TODAY IS UNIVERSITY DAY and it is a privilege to bring Stone Walls readers an excerpt from the important new book about UNC by Geeta N. Kapur, To Drink From the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation's Oldest Public University. This is the first excerpt of the book to be published anywhere. We extend much thanks to Kapur and to her publisher, Blair, for permission to use the excerpt that appears after this brief introduction.
University Day marks UNC’s birthdate as the laying of the Old East cornerstone in 1793 and is an especially appropriate day to reflect and re-examine what’s traditionally been left out of UNC’s history. Last year at this time, Stone Walls wrote about a little-known version of the cornerstone ceremony story that has an enslaved man named Dave placing the cornerstone for the first building at the nation’s first public university, rather than William R. Davie, the father of UNC, who enslaved more than a hundred people.
The back cover of To Drink From the Well features blurbs of praise from Rev. William J. Barber II; Jerry W. Blackwell, special prosecutor in the George Floyd case; and UNC history professor William Sturkey. Sturkey calls the book a “bold and much needed examination of the racial history of UNC-Chapel Hill, an institution that perpetually lacks the courage to tell its own history. Kapur has given us an ode to truth and a love letter to the Black men and women who made UNC possible.”
White writers have used countless barrels of ink glorifying UNC and Chapel Hill over the centuries — such as the racist book The Southern Part of Heaven — and in doing so much has been left out of the local narrative. This is the first book that I’m aware of that aims to tell a comprehensive history of Black struggle at UNC. It is a thoroughly researched work containing nearly a thousand footnoted citations that also reads as a compelling narrative meant for a general audience. Echoes of today’s rhetoric around race issues at UNC and in North Carolina can be heard in the old stories in Kapur’s book.
Kapur is a double graduate of UNC (undergraduate and law school) and is a civil rights attorney in Durham who was the lead lawyer for the Moral Monday Movement. She is also a former public defender. Kapur immigrated with her family from Kenya to Durham as a child.
Not only is To Drink From the Well grounded in scholarly research, but as a trial attorney Kapur knows how to tease out the details and tell a story, managing to make even courtroom scenes and meetings of university and political leaders compelling. Wilson Swain Caldwell, Pauli Murray, Louis Austin, Thurgood Marshall, Floyd McKissick, and Langston Hughes, among many others, play prominent roles. The city of Durham and North Carolina Central University (formerly North Carolina College) have big parts as well. The story goes from UNC’s founding to the present, and especially shines in revealing the long legal battles to force UNC to admit Black students.
You can purchase To Drink From the Well directly from the publisher Blair, from Epilogue or Flyleaf, or on Amazon. It’s also on Kindle and at the Chapel Hill Public Library.
Here is Kapur showing her daughter her name in the very first copy.
To Drink From the Well
By GEETA N. KAPUR
Context for this excerpt:
Lloyd Gaines, a young Black man with a stellar academic record, had applied to the only law school in his state at the University of Missouri. He was rejected because of his race and sued. His case winded its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court ruled that the state of Missouri had two choices — admit Gaines or open an equal Black law school. Missouri chose the path of least resistance and opened a separate but unequal law school.
Worried that “Negro” students would apply to the law school at the University of North Carolina, state officials devised “a way out” of the Gaines decision. They hastily created a “Negro” law school at the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in two classrooms in the administration building. One classroom had used books piled up in stacks from the floor to the ceiling ten feet high. It was woefully inadequate by every measure compared to the lily white law school in Chapel Hill. Students from the North Carolina College closely followed the Gaines case and a few of them sued for entrance to the University of North Carolina. They were denied admission and sued in federal court. They were represented by NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter and Durham lawyer Conrad Pearson. After a lengthy, contested three-day trial in Durham, the judge issued his ruling. He noted the stark differences between the two schools in faculty, building facilities, library books, students, alumni, and accreditation. However, he ruled that the two schools were equal. Thurgood Marshall then appealed the decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals…
A THREE-JUDGE PANEL of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals convened in Richmond, Virginia, on March 15, 1951, to hear oral arguments in the University of North Carolina law school case. Judge William Soper of Baltimore, wearing glasses and with his white hair perfectly parted in the center, presided. To his left sat Judge Armistead Dobie of Charlottesville, Virginia, the most colorful judge of the circuit, known to interrupt lawyers with disrespectful questions or to make a wisecrack joke. And to Judge Soper’s right sat District Court judge Harry Watkins of West Virginia, who was called in to take the place of Chief Judge John Parker, who had recused himself because he was a university trustee. Each side had only an hour to convince the judges.
The judges remained relatively quiet during Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter’s arguments, but when it was Attorney General [Harry] McMullan’s turn, they fired one question after another at him.
When McMullan argued that the opportunities for Negroes at the North Carolina College were substantially equal to those offered to white students at the University of North Carolina, Judge Soper interrupted him and “quizzed him sharply.” He recalled that the university’s law dean had testified.
“You were careful not to ask [Henry] Brandis whether he considered the faculties of the two law schools equal,” revealing that he had obviously read the almost six-hundred-page original trial transcript. “What I want to know is why you didn’t ask him [that question].” McMullan said, “I didn’t believe that Dean Brandis was thoroughly familiar with the North Carolina College faculty.”
Judge Soper kept on. “Well what about the fact that the Negro school has the dean and four assistant professors, while the University Law School has ten full-time men, which certainly affords a wider field of specialization?” Before McMullan could answer, the judge said, “The members of the University faculty . . . frequently contribute to legal literature and yet there is not evidence that the Negro teachers do.”
At a different point, McMullan started to argue that the Negroes involved were transfer students. But before he could say the next part—that they had waived their rights by enrolling at the North Carolina College—Judge Dobie seemed to get irritated. “It would be a waste of your time to pursue this point since you know that these students were not rejected by UNC because they are transfer students.”
At the close of the hearing, presiding Judge Soper announced that the court would take the matter under advisement and issue a ruling later. This was a common practice. The three judges disappeared into their chambers.
A week later, on March 22, university president [Gordon] Gray called a special session of the executive committee of the board of trustees—the eleven-member governing body—at the governor’s office in Raleigh. Governor [W. Kerr] Scott, Attorney General McMullan, Major McLendon, and the chancellors of North Carolina State College, the University of North Carolina, and the Woman’s College in Greensboro were also at the meeting.
The governor recognized President Gray and gave him the floor. “I wish to say at the outset that I am frankly opposed to breaking down segregation in the public schools.” He also said he was opposed to the admission of Negroes to “our undergraduate schools or graduate or Professional schools.” Gray predicted that Judge Hayes’s decision would be overturned by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and he recommended an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
“This is no longer simply an academic matter because we have been sued by a Negro applicant for admission to the medical school. In his complaint to the court, the plaintiff alleges a long-standing and systematic practice on the part of the university to exclude Negroes because they are Negroes,” Gray said. And then he asked the most ridiculous question. “Do we exclude Negroes because they are Negroes?”
President Gray presented the policy recommendation from the trustees’ Admissions Advisory Committee to admit qualified “members of other racial groups, other than the white race,” to the university’s professional and graduate schools when such schools were not provided for by the State of North Carolina at Black colleges. Gray told the trustees exactly what he thought of it: “I am not here crusading for you to adopt this particular policy, but I do think it imperative that you adopt some policy.”
Textile tycoon and white supremacist John Clark was a member of the Admissions Advisory Committee and spoke against the policy. Judge Parker and Victor Bryant (a lawyer and state senator from Durham) responded that the Executive Committee should adopt the policy. The members of the Executive Committee—except, of course, John Clark—voted in favor of the policy and referred it to the full board for adoption. Clark later sent out a written statement to the one hundred members of the board of trustees. “The resolution appears to me to be a ‘Come-and-Get-It Resolution’ which invites Negroes everywhere to seek admission to the University of North Carolina.”
When university trustee John Kerr Jr. found out about the policy, he wired a telegram to several lawmakers in Raleigh. “The only way to meet the situation is to cut out appropriation to any schools that do not follow segregation. . . . That will bring them around to some sense. People of North Carolina are opposed to this proposition.” As a former Speaker of the House, he wielded a lot of influence, and a movement caught fire in the General Assembly. Several lawmakers who received the wire said they were against admitting Negroes to the university. Representative Wayland Spruill of Bertie County—a university trustee—considered introducing a bill that would “choke off money going to any school that admits Negroes and whites together.”
Twelve days after hearing arguments, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals released its unanimous decision on March 27, 1951. “Our examination of the undisputed facts of the case convinces us that the Negro School is clearly inferior to the white, and that judgment must therefore be reversed in accordance with the decision in Sweatt v. Painter.” The court found that the difference in the number of students—280 at the university versus 28 at the North Carolina College—presented “a definite handicap to the colored student” because his association in the law school was confined to “people of his own class.” “The duty of federal courts is clear,” the court proclaimed. “We must give first place to the rights of the individual citizen, and when and where he seeks only equality before the law, his suit must prevail. It is for him to decide in which direction his advantage lies.”
That same day, Governor Scott told the press he felt the issue should be taken to the Supreme Court and “settled once and for all.” However, the nation’s highest court had already settled the issue in the Sweatt case.
In Chapel Hill, President Gray sent out a press release. “In view of our conviction that the State of North Carolina has in complete good faith attempted for more than a decade to provide equal legal educational opportunities for our Negro citizens at the North Carolina College in Durham, I will strongly urge the Board of Trustees . . . to [appeal to] the Supreme Court.”
Available from the publisher, Epilogue, Flyleaf, Amazon, Kindle, and the Chapel Hill Public Library.
ONE GOOD THING:
Following outcry over new property tax increases for family homes in historically Black neighborhoods, especially compared to investment properties, the Orange County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously last week to provide some relief via a new Longtime Homeowner Assistance program. Eligible are people who have lived in their home for at least 10 years and earn 80% or less of annual median income ($48,400 for a single person, $69,100 for a family of four, for example).
Residents have until December 15th to apply and can do so online here or get a paper application at the Southern Human Services Center at 2501 Homestead Road in Chapel Hill or at the Whitted Building at 300 W. Tryon Street in Hillsborough from the Housing and Community Development Department. Advocacy and diligent work by the Marian Cheek Jackson Center, EmPOWERment Inc., Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP, and many others helped make it happen.