Desegregation then, what now for Chapel Hill?

CHAPEL HILL -- Forty-five years of history fell away at UNC-Chapel Hill on Thursday night.

Participants in Chapel Hill's tumultuous civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s said that, in some ways, a lot of progress has been made. In others, there's still a long way to go.

They met for a panel discussion at UNC's Wilson Library to celebrate the republication of John Ehle's 1965 book "The Free Men," which chronicles Chapel Hill's desegregation.

The movement was marked by dozens of demonstrations, sit-ins, hunger strikes and other protests. Some demonstrators were physically assaulted. Hundreds were arrested.

Several panelists made the distinction between desegregation and integration and said they feel the latter is lacking in Chapel Hill.

James Foushee, who participated in demonstrations, said, "Chapel Hill is going to become, in the next five years, an all-white town."

"We have desegregated," Karen Parker said. "Integration is up to the individual."

"Blacks are priced out. Are the people of Chapel Hill aware of that? No, they're not," said Wayne King, who covered the protests for The Daily Tar Heel, UNC's student newspaper. "It's harder to notice that ... no black people are having breakfast in the Carolina Coffee Shop. ... Would you notice?" he asked the audience.

But Ehle said he thinks the goal of the 1960s protests was to bring about equal protection under the law for blacks.

He said he remembered watching a march in Raleigh where demonstrators gathered and sang. "It was one of the most moving things." he said. "If they wanted to integrate with me, they didn't say so. They wanted their rights."

Ehle, 81, said before the panel discussion that he was pleased his book was being reprinted by Winston-Salem publisher Press 53.

"This is a story of people," Ehle said, "many of them dead, some of them still alive. Of events in North Carolina history that were significant."

And the republication more than 40 years later is very different, he said. One difference -- "I don't get snubbed on the street."

When published, Ehle said, his book about acts of civil disobedience was not well-received -- even by Chapel Hill's progressives. "I would say it was not welcomed by many of the liberal people," he said. "It was very disruptive what the young people did, what the students did. ... They did not work within the established boundaries.

"Blocking traffic in Chapel Hill on a sports day was not really a civilized thing to do," he said slyly.

Publisher Kevin Watson has also reprinted Ehle's 1964 novel "The Land Breakers" which Watson said he considers on par with Harper Lee's classic "To Kill a Mockingbird." Lee contributed a blurb printed on the cover of the republished novel, he said.

Parker, the first black woman to graduate from UNC-CH, said her interest in the civil rights movement came well before she became a student. "When I was a little kid, I wanted to go to some Disney thing at the Carolina Theatre in Winston-Salem ... and my mother said, 'You can't go because it's for whites only, and you're not white,' " Parker said. "And I've been mad ever since then.

"Later in life, that sense of defiance against the establishment, and it needs defying now and then, never left me."

King echoed that sentiment. "It made me angry and supremely disappointed," he said. "I am a North Carolinian, and my state should not do what it was doing. ... And I'm still a little bit peeved."

Jim Wallace, then a Daily Tar Heel photographer, nodded at Foushee and said, "I photographed the gentleman next to me being arrested several times."

He said the civil rights assignments were probably the most important of his career. He lauded activists for "putting their lives on the line to enjoy the freedom that we had, and the fact of the matter is as long as they didn't have it, neither did we."

"We set out to try to change Chapel Hill," Foushee said. "They thought it was going to be an easy task because Chapel Hill was called 'the Southern part of heaven. ...'

"They found out that Chapel Hill wasn't the Southern part of heaven."