James Cates’s family still deserves justice decades after his killing at UNC
James Lewis Cates Jr. should still be here.
His friends and family spoke to a virtual audience at a Thursday memorial service. Their faces had aged in the 51 years since his killing, as faces do.
Cates, however, is frozen in youth. The way people often see him is through his senior class photo from Chapel Hill High, taken the first year the school was integrated. You can just make out his dimples in the black-and-white photo, one of the defining features his cousins Nate Davis and Valerie Foushee spoke about in an essay they wrote for The Assembly last year.
“He was probably the most charismatic of our large group of male cousins,” they wrote. “His dimpled smile would light up a room. He was a quick-witted, fast talker who kept you laughing. Everyone would simply sit back as he entertained the room.”
On November 21, 1970, James Lewis Cates Jr. died after being stabbed in the middle of UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. He was 22 years old. Three members of the Storm Troopers, a white biker gang whose name is reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s paramilitary group, were charged with first-degree murder for his death. They were all acquitted.
If you go to the Pit, the center of UNC-CH’s campus, you won’t see Cates’s name memorialized on the bricks where he was left to bleed for about an hour while they waited for an ambulance to drive him less than a mile to UNC Hospital. His smile isn’t displayed in the student union, where a dance was held that night in hopes of easing racial tension in Chapel Hill. The university and town began washing his memory off campus in the hours after his death by cleaning the crime scene and letting the Storm Troopers flee.
Power may forget, but the community remembers.
The way the case was handled from the beginning and its place within our America sealed the fate of the men charged in his death. An all-white Orange County jury judged the case because the Black jurors were dismissed by both the prosecutor and defendant’s attorneys. The defendants presented no witnesses. They were acquitted on all charges after the jury deliberated for less than two hours.
The media didn’t fight for clarity. The News & Observer’s story on the killing was a small column the day after the killing, and named the arrested before naming Cates. The Daily Tar Heel published a photo of his blood being swept into a storm drain.
At Thursday’s memorial, Davis mentioned that he was hesitant at first to talk to journalist Mike Ogle and historian Danita Mason-Hogans, who have documented these memories in recent years.
“I kept saying, ‘This is something I do not want to talk about,’ and then I realized what I was doing,” Davis says. “I was doing the same thing that everybody else in the community was doing: not talking about it. And that it was eventually just going to go away again and get lost.”
There has been a resurgence of Cates’s story thanks to efforts from the community. The James Cates Remembrance Coalition has been working to record the stories of elders, preserve documentation of that night and the following nights, and push for reconciliation. Last year, members of UNC’s Black Student Movement formed the James Lewis Cates Memorial Committee, hoping to establish his memory permanently on campus.
In June, the group submitted a proposal to Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and the university renaming committee to name the UNC Student Stores building after Cates. The building was previously named for Josephus Daniels, the longtime editor of The News & Observer and a man who stoked fears that led to the Wilmington Massacre.
Renaming the former Daniel’s building after Cates would be a step in the right direction after years of silence; before anything happens, the university and town need to reach out to his family and apologize, which Foushee says they have yet to do.
As I write this, Kyle Rittenhouse has just been acquitted for killing two people and injuring another at a Black Lives Matter protest last summer. Ahmaud Arbery’s killers are on trial and claiming self-defense, despite the fact that Arbery was unarmed.
Our country will eventually forget their names if nothing is done. Their communities will remember.
A candlelight vigil in honor of James Lewis Cates Jr. will be held in the Pit on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus Sunday, November 21 at 3 p.m. The organizers ask that attendees wear masks and bring flowers.
This story was originally published November 21, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
