Book chronicles struggles

CHAPEL HILL -- You may have heard about civil rights marches in Chapel Hill in the early 1960s. Now you can see them in a new book.

"Courage in the Moment: The Civil Rights Struggle, 1961-1964," features 100 photographs of Chapel Hill marches, the 1963 march on Washington and a Ku Klux Klan rally in Orange County - all from the Miranda D 35 mm camera of Jim Wallace while he was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill and a photographer for The Daily Tar Heel. Paul Dickson wrote the book's text.

Mainstream media didn't cover the movement extensively, Wallace said. There were few black students at UNC in 1961, but the ones who were there could not get lunch at the same restaurants on Franklin Street as their classmates, he said. The DTH staff saw the injustice in that, he said. "It was the hottest political topic going on at the time," he said.

While the newspaper published many of his photos, dozens of other rolls of film sat in storage for three decades. It wasn't until he retired that Wallace sorted through his film for the National Press Club's annual members' photography exhibit. The exhibit grew into the book.

Nearly all of the photos in the book have complete captions with both law enforcement officials and protesters identified. Wallace was able to identify some of the marchers with the help of St. Joseph CME Church on Rosemary Street, which served as a base for the marches and meetings during the 1960s. In 2010, the church hosted an open house for congregants and community members to look at the photos and help in identifying some of the marchers.

Public accommodations

It was the new conversations between generations of the Chapel Hill community prompted by the photos that Wallace says is one of the most important things about the book.

"They knew that there had been civil rights marches," he said. But "they did not know or appreciate what their parents or grandparents had done to help see that there was in fact a public accommodations law."

A local public accommodations law allowing blacks to be served in the same establishments as whites is what groups were marching for, Wallace said. The Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen voted down the proposed ordinance in January 1964, but similar provisions were a part of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed that July.

Orange County Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass remembers arresting protesters during the marches when he was a patrol officer with the Chapel Hill Police Department.

The police chief at the time, William Blake, emphasized a calm, nonviolent response to the marches, Pendergrass said. Blake had good rapport with organizers, and the department typically knew about sit-ins and marches ahead of time, he said. Officers were always instructed to handle protesters gently, Pendergrass said.

"We approached it with a manner that we wanted to be fair and impartial," he said. "Chief Blake made a statement to us in the very beginning that we live here and we know these people and we'll be seeing them every day, let's treat them how we'd like to be treated."