTH, 10/10/1941, 9/25/1947) The University simply did not have enough space to house all those students and resorted to creative measures to solve the housing crisis. Military surplus owned by the federal government became an important source of temporary housing units such as trailers and Quonset huts. Quonset huts were corrugated steel sheets shaped like a cylinder cut lengthwise and closed at the ends. During WWII, the military used them for barracks or storage, but they were intended only for short-term housing.
However, UNC used Quonset huts as overflow housing from 1946 to 1950. Thirty-six Quonset huts were assembled on the old tennis courts behind the Monogram Club (now Jackson Hall), where Cobb Residence Hall stands today. Thirty of them were designated as living quarters for single male students, three for studying, and three for latrines. Up to twenty men lived in a single hut with a heater and primitive insulation made from rag paper. (DTH, 11/5/1946) According to The Daily Tar Heel, rent for a bed in the Quonset huts costed $5 per month (DTH, 10/5/1946).
Inside a Quonset hut (1947) from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Image Collection.
The biggest issue with the Quonset huts was exposure to the elements. While summers turned the Quonsets into ovens, interruptions in regular fuel delivery during the winters left residents out in the cold. A nationwide oil shortage in the winter of 1947-1948 forced the University to conserve fuel by closing six of the Quonset huts. Still, during a frigid week in February 1948, half of the remaining Quonset huts ran out of oil. The Daily Tar Heel reported that “siphoning of oil from the few huts with any left was apparently going on again last night.” (DTH, 1/7/1948, 2/12/1948) After some rainy weather in April 1948, the Daily Tar Heel marveled at the mud surrounding the Quonset huts, “It was amazing and disgusting to see all of the mud. Old-time Quonset hut residents merely sighed, rolled up their trousers, displayed their hip-boots and paddled through the goo. It was a test of the old theory of survival of the fittest.” (DTH, 4/3/1948)
Clambering for scarce resources and wading through a veritable swamp were not the only tests of Quonset residents’ animal instincts. They also had to defend their territory after a robbery during a football game. As Carolina faced off against the University of Georgia on September 27, 1947, thieves pilfered items and money from the Quonsets. To prevent another burglary, the RA, Ray Jeffries, had the huts padlocked beginning at 2 PM on game days. (DTH, 10/3/1947, 10/11/1947, 10/12/1947)
The Daily Tar Heel (11 October 1947)
As if cold, mud, and robberies weren’t punishment enough, Quonset huts dwellers contended with fire as well. After a fire in February 1947, the University installed fire extinguishers in each hut to prevent such a blaze from getting out of control. (DTH, 2/23/1947) In November 1947, a malfunctioning oil stove exploded into flames before a student managed to extinguish it. Though the fire caused minimal damage, the Daily Tar Heel pointed out that next time the University might not be so lucky as the Chapel Hill Fire Department’s soap guns could not reach the fire without access to the Quonset hut area, which was closed to all vehicles except oil trucks. The Daily Tar Heel suggested that the University “mount an emergency in a glass front box, of the fire alarm variety,” so that the fire department could reach the affected hut in case of emergency. (DTH, 11/18/1947)
By January 1949, the fire extinguishers were long gone when an “oil heater began leaking, formed a pool of oil on the floor and leaped into flame.” A student attempted to call the fire department, but found that the page with their phone number had been torn from the telephone book. The student attempted to reach the operator, but met silence at the other end. Finally, the student called the police who contacted the fire department. (Such was the drama of communication before cellphones and Siri.) The fire department put out the fire, apparently reaching the hut without difficulty. The heater and a pile of dirty clothes were the only casualties. (DTH, 1/16/1949) A year later, the Quonset huts were razed to make room for Cobb Residence Hall.
Razing the Quonset huts (1950), from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Image Collection.
Quonset huts were crowded, uncomfortable, and unprotected. The Daily Tar Heel wrote of the Quonset hut residents, “in order to receive an education, they are living under conditions similar to that of an East side slum.” (DTH, 12/2/1947) The comparison to poverty aside, the willingness of UNC students to live in these temporary structures for years indeed testifies to the importance they placed on education. For many returning veterans, the GI Bill offered the chance of a lifetime. To seize that opportunity, they baked through the summer, shivered through the winter, and waded through mud. If nothing else, the Quonset huts certainly put the modern experience of dorm living into perspective.
References:
“Quonset Huts, 1947 and undated” and “Quonset Huts: Demolition, circa 1949,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Image Collection, 1799-1999, University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Finding aid: http://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/P0004/
“Quonset Huts, circa 1946-1947,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Photographic Library, 1946-2000, University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Finding aid: http://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/P0031/
“Sanitary Conditions: General, 1938-1952; 1957; 1963,” Student Health Service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1932-1998, University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Finding aid: http://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/40127/
Various articles from The Daily Tar Heel cited above.
Ever wondered what it cost to attend UNC 20, 30, or 60 years ago? Thanks to statistics made available online by the Office of the University Cashier, we’re able to share this chart of annual resident and non-resident tuition and fees from 1947 to 2017. Amounts are rounded to the nearest whole dollar.
The LGBTQ Center, established in 2003, works to make the UNC campus a welcoming environment for people of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.
The new addition includes materials documenting events and programs sponsored by the Center in the 2000s, as well as materials from organizations predating the LGBTQ Center, including the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association (CGLA) and its successors, Bisexuals, Gay Men, Lesbians and Allies for Diversity (B-GLAD) and Queer Network for Change (QNC). The addition also includes a wealth of newspaper and magazine clippings and ephemera documenting events related to LGBTQ issues on campus, in the local area, and beyond in from the late 1980s through the 2000s.
We are pleased to announce a new addition to the University Archives: a small collection of materials related to modern dance at Carolina in the 1940s. These materials were collected by Elsie Earle Lawson, and can now be found in the University of North Carolina Ephemera Collection.
Dancers in the UNC Modern Dance Club, early 1940s.
At UNC, Elsie Earle Lawson worked as a dance instructor in the Department of Physical Education, dance associate to the Carolina Playmakers, and faculty adviser to the Carolina Modern Dance Club. The materials collected include press releases and clippings about modern dance events on campus, programs for performances and conferences, as well as photographs of student dancers.
Program from a dance conference at UNC, 29 November 1941
At the University Day celebration on October 11, 2016, Chancellor Carol Folt announced a new program to name scholarships after notable “firsts” in UNC history. In recognition of the individuals recognized as pioneers at UNC, the University Archives is publishing blog posts with more information about several of the people honored in this new program. This post is part of that series.
From the 1927 “Hacawa,” student yearbook at Lenoir Rhyne College.
Henry Owl, a member of the Eastern band of Cherokee Indians, was the first Native American student to attend UNC. Owl came to Carolina in the fall of 1928 and graduated the following year with a Master of Arts in History.
Owl was born in 1896 near Rattlesnake Mountain in western North Carolina. He attended the school at the Cherokee reservation, which at the time went only through eighth grade. Owl began his college education at the Hampton Institute, a primarily African American school in Hampton, Virginia. After leaving Hampton, Owl joined the U.S. Army and then taught briefly in Oklahoma. He returned to North Carolina in 1925 to enroll in Lenoir College (now Lenoir-Rhyne University) in Hickory.
At Lenoir, Owl was a member of multiple college clubs and was elected “Most Popular Boy.” He was also a star athlete, playing football and baseball. He was inducted into the Lenoir-Rhyne Sports Hall of Fame in 2012. According to an article in the Cherokee One Feather, Owl was the first Cherokee to graduate from a North Carolina college.
Not long after coming to Chapel Hill, Owl was mentioned in a Daily Tar Heel article about UNC’s “most cosmopolitan student body,” which discusses the growing number of international and out-of-state students at the university, despite the fact that Owl was neither an international nor an out-of-state student.
Owl wrote his master’s thesis on the history of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The thesis, The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Before and After Renewal, is available in the Carolina Digital Repository.
In 1930, just a year after graduating from UNC, Owl was prohibited from voting in Swain County. A profile in a the Lenoir-Rhyne alumni magazine described what happened:
[Owl’s daughter, Gladys Cardiff] said her father often discussed this incident. “North Carolina had some issue that they knew the tribe would be voting against,” she said. In those days the state had a literacy test for voters. When Owl tried to register, he was turned away on the grounds that he was illiterate. Owl left the courthouse and returned with a copy of his master’s thesis.
The story of Owl’s struggle to vote eventually reached the U.S. Congress, which passed a law affirming that Cherokees in North Carolina were citizens and had the right to vote.
Owl worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a teacher and principal on reservations in North Carolina, Montana, and South Dakota. He moved with his family to Seattle where he worked as a counselor at the Veteran’s Administration and later as an inspector at Boeing. Wary of the racism that he knew he and his family would encounter on leaving the reservation, Owl began using his wife’s last name, Harris. He died in Seattle in 1980.
In addition to the new scholarship named in Owl’s honor, in 2011, the Department of American studies announced an endowed scholarship named The Henry Owl Scholarship Fund for Undergraduate Students. The scholarship provides need-based assistance to undergraduate majors in the American Studies department, with preference given to those studying American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
The three spokespeople in question were Dave Kopay, Loretta Lotman, and Perry Deane Young. Dave Kopay was a running back for the Washington Redskins and one of the first professional football players to come out as gay (in December 1975). 
