A loud and visible student leader, the Durham native led campus protests, brought students to Raleigh to march at the governor's mansion and generally pushed a civil rights agenda at a time of race riots and smoldering racial tension.

"If there was a political issue of the day, I was involved in it," Mebane, now 55, said last week. "There were times when I was afraid my car was going to blow up."

Mebane was the organization's leader during the 1972-73 school year. The group was in its infancy then, formed six years earlier to give the university's tiny black student population a political voice.

This fall, the Black Student Movement celebrates its 40th birthday. It is now 400 members strong with interests and aims far more diverse than when it began in fall 1967.

About 30 current members met Sunday afternoon for a brief reception and slide show to honor the group's history. Events all week on campus will do so as well.

Reached at his home in Connecticut, Mebane, a recent graduate of Yale's divinity school, said he hopes today's students appreciate what he and his contemporaries went through. The Ku Klux Klan was still active in North Carolina, and tensions boiled over in incidents like the 1971 arrest and conviction of nine black men and one white woman in Wilmington -- eventually overturned on a technicality -- on charges of arson and shooting at city police and firefighters during a desegregation-related riot.

Black student leaders who got involved in issues like that -- even within the seemingly safe confines of a college campus -- did so with some unease, Mebane recalled.

"It was not an easy time," he said. "The benefits [black students] receive today were hard-fought."

This year, the Black Student Movement is led by President Derek Sykes and Vice President Racine Peters, both seniors from Virginia.

Each professes appreciation for what Mebane and others like him went through during the organization's formative years but say the BSM has grown and expanded greatly since then. It is one of UNC's largest student organizations, with 20 committees, a magazine and a gospel choir.

It isn't solely a political entity anymore.

Times, Peters said, have changed.

"Back in 1967, racism was more overt," she said. "Now, if students feel any racism at all, it's in a more covert manner."

History recalled

Today's students learn the history of the movement's formative years -- informally through stories handed down through the ranks; more formally with things such as the video detailing BSM history that the organization shows members each year.

Students today might be surprised to learn that when the BSM was formed in 1967, there were only 113 black students out of a student body of 13,352, according to an exhibit displayed earlier this year at UNC's Wilson Library.

A key early challenge came the following fall, when BSM members aligned with striking cafeteria workers frustrated by low pay and poor treatment by white supervisors. For months, BSM leaders worked with cafeteria workers, joined in protests and even got arrested.

The issue grew turbulent enough that Gov. Robert W. Scott became involved and the National Guard was mobilized. Eventually, worker raises were approved, though dissatisfaction with job conditions eventually led to another walkout.

"The students didn't have to be involved," Archie Ervin, UNC-CH's associate provost for diversity and multicultural affairs and a faculty adviser to the BSM, said during Sunday's reception. "It wasn't their fight. But they saw it was a wrong that had to be righted."

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