City politicians impede, religious groups support civil rights activism
Pollitt paints the Community Church as central to the Chapel Hill civil rights movement. He unveils the liberal façade of local politicians to reveal their lack of support for the civil rights movement. Chapel Hill officials openly violated activists' constitutional rights.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Daniel H. Pollitt, February 22, 2001. Interview K-0215. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- DANIEL H. POLLITT:
-
...If you wanted to do
it, the Community Church was the center. And that's were
you'd call and say I can't do it today, can I do
it Tuesday? Yeah, go to so and so. And then
they'd go to the church and have a prayer and march down Main
Street to the post office, and have some speeches on the bullhorn and go
back. I didn't do any of those. I didn't
think—I would picket— but I thought it was a waste
of my time, I could do other things. Harold Foster refused to move from
some place once and they arrested him for obstructing, and Floyd
McKissock and I represented him before the court who was very
sympathetic to us. One interesting thing is that the police were doing a
lot of overtime, and they were working very hard. And the chief was, he
would be humming, "We Shall Overcome" or something to
himself, subconsciously.
[Laughter]
The city council passed an ordinance saying you
can't picket after dark, because that's when the
vigilantes come; it's not unreasonable, except
it's unconstitutional. The constitution does not go down with
the sun. So we arranged to get the three women who had taught the
district court judge in Sunday school
[Laughter]
to go down to the police station after dark, and to all have
candles, and the three women would read the bill of rights, and then
they'd all be arrested. So the way it worked, Charlie Jones,
the minister, called the chief and said we're going to
violate the ordinance, we'll be there at 8:00, and so on. And
the chief called the mayor, and the mayor came down to the church, and
said, for some reason it needs two readings to take
effect—you have to read it at consecutive things for some
reason, make believe reasons. And it hasn't had the second
reading yet, so it's not in effect. We said, okay,
we'll wait. And it never had a second reading. So there are a
lot of little stories like that.