ON V IEW
A ’60s Revival:
Through the Activists’ Lenses
Aman robed in white, sporting a crew cut
and deep-set eyes, leans against a lectern in
the dead of night. Two others look on as
he speaks, their matching white robes illuminated
from behind by the light from a burning cross.
The image was taken by Daily Tar Heel
photographer Jim Wallace ’ 64 at a Ku Klux Klan recruiting rally near Hillsborough in summer 1964.
In another photograph, a man and two
women, one black and one white, sit cross-legged
in the crosswalk in front of the U.S. Post Office on
East Franklin Street. Their expressions are set with
determination. One of their signs reads: “Make
democracy more than a word in Chapel Hill.”
Gawking onlookers bulge out from the sidewalk into the streets to see them.
There’s a letter from C.O. Cathey ’ 48, dean of
student affairs, to FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover
asking if a newly formed
student group is Commu-
nist and a threat to
national security.
Journal entries in a spiral-bound notebook detail
the jail experience of
Karen Parker ’ 65, Carolina’s first female black
undergraduate; a weathered letter in slanted cursive script from a student
desegregation activist,
writing from jail about his trial, notes that one
citizen said the student activists were “… all
pawns or malicious agents … paid $600 a day by
Northern funds to come into the South.”
The photos and documents are part of an
exhibit, “I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Student
Protests in 1960s Chapel Hill,” that kicked off Jan.
23 and runs through May 31. More than 100 primary source materials are on display at Wilson
Library about activism — against and for segregation, the draft, state laws abridging free speech and
University workers’ rights — at Carolina and in the
surrounding community during the 1960s and ’70s.
As a photographer, Wallace shot images of student civil rights protests in the 1960s. “We knew
we were in a very important time,” he said.
Wallace said he and his fellow reporters would
go to Harry’s on Franklin
Street to eat because it was
desegregated, but also
because that was a gathering point for the protesters,
who would share information with reporters about
where their next sit-in
would be. Soon the police
took to following Wallace
around, he said, because he
knew where the action
would be.
“The variety and the
number of different
‘episodes’ that took place
here during the 1960s is
pretty remarkable,” said
Tim West, curator of the
manuscripts department
and director of the Southern Historical Collection.
The glass cases snaking
around the room contain
typewritten letters, documents, pamphlets, diaries
and photographs telling the
student side of the story of
1960s activism.
The exhibit is organized into four episodes:
desegregation; protests
against a state ban on public universities inviting Communists to speak on
campus; protests of the Vietnam War; and student
activism against injustice in the workplace for
University employees.
“You see the small number of intensely dedicated UNC students demonstrating in the first
feature — it included going to jail and protests —
all the way to Vietnam when you had thousands of
students in the streets and on campus,” West said.
Biff Hollingsworth, a graduate assistant in the
manuscripts department, said the exhibit is only
the “tip of the iceberg.” He estimated it shows
only about 20 percent of the documents in the
collection.
The exhibit was funded by a grant from the
Diversity Incentive Fund, administered by diver-
The letter at far left,
from FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover to
Dean of Students
C.O. Cathey, is an
example of some of
the ongoing communication between
the agency and
University administrators in the 1960s.
Above, a Ku Klux
Klan recruiting rally
was held near
Hillsborough in
summer 1964.
