Franklin Street marker will tell story of Chapel Hill teens who launched a movement
Sixty years ago, nine young, black Chapel Hill men took a stand by sitting down. It was a move that would inspire others to fight for racial justice and civil rights over the next decade.
The story of the sit-in at the Colonial Drug Store has been overshadowed by the university’s presence and the role that college students played in the civil rights movement, says Danita Mason-Hogans, whose father David Mason Jr. was one of the Chapel Hill Nine.
“Whose history is important and whose history is elevated says a lot about who the community thinks is important, too,” she said.
On Friday, the town will remember the Chapel Hill Nine with a historic marker at 405 W. Franklin St., where the whites-only Colonial Drug Store once stood. Today, it is home to the West End Wine Bar.
The new marker is inscribed with the names and ages of the Chapel Hill Nine — Mason, Jim Merritt, Clarence Merritt Jr., William Cureton, Albert Williams, John Farrington, Earl Geer, Douglas “Clyde” Perry and Harold Foster — along with photos from the era.
Four surviving members will attend the event, as will Foster’s sister Esphur Foster and Reginald Hildebrand, a retired UNC professor of African American studies and history and a member of the town’s Historic Civil Rights Commemoration Task Force. The town’s first poet laureate, C.J. Suitt, also will speak.
Durham artist Stephen Hayes designed the marker to sit on a rock base reminiscent of the low walls in the historically black Northside neighborhood, where the teens grew up and formed their plan.
The marker is a symbol of the “debt of gratitude for leading us forward with courage” that the town owes to the Chapel Hill Nine and many others, Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger said in announcing the event.
Movement led by teens
The story of the Chapel Hill Nine differs from other civil rights sit-ins, because it began with high school students “who took on a significant challenge,” Hildebrand said.
“These were people who had grown up in Chapel Hill, whose families were longstanding members of the community, who had sometimes close relationships even with the owner of the drug store,” he said. “So this was a community going through a transformation and trying to improve and heal itself, and going through all the disruption and turmoil that went with that difficult process.”
It all started at the rock wall at the end of McDade and Cotton streets where the group gathered every weekend to talk about politics and local events, said Jim Merritt, who at 16 was one of the youngest of the friends.
“We didn’t want them to know what we were doing, what we were up to,” Williams said in a 2018 video interview with the town. “We were like other teenagers. We were developing, and we had a little rich blood in us, and Harold Foster was a kind of leader. He was like a hot sparkplug.”
That year, on Feb. 1, four black college students at North Carolina A&T had taken seats and refused to move at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro.
The news inspired them, Merritt said, and they decided to launch their own sit-in. They told the Chapel Hill Weekly newspaper that something big was going to happen before walking into the whites-only drugstore on Feb. 28, 1960.
Many of the store’s customers were black, because it was then at the edge of a thriving black business district in Chapel Hill. The store’s owner, “Big John” Carswell, knew the teens and even lived near them in the white section of Northside on Church Street.
Carswell was polite when he asked them to move that day, Merritt said, but he may have been under some pressure, because his landlord was a staunch segregationist. His reaction was disappointing all the same, Merritt said.
“We all walked in at approximately the same time,” he said in the 2018 video interview. “I went over to the booth, as I recall, had a seat. Big John came over and said, ‘Jimmy, you can’t sit here,’ and I just looked at him and didn’t move.”
Police were called and, as the teens later left the store, took down their names. They weren’t arrested until July, when the Chapel Hill Nine returned to Colonial Drug Store with others to hold another sit-in. They were convicted of trespassing, but the sit-ins continued for several years at different restaurants and businesses around town.
We weren’t frightened, Merritt said, “just set on doing what we needed to do.” His father, who worked at the hospital and at a UNC fraternity, wasn’t too happy about it, but his mother talked with him, Merritt said.
For some of the Chapel Hill Nine, last year’s event announcing the marker was the first time they had been back since their arrests.
Civil rights histories, lessons
The story of that sit-in is what first inspired the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to visit the town and the Hargraves Center in Northside — one of two visits he made that year — said Mason-Hogans, a project coordinator with Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.
It’s an important story, the details of which even she did not know until she began working to collect the oral histories of civil rights veterans from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
“When we have such a huge disparity between children who do well in school and children who do not do well in school — Chapel Hill has the second-largest achievement gap in the country — it really is important to inform and let young people know that you do have a history,” she said. “You come from a proud history of brilliant people who struggled and fought to make that place better.”
Mason-Hogan’s team took its work to Hemminger, who launched the task force in 2017 to document the town’s civil rights history and plan commemoration events. The work resulted in a mobile timeline, a short film, public programs and the historic marker. In the spring, an interactive exhibit will spotlight the town’s black female elders.
Other projects have included the addition of civil rights photos at downtown bus shelters on West Franklin and North Columbia streets, and the Chapel Hill Public Library’s Re/Collecting Chapel Hill podcast, which focused in its first season on local historic markers and monuments. The final episode in early March will tell the story of the Chapel Hill Nine.
The marker is a reminder of the community that was here when the university was formed in 1789, but that has not been talked about as part of that history, Mason-Hogans said. The civil rights movement and the Chapel Hill Nine didn’t end the racial tensions, which now are reflected in the fight over the Silent Sam Confederate statue, she said.
However, society now may be at a crossroads where technology and social media are converging with the dismantling of old systems that marginalized some people and the building up of new systems and histories that include everyone, she said.
It makes for an exciting time in historical research, because the civil rights movement, along with Civil War and Confederate narratives, have been reported but not explored and evaluated, she said.
“We are able to uncover more history that’s more inclusive to the young people that are coming up today, so that they can actually see themselves in history, whether there are more black girls growing up that can see themselves in the movement or little black boys seeing themselves reflected in the Chapel Hill Nine,” Mason-Hogans said.
Merritt said this week he is proud of his roots and thinks people from all walks of life can learn from each other.
“I was telling my wife the other day, I take great pleasure in riding through UNC’s campus and seeing all the diverse population there,” he said. “Black and brown kids, white kids, everybody’s mingling together and learning.”
What’s next
The dedication ceremony for the Chapel Hill Nine marker will begin at 4 p.m. Friday at 450 W. Franklin St.
West Franklin Street will be closed, from Roberson Street to Kenan Street, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. for the event. On-street parking will not be available, and Chapel Hill Transit will be detoured.
This story was originally published February 27, 2020 at 11:07 AM.
