[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

CINDY CHEATHAM:

... position at UNC and with the Campus Y when Anne came in 1956.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

She came here the year before I did. She came here, I think, in '56 and I came here in 1957. I came from Arkansas where we had integrated the schools; the schools here were not integrated and that was sort of a common bond. We used to be located on the main campus and would go up to the Y court for coffee at 10:00, so we became friends. That's where the action was; the constructive action on campus centered around the YMCA, the campus Y. So, we became friends.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

When do you remember first meeting Anne and what were your initial perceptions of her when you met her?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

I don't remember. I have no recollection of when we first met. We met near the YMCA and that's where the students would hang around. I think we had a half of the black students here at the time. I became the faculty advisor to the NAACP and everybody in the NAACP group, the handful, seemed to be active in the Y. And whatever the NAACP wanted to do, we would do it with the Y, so maybe that's how I first met her. She was the assistant and Claude Shotts was the director. Then they invited me to join the advisory committee which I was very happy to do.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

That's great. What did you know, at that time, about her background when she came? I know I asked you about your initial perceptions. Did you know much about just her ethical and moral attitudes and what her interests lie in the most?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Oh, yes. That's very obvious. We were kindred souls, so it was easy to strike up a good friendship. She was very open. She was always very open to everybody. But she was very open to me about our common concerns which were student involvement and trying to do something about the segregated campus and the segregated community we were living in. And it was again, the late fifties, which were characterized by student apathy. I didn't think it was, but I think there's always ten to fifteen percent of the students who are concerned with social justice and the problems beyond them. That was what was going on at the Y in many ways. They were nothing big. Claude was the administrator and fund-raiser and he had his concerns, but he'd already retired from Northwestern, I think, where he had been the Y director. And we didn't have the energies that Anne did. And they organized programs to go visit the mental people at Butner and the orphans; the disadvantaged people within a twenty mile area were visited by Y people who would go out and just walk with them or talk with them or give them a touch of the outside. And I think that was maybe the first of the major energies in '57, '58 and '59, or in that period. It was social service types of things. And I remember they had a car and the car broke down. It broke down every time they would go to Butner. Their biggest problem was to buy a second hand car that would get the students there and back.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

How did you see the campus Y change during Anne's role at the campus Y? How did you perceive it? It was always a social service organization and somewhat the center of campus, but how did that change? How did she make a unique influence, do you believe?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, I think the Y changed as the conditions changed. I forget the exact date when we started to integrate the public schools here, but as soon as they did, they started with the little tots, the first and second grades, maybe. And the Big Brother and Big Sister and the tutorial programs started, so the people from the Y would go out and they would adopt somebody and sit with them after school and review their lessons and be a role model and an inspiration. So, that was going on. The black schools didn't have much in the way of a library, and I remember to get an encyclopedia, fifty volumes of an encyclopedia, we got that, you know. That was earlier, and then came the tutorials which was about the same time. And then in the early sixties, the

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more radical energies started. We had the Greensboro sit-in. It took place in February or something of 1960, possibly, and it spread rapidly. It was on a Monday that they sat in, the four freshmen, and then Tuesday they went back with ten and Wednesday they were there with twenty. Then the white hooligans came in and there was a bomb threat on Friday and then they declared a cooling off period. But by that Wednesday or so, the students at N.C. Central were sitting in and Fayetteville State. We still had a black high school and we had our first sit-in on Wednesday or Thursday of that very first week. And the basketball team had won a game against whoever their main rivals were and after they won, which they won in Chapel Hill, the team went down to the drugstore. They usually went to a drugstore to get a coke and they had to stand up. They couldn't sit down. So, they decided to sit down. [Laughter] That was the first sit-in. And then they chased them out. They went across the street to the bus station which then had a snack bar and some things to get a coke there. They went into the white waiting room and the guy chased them out with a gun. It was snowing, so they had some snowballs throwing around and then they went home. But they went to their advisors, "What do we do next?" And that was the start of the Ad Hoc Committee for the public accommodation law or whatever it was.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

There were several different organizations including the Committee for Open Business, the Committee on Integration and then later on, CORE and national groups came in. Anne was a member originally, of the Committee for Open Business and it split when Governor Sanford called on the demonstrations to halt, so that there could be more voluntary desegregation. Do you know much about that split? [Phone ringing]

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, as I was saying, the first sit-in was the high school students. Then they decided to have a meeting. The black high school students wanted to have an open meeting a couple of days later; maybe Friday or something. And they went to a couple of the black churches and the ministers didn't want them. They were afraid of the whole thing. So, they came to the Community Church where Reverend Charlie Jones was the minister and asked Charlie Jones if they could use the Community Church, and he said, "Sure." But then they decided that was too far from the black community and they might not be able to find it and so on. So, Charlie Jones arranged to meet at the Roberson Street Center which was the black community center. And then, what do you do when you meet? Well, there was a CORE organizer who had come down to help at N.C. Central in Durham and he'd been arrested for something and he was in jail. So Charlie Jones and I went over and bailed him out and brought him over to the Roberson Street Center where he could talk to the high school kids.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Do you remember the name?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

I'm trying to think of the name.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

I have several names of students, but most of them were arrested after. . . . Was it Pat Kusack, John Dunn?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

No. They were much later and they were college students. These were high school students. There was Harold Foster and Braxton Foushee, who's now the assemblyman or councilman at Carrboro. They were the stars of the basketball team. And they are the ones who had gone to celebrate their victory. One of them was the President of the Student Body there and the other was the editor of the year book or something, but they were big in the Lincoln High School. So, they met and we had the guy from CORE, Gordon Cary was his name, and he was a white guy who had been a conscientious objector in World War II. He was, I think, the organizer east of the Mississippi, because CORE then consisted of four or five people. And he came and he did socio-dramatics or something. And he says, "All right, now, let's do it lawfully and peacefully. You be the store keeper and you be the cop and you be the protester," and so on, and he had them acting everything out. And that's what we did that evening was to act it out. Then I think they went back the next day

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to the drugstore and they'd go in and ask for something and they wouldn't give it to them. And we did picketing at that time, mostly picketing.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Were you involved with the picketing of the theater?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Of the theater, yes. Was that first or was that later?

CINDY CHEATHAM:

That was one of the original main actions. I think it started with the black high school students.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

We had two theaters in town and neither one would allow blacks. I can give you that very clearly. There was a movie showing, the song of which is, "T'ain't Necessarily So." It's a very famous play and then a movie and it was showing here. The English teacher at the black high school asked the manager if she could take her English class to see this movie and that she would come after the late show on Friday or before the matinee on Saturday or they would sit in the balcony or whatever he wanted, but she would like to take her class. And he said, "No." So, she went to her minister who took it up to the Interfaith Council and Charlie Jones at the Community Church. They went to see the guy and he said, "No." So the decision was to picket that movie. And I was the first picketer at the showing at 6:00. And from then on, it went on for five months or something and we always tried to have a white person and a black person picketing together. There were half hour stints. And that went on throughout the fall and the winter and the spring. But that was the Ad Hoc Committee for Open Theaters or something like that. And that was successful, but that was not really related to the other picketing. I don't think it was related in time. My memory is hazy.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Do you recall what Anne's role was in all this was?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Anne was a behind the scenes participant. Let me add one more dimension. That is the sit-ins, which was Pat Kusick and that crowd. But that was a year or two later. We had the first wave of sit-ins and maybe forty or fifty percent of the downtown businesses agreed to serve everybody, but the others didn't. And that was the second wave which was the John Dunn, Pat Kusick crowd. And that's where people got arrested and all that sort of thing. Now, what Anne did during all this, first of all, she was the home. The Y was the home for the black students. They sold stocks in the Y building, so there was a logical reason for everybody to go there, and then on each side they sold the newspapers and then there were the lounge and the offices. And then upstairs there were some offices all connected with the Y and good things. But that's the one place where the handful of blacks could go in and be treated respectfully and with warmth and with friendship. And that was the one place where they could achieve some prominence. Kellis Parker, I think, was his name, might have been the first secretary or the treasurer or something of the Y. But the blacks were given the opportunity to achieve leadership positions at the Y when most other places were closed to them. So Anne Queen really helped integrate the University. She was friendly to all these people and gave them things to do. They could go out and help tutor or they could do this and that. And then she had a Speaker's Bureau that went on and on and on and on and almost anybody who was worth hearing was invited down here by the Y and they would have a program of some sort. Then there would be the reception which would be open to the public, generally, and then the next reception at Anne's house. She had a very small little cottage, very unpretentious, but she could squeeze twenty-five or thirty people in for dinner, which she always prepared, you know. And she was a teetotaler and she always put me in charge of the liquor. And so I would bring the liquor and mix the drinks. She wouldn't do that, you know. She didn't mind having liquor in the house and she didn't mind if other people drank, but she wanted no part of it. She didn't want to do it.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

That seems to be quite a characteristic of hers that she was very open to other's people's ways, but she was definitely committed to her own. Can you comment on that maybe more?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, she had her own standards which were extremely high. I can't give you any other illustration off-hand. But she would invite the black students to her house and that would be maybe the first time in their lives they'd ever been invited to a white person's house. And in there, they would be treated like anybody else was treated. I remember Floyd McKissick was the head of CORE and was a very frequent visitor. And Sloane Coffin, the minister, was down there. Al Lowenstein, I think he had been active in the Y when he'd been a student here and he would be brought down. She liked Michael Harrington who was the head of the Social Democratic group and was very much up on poverty, the war on poverty, which was the Kennedy years in the sixties. That came at the same time. And I don't know whether Sarge Shriver came or not, but any time there was a Peace Corps recruiter they'd be at the Y and then they'd be at Anne's house and there'd be people invited in. I don't know if she had a special fund. I doubt it. But that was her role. Her role was to be extremely hospitable to all the minorities and that includes all the foreigners. We never had many foreigners come here like they do at Michigan or Cornell or Harvard or something. But they were always welcomed at the Y and it was in that connection that Anne started the International Bazaar where everybody would wear their native garb and do their native dance or their native instruments or their native crafts and their native foods. So there were four or five, maybe ten, places to eat something and you could buy things. And it was a money raiser, but predominantly a show place for people to demonstrate their native pride and to get to know each others. And in the international area, it was a big thing to go to the UN. She would go up and later somebody else would take up a bus load of kids. Frank Porter Graham was then at the United Nations. He was high up and he would introduce and talk to directors and so on and show them around. A lot of the kids had never been to New York City and so they wouldn't waste their time seeing the Statue of Liberty. They went down to Greenwich Village and East Greenwich Village and would see X rated movies and get exposed to a part of society which many of them had never dreamed of before. So, it was to see the U.N. and to see a major city and see how people live in a major city. I believe you could drive all the way to New York, at that time, in ten or twelve or fourteen hours. The first town you get to in Virginia, they had stopped to get something to eat at the bus station. They wouldn't serve them because a quarter of them were black. So they went up to picket there for a few days. So, she was the hostess and the friend and tried to provide opportunities for people who needed opportunities. So, that was her role.

And then, since she was not involved personally, it started off as a CORE operation. The high school kids were the muscle, so to speak. And they were operating under CORE and CORE had a non-violence philosophy. So, if somebody is going to spit on you, and a lot of people spat on them, or throw snow balls at you or curse you and so on, you turn the other cheek. And so there were training sessions on how to put up with that sort of thing. And it was peaceful, lawful picketing and no sit-ins at that time. That was in '60, maybe. And then, maybe it was two years later when John Dunn and Pat Kusick, who were students, and two or three other students whose names I don't remember at the moment, decided that it was terrible to have fifty percent segregated restaurants and businesses in the town. So, they started to picket.

But the way that it happened was that there was a speaker invited down to the Y, by the Y, from the "Village Voice". That's Anne Queen reaching out for new experiences and new voices. So she invited somebody from the Village Voice and David Dansby was a law student who was the first black, I think, to graduate from the undergraduate school and the law school, and a professional school. And it was still very rare. I think we had maybe three or four blacks in the entire law school and he was one of them. But David Dansby was the host with somebody else. They had called what was then "The Pines" restaurant, and said, "We're going to come for dinner afterwards," and the guy said, "Fine. Table for five," or something like that. They showed

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up with a guest, the "The Village Voice" speaker, and two or three other whites and David Dansby. So, they said, "We cannot serve you." And they said, "I called you and made arrangements." "Well, we can't serve you." And so, they wouldn't leave and they were arrested. That was the first arrest. And it was dumb to arrest somebody from the "Village Voice" because he probably went back to New York and wrote it all up. "What kind of a town is this?" You know. But then, two nights later, there's another group that decides to go down to "The Pines" and seek service and integrate it. And one was Father Parker. Father Parker was a retired Episcopalian priest who was well into his eighties. He wore the clerical collar and the black vest and he had snow white hair and he looked like a saint. He was tall and sort of gaunt. He went with the next group, the second group, to "The Pines" and there were maybe four or five and I forget who the others were. But they told them to leave, and they wouldn't leave and they called the cops and told them they were trespassing. At that time, the policy was to go limp, just go limp, and then the police would carry you out and put you in the car and you would be charged with resisting arrest for going limp and for trespassing. The bail was $150 for each and so there was a problem of raising bail money. We didn't like people to get arrested unless they had the bail money with them. But Father Parker went limp and somehow he lost his hat in the melee, so the front page story had a picture of Father Parker being carried out. Then the caption was "Father Parker Loses Hat," or something. Well, about fifty people sent him hats.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Was this on the "Chapel Hill Weekly"?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Yes. So that got a lot of publicity going. And if Father Parker is going to lay his body on the line, you know, at his age, why shouldn't the rest of us? So, that started the tumultuous period. There were letters to the newspaper every day pro and con. There was a big debate going on everywhere. Every night there'd be a sit-in somewhere. And this time, it was done by the college students, all of whom had been active in the Y.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Do you know whether they were in contact with Anne during that period for advice?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, I forget the name of the organization, but there had to be one to collect funds for bail purposes. And the treasurer of that was the treasurer of the YMCA and the office was the YMCA. That's where people met.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

So, that's where the students organized that were involved in this sit-in movement that were students at UNC?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Yes. I mean, you'd go to the Y and see what's going on. And the other place was the Community Church. The Community Church was more for the grown-ups. I don't mean that the students are not grown-up.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

I understand. [Laughter]

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

But the older people used the Community Church. There were the white collar University students and there were the black high school students and then there was the white community, mostly professors, that operated out of the Community Church. At one time, the Duke divinity professors got involved and they all got arrested. But Anne was not in the forefront at this time. Everything that we mimeographed was mimeographed at the Community Church and not at the Y. The Chancellor was Bill Aycock, I guess, and we kept putting pressure on Bill to put the theater off limits or something, or to take an action of some sort. And he didn't. And Bill Friday. They were neutral throughout all this. They did not speak at all on the public accommodation. Maybe they were wise. The state of North Carolina was not ready. They were preserving the University. I was active. I was the very first picketer at the theater and my role was well known and out front and I wrote an article on it and I'd be quoted. I never once doubted that anyone would come after me, you know. And I was not going to not get a pay raise, I was not not going to get promoted or anything else.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

So, you didn't believe your position was at all threatened?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

I felt I was in no jeopardy whatsoever for doing all of this. And no one was in jeopardy. Not a single professor was jeopardized in any department that I knew of because of their active involvement with people who were arrested. Peter Feiline was pretty active in this. He was a brand new professor; a young, untenured, assistant professor. And pretty active.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

I'm sure he was.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

But on the other hand, or maybe that's enough, you know, to protect the faculty from any repercussions.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Did you believe that Anne, because she was a staff member at the University and because she was responsible for the Y and had that reputation, had that communication with the administration, with Bill Friday and Aycock? Did she in any way feel like she had to remain in the back of this movement?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

I don't know. She did have contact with them. See, Bill Friday and Bill Aycock were members of the Community Church which was the center of the whole thing. You know, it was somewhat ambiguous. I don't know when Claude Shotts retired from here, but there was a good question about who would succeed him. And again, this was a man's University. Women go over to the Women's College in Greensboro and you could only come here if you were going to the Nursing School or if you live in Orange County or something like that; or if you were an upper classman and you want to major in something they don't have at the Women's College. So, there were very few women. So, at that time, I had a friend who came here to get her Ph.D. in romance languages and they would not let her be a TA here. They arranged for her to be a teaching assistant at Duke because women were not fit or it was not appropriate for women to teach as a teaching assistant in the romance department. Well, now here's Anne Queen. She's a women at, essentially, a men's University, number two in a two person job and I'm sure she'd like to be number one, you know. But I don't really think Anne would have thought about that.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Yes. I was interested in finding out more about how you felt her position as a female. . .

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, there was that and there was trouble. I know that when Claude Shotts did retire, or announced his retirement, there was a search committee or something, on who was going to succeed him. I got a petition going for Anne to support her for the job. And we weren't sure she'd get it. There was a search committee and I think I might have been on the search committee. I know I was on several search committees for the Y. I would have been a biased member. But there was that problem.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Norm Gustavison came in, I noticed, when he was really young and she had been there for several years. I'm wondering if you know anything about how that decision was made.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

I was on the search committee that brought in Norm. But I was also on the search committee that brought in somebody else before Norm, I think, who stayed there for a little bit and then became the Assistant Dean of Students or something. He was out of the Union Theological Seminary and a very good person, but Anne was not assured that she would get the top job, you know. And if she did she would be one of the two. . . . There was the Dean of Women and there was Anne Queen and they would be the only women with any authority around the University.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

How did you perceive Anne's influence on the students?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, she had everybody spellbound. Everybody loved Anne Queen and what she was doing and what she was about. Anne is not a traditional beauty. She has her own beauty, but it's a unique beauty and so she doesn't fit the model of the Hollywood beauty type. And she spoke like she was from Canton, North Carolina after having grown up in a blue collar household.

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She had double negatives, you know, so she was not fluent, not a great speaker at all. It was just what she was and what she did that created a tremendous crowd of admirers. You may have seen the letterhead of when we started the Anne Queen Fund. It starts with Terry Sanford and Bill Friday and all of the editors of the major newspapers who had been YMCA people under her. It was just a tremendous list of people who were willing to go and try to create some sort of a memorial because she should not be forgotten.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Yes, you say that she was admired by all these people. Why was she so able to spellbind people? Obviously, her interests, but her interests were similar to a lot of other people who were active liberals in the community.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, I think that maybe it was because she would always say, "What do you think?" And she wanted everybody to speak and I recall the first time we had Floyd McKissick here it was a debate on whether the House Committee on Unamerican Activities had a right to subpoena the Ku Klux Klan and ask for their membership rolls or not. And Floyd McKissick defended the First Amendment rights of the Klan. That was his role and the other guy was the Congressman from Georgia who was very liberal and popular who thought that the Klan was so bad, they ought to try to stamp it out through publicity or something. Well, we had a Klan guy. I forget who he was. We had David Duke here, who was the candidate for Senate in Louisiana. He got sixty-five percent of the white male vote in Louisiana, but he came here under YMCA auspices to get his point of view across. So, she obviously, was very liberal and she favored Mike Harrington and Al Lowenstein. Sloane Coffin, I think, was her favorite of all favorites. But she always gave the other side a break. And again, she never forgot the people in Butner or the Big Sister and the Big Brother program; to go help children for a couple of hours. I don't ever find it thrilling, but it could be considered thrilling to go out and be the first picketer at the movie theater. My sign was "T'ain't Necessarily So". That's what I remember, segregation. "T'ain't Necessarily So". And Howard Odum was the first guy who went through the picket line. He went to see the movie.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Because he's supposed to have had such an impact.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

He was the great sociologist who had such an impact and all that.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

That's an interesting point because several writers have remarked on the fact that Chapel Hill had such a liberal tradition which was a very big impediment in taking the desegregation further than it already had. People became complacent that weren't willing to go beyond what had already been done. Did you see that?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well there's always, "We're the southern part of heaven" and that sort of thing and "We're great." And we have Howard Odum and we have Frank Graham we can comment about. Yes, it was a minority that wanted to integrate the town and we didn't. We didn't. We were unsuccessful. It wasn't the 1964 Civil Rights Act that integrated the community. I'm probably in the book because I wrote the ordinance on public accommodation which never passed. The tactic of the majority of the City Council was to, well, "This is sort of a last stage and let's not see if we can't do it some other way. Let's establish a commission of good folks to try and persuade everybody to reach a meeting of the minds." And Anne Queen would be on those committees is my recollection. And those were the people who had not been noticeable in the integration or in the anti-integration efforts. My Dean, at the time, Edward Randis, he was very adamant. He got very angry and he'd go to all the public meetings and he said, "This is anarchy. You cannot violate the law." He was a lawyer, you know. He said, "You're violating the law." And I would say, "Well, Martin Luther King says that you have to put your body in the struggle." "Well, then Martin Luther King should be arrested and put away." And Edward Randis was a spokesman for the Chapel Hill newspaper. But Edward Randis was great and the

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Chapel Hill newspaper kept talking about anarchy and Terry Sanford, our governor at the time. What happened there was that we had a lot of speakers come in. We had Roy Wilkins from the NAACP and we had an audience of fifty for him. But this was a stop over. Whenever northern people were touring the controversial areas, they'd come to make a stop at Chapel Hill. We had James Farmer who was the Executive Director of CORE. And the President was Floyd McKissick who was a Durham boy. But Farmer arrived and he gave his speech and it was in February as I recall, and there was snow, so they closed the Raleigh-Durham Airport. So, he was stuck here. What do you do with a notable who's stuck here. So somebody thought, "Let's have a press conference." So, they called a press conference. "Well, what's he got to say?" So, what he said was, "I'm going to throw the full resources of CORE into Chapel Hill unless they're integrated by the end of the week," or some such deadline. Well, the full resources of CORE consisted of Gordon Cary, who had already been here, if nothing else, you know. But that was the headlines. The News and Observer, WRAL, everybody, "CORE to target Chapel Hill. Throw all resources in Chapel Hill." So, then they asked Governor Terry Sanford, "What are you going to do about this declaration of war?" He said, "I'm going to resist it. I'm going to make sure Chapel Hill is safe." Well, the City Council immediately voted to buy an armored carrier of some sort which was a bread wagon they bought. I don't know what that was for. But at any rate, they were going to do it. And then the KKK said they were going to come in and protect the storekeepers and they were going to have a caravan down Franklin Street. And that was going to happen at the end of the month or something. I guess that was when they had the major sit-ins. And so the University students decided that they would paralyze the community. It was a Saturday afternoon and we were playing Wake Forest in basketball and Wake Forest was good at that time. They had Billy Packer. They had a very good team and we had a very good team and it was an important game and the gym was packed. Then when they went out, the sit-inners were on the streets at all the intersections. So, it was very peaceful. And you go and you pick them up and you carry them to the squad car and you take them down to the Police Station and then they are there until they put up the hundred fifty dollars for the going limp and the hundred fifty dollars for trespassing. And that was our big day. They had a hundred and fifty people or so arrested that day of whom a hundred and forty were University students and the other ten were professors. So, it was a very peaceful thing but it was not portrayed as a very peaceful thing. So now we got to do something. And the episode out at Watt's Grill which made the newspapers and that was a call for urgency. And the Anne Queen type committees would be appointed and recommend back. And then the trials began. A vicious judge was assigned here who gave speeches to the Four-H Clubs about the Communists in Chapel Hill that he was trying. It was very untraditional. And he said he was going to show them a lesson and he did.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

They had food there, all sorts of international food, but somehow, Anne Queen would go there and open it up in the morning and turn on the lights and then at the end of the day, she'd sweep the place out. She'd be there for two or three days and she'd want a hot meal that was not Chilean or Ecuadorian or something. My wife would always cook her up something, a hot plate of something and bring it to her. That went on for ten years. She became an expected customer. My wife used to cook Anne Queen her hot dinner on the nights of those things. So, in that sense, we were pretty close. Anne was not in the Speaker Ban controversy, except that the Y was in the Speaker Ban controversy. They passed a law you could not invite someone to speak on campus who meets certain criteria. They did invite them. Paul Dixon, who was the President of the Student Body, invited Al Tucker and somebody else. And then

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they were chased away; they wouldn't let them speak. So, then they filed the suit. The suit included John Dixon and so it was his name, Dixon against Sitterson. But then ten other students, including the chair and the co-chairs of the Y and the director of the Y and the [unclear] and the editor of the Tarheel and the Interfraternity Council and whatever; but it was done in the Y.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

What was done in the Y?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

The law suit was planned in the YMCA in one of the offices. But other than that, Anne didn't play any role. There wasn't much role. It was a role for lawyers and fundraisers and I don't think Anne was a fundraiser.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

She seemed to have a lot of student [Phone ringing] [Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

So, then the Vietnam War came along. There was an anti-Vietnam War protest. There was a big protest here, but not like at Columbia or Berkeley. The graduate students went on strike for a day or two. Then we had a meeting of the faculty council to show our opposition to Nixon. The resolution that finally came out, as I recall, was something to the effect that they would encourage or endorse or something a trip to Washington to see our legislators. By the way, that was called "Washington Witness One." And then we had Washington Witness Two in a similar situation. And so through the Y, we rented buses. Gustavison and me signed our names to the list. We agreed to pay eight hundred dollars or eight thousand dollars, I don't know, for the buses. The buses were to be at the Planetarium at four in the morning or five in the morning or something, and we'd go up to Washington. And I think the first time we went, we were to meet our Congressman. Nick Delafinicus was our Congressman from Durham. He and Bill Friday made the arrangements with all the congressional delegation to meet with groups. And then the two senators would meet with all of us. We had a great big forum there on Capitol Hill. So, we had eight or nine buses and a couple of thousand students. We all went up. The Y did it all. And then, "Where are we going to eat?" The arrangements were made by the Y that we would have box lunches at the Methodist Building which was right across the street from the Capitol. Then we had to wait for the bus drivers to have so many hours between, and then we came back. We stopped somewhere in Virginia and they were expecting us and we had a late supper. So, it was a twenty hour day or something, but that was done through the Y. Then we had our second one. We had Washington Witness Two. It was another event. It might have been the killings at Kent State or something which prompted another trip. Again, the faculty council endorsed it and there were a thousand people around Pope Place wanting to see the Chancellor. And this was to diffuse, not really to diffuse, but to be constructive. What do you do when you're angry and upset? Do you have a teach-in or something? Or do you cancel classes? So, that's for the demands. But we didn't want to burn down the NROTC. They were having their anniversary or something around then and they were going to have a big parade and so on. And they really feared that there might be trouble at that point. They thought, "Get everybody out of town." We had Washington Witness Two. And this time we saw new Congressmen. We'd seen our other Congressman, but they were on our list. We saw a new Congressman. Father Drinon was there from Massachusetts and what's her name from Long Island? The one who wore the hats. I don't know. And then there was the new one from Colorado, the woman. And Ron Dellams. There were a whole bunch of new Congressmen. We thought, "This time we'll see new Congresspeople as well as our old." And then you sign up for who you want to see and you see one. Al Lowenstein was one of them. You see one of them for forty-five minutes and then you move on and you see another one. It was a great day. I was with Anne.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

So, she did go on this trip?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Oh, yes, she went on the trips. I took my whole family, but we were with Anne. And we signed up for whatever there was nobody

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else signing up for. We signed up last to go see the unexciting people. She was great.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

What did you see as her role? She has been credited or referred to in playing a role in keeping these activities at Chapel Hill non-violent.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Yes, well, that was one of the things. I know that Dan Okin was chairman of the faculty at that time and he was going to not go. He was going to stay here and witness the NROTC marching around to stop anybody from setting fire to the NROTC business. So, what we tried to do was find something constructive because there were a lot of excess energies, you know, and people wanted to do something. And so, we thought, "What's a good way of doing something constructive?" And that was really why the Washington Witness program went into effect. We had at least five thousand students. And then what they did there, we met with our two senators and it was set up so that selected people could speak for three minutes on the mike. And that was the President of the Student Body, the editor-in-chief of the Law Review. You know, the head of the Interfraternity and Intersorority Councils. They'd say, "My name is so and so and I'm from such and such, North Carolina. I'm against the war and here's why." And they would give very inspirational things and then Senator Ervin would explain why the war was lawful and legal and necessary. And the other senator, whose name escapes me, at the end of the day he says, "I'm convinced. I'm not going to vote for the war anymore." Up to that very day before, he had been voting for appropriations and things. So, he turned around after hearing all these inspiring statements. And then some people went to the White House to audiences there. It was really extremely constructive and helpful and it felt very good that you were doing something. It was the YMCA, you know, who arranged for the buses, who arranged for the food, who arranged to have supper when supper is ready, who arranged for the rendezvous and the meetings and got the various Congressmen to say, "I'll meet with you." It was a lot of work. And then there was the press. We had announced everything and that was in the Y Building, you know, and it was somebody from the Y who had newspaper experience. So, it was a campus Y operation.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Can we talk a little bit about the food worker's strike and Anne's role in that strike?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

The strike was for wages and more than that, for dignity. And it was a dirty thing that the University did in that they were working people eight hours and paying them eight hours, but they were not paying them minimum wage on the theory that minimum wage doesn't apply to state employees. It did. So they were wrong. But the eight hours would start at 6:00 in the morning when the people would come to prepare breakfast and end at 8:30. Then it would start again at 11:00 and go until 2:00 and then it would stop. It would start again at 5:00 until 7:30. I don't know how many hours that is, but they would get eight hours a day of work in, but they had to be there fourteen hours, you know. There's nothing much you can do between 9:30 and 11:00. They used to hang around outside Lenoir Hall with nothing to do. So, that was one thing. And then, the guy who ran it, there were a lot of grievances about, "Why can't I be a cashier? Why do only whites get to be cashiers?" And things like that. You'd been there so many years, and that didn't help you to get to be a cook. So, there was no upgrading. The people really felt abused and I don't think there was any particular spark of any sort that started it. But they went on the strike. I was the President of the AAUP then and we were having a meeting of the Executive Committee of the AAUP at one of the food places which has now since been closed. And we found out we couldn't be served because there was a strike. So, we then thought, "Should we get involved in this?" And I thought, "Well, we are involved in it." We can't even have our meeting. The faculty is involved." So, we started an expanded executive Committee and we invited the Food Worker's Union and the graduate

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students and the YMCA and the dean of something to meet every day with a brown bag lunch. And we met every day and tried to negotiate and basically, be informative and dispel rumors; all that sort of thing. Gustavison met with us regularly, as I recall. Well, then the thought was, "This thing has got to be settled." The Governor gave everybody a pay raise, ultimately, after he had sent the troops in to rescue the old law school building. That was a trauma to have the State Troopers to come in with big sticks and helmets and plastic masks and everything. They took one giant step forward and we took a half a step backward and it was really traumatic. But then, what do you do about it? Then the Faculty Council adopted a resolution that would appoint a committee to look into see what's right and what's wrong. And all that time, there was a Scott. He was brother of the governor or the uncle of the governor. I forget what his first name was. But he was an extremely influential legislator and might well have been a Trustee. Anne called him every day to keep him informed of what was going on so that he could tell whoever was appropriate about it. And she had an entire network of people that she was calling every day and inform that it's not true that this happened or that happened. And the only violence that took place was that one day the strikers, at 7:15, and it closes at 7:30, went through Lenoir Hall and turned over tables. They came in one door, walked through, turned over the tables that were there and went out the other door. Somebody called that "assault upon a table" or something. Well, that was the headlines for strikers, you know. "Strikers commit mayhem." And Anne Queen was calling all over. All they did was turn over a table. They went in there and turned them up and the situation was corrected in three minutes. It was not as WRAL reported. And she had the big network. And then, who should be on the committee to investigate Anne Queen, obviously? So, they came out and the recommendation was that wages be repaid, the Federal required wages, to obey the Federal law. And that there be a grievance process. And that was the first grievance process for the SBA people. They are now arguing about the grievance process. That was Anne Queen's grievance process, initially, but they kicked out the lawyers. I told Anne, "Put in a lawyer thing. They need somebody there to advise them." It goes back that far.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

So she was really important in formulating this first grievance process?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Yes. And at the same time, the black student movements went on. The black students allied themselves with the black cafeteria workers. And they had their grievances and their grievances were such that they wanted a black history week or the black Afro-American program and that there be efforts to recruit black professors. So, let me backtrack a little bit. When we first started to integrate here, there were very few blacks and the YMCA, under Anne Queen, started an outreach program where the YMCA people would visit the black high schools and tell them you don't have to be afraid at UNC and come and give it a trial.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

The Upward Bound program? Is that what you're referring to?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, first it was just a visitation. And then there was, "Let's have them come on the same weekend and show them the place." And then there was the summer program for the Upward Bound to invite the people to come in who are admitted, I guess, to spend six weeks here. All those were YMCA programs which were gradually assimilated by the administration. But Anne Queen initiated all of those. Then they put out pamphlets, "Why UNC is a good place to come." And they'd have a picture of a white and a black on the front. Those went out to every black high school in the state. That was out of the Y budget and there was a committee on all this. So, those were the ones that were too far to visit. But the Y would go out in teams of two or three and then we would go to the Student Council or the College Council or whatever and tell them, "Think of us. And here's why you should think of us." So Anne Queen initiated

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all that. She would deny she initiated it. She'd say some of the students initiated it and all she did was facilitate it or something, but without her being there to facilitate it, it never would have happened. So, that was her role in helping to integrate the University. And then we set up a faculty committee on minority students or something like that, which still exists. Anne Queen and Dick Phillips, who was then the Dean of the Law School or the co-chairman, handled that committee. And also how to end the cafeteria strike and what to do constructively about it. And there were a lot of suggestions. I don't know what you call it, but if you are in training over at the hospital, if you're a menial something, you have an opportunity to learn some skills and improve yourself. [Phone ringing]

CINDY CHEATHAM:

How did you perceive Anne's religious background and how that influenced her work at the Y and with other colleagues of hers?

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Well, she kept it under control. You know, she went to Berea. You can get in there if you're in the lower half of the economic stratum of your Appalachian county. So, you have to be there and she went there after ten years in the paper mill. And her sister is there in the paper mill and I guess her parents were. And I remember she was at our house once and we were playing some labor songs and there was something about you don't get out and you never see the sun. When you get out of work it's dark and she commented that it's really terrible to get out of work and it's always dark. I think her religious posture was motivated by her social concerns. When I was on the Y board, we opened with a prayer every meeting. Do you still do that? I think that disappeared somewhere during Anne's tutelage. But whoever would give it would really work on it. They didn't ad lib the prayer. I mean, they had something written down which was usually worth listening to. It was a Christian association and it was open to everybody and it was non-denominational and non-creedal, non-anything, but she treasured her years at the Yale divinity school and would comment on them like the people she met there. And then, I don't know, she went to work for Friend's Service Committee, which is religious, but not very. And then to the UN. As I recall, she worked at the Friend's Service Committee at the UN as one of their observers or something. And from there, she went to Georgia to be a religious person. And she left the religious job at Georgia to come here to be in a non-religious YMCA, which changed it's name to Campus Y to eliminate "men" and "Christian" from the name. It wasn't men and it wasn't Christian. It was anybody. So, she secularized the YMCA. The ministers in town had an association and she went to them and she had a sense of belonging there and of being there. We had a great group of campus ministers at the Methodist Foundation and the Catholic, the Baptist and they are all nice, very enthusiastic, intelligent, well-meaning, doing good young people. Anne was in that crowd and felt very comfortable. I think they were her real social people. I think she got more out of the meetings of the Minister's Alliance or whatever it was called. I think she got a lot of support there and felt very good and comfortable going there. But she never imposed any religiosity on anybody. I mean, unless you knew her, you had no idea that she was a minister. I mean, she never said she was a minister and never referred to herself as a minister. There were no crosses or religious emblems of any sort in her office or in her home. And then she retired. She retired before she had to retire. I asked her, "Why do you want to go? We need you here." Everybody said that, but she was going home to Canton and to live in a log cabin that her grandfather had built, which if it had electricity, it was fairly recent. And if it had indoor plumbing, it was fairly recent. She said she was going to go home and take care of her elder sister or sisters. They spent all their lives working in that damn paper mill in Canton and then she broke just a little bit loose and went down to the Community College in Charlotte where she taught and did some YMCA work like work she had done here. But she basically stayed in Canton. And she would come back for the annual International Bazaars.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Well, thank you so much for spending time with me.

DANIEL H. POLLITT:

Okay, well, as you may have gathered, any time I can spend discussing Anne Queen is a privilege.

CINDY CHEATHAM:

Thank you so much.