. . . came out from Capitol Hill. I knew him through Tom Lambeth and
Joel Fleishman and others in my office that had been at Chapel Hill and
had actually known Anne at Chapel Hill. Then I would have to begin with
the time that we had the Chapel Hill demonstrations.
Somewhat toward the tail end of my administration we had created the Good
Neighbor Council, which was really a human relations council, but people
didn't know what human relations councils were. I stole that Good
Neighbor program really from Franklin Roosevelt who had named the Latin
American initiative of his administration the Good Neighbor Program and
that had sort of faded into history. I thought it was an apt name for
what we talking about and so we adopted that name. I think they now call
it the Human Relations Commission. It's enacted in the law. We just did
it with an executive order. And it began to talk about jobs and
education and doing away with the burdens of segregation and made that a
focal point. That followed the street demonstrations and the sit-ins.
The sit-ins, of course, preceded the street demonstrations. It was part
of our effort to let the black community know that we were trying to
help them achieve their aspirations. So that was in place. Then a group
of people in Chapel Hill demanded that the town of Chapel Hill enact an
open accommodations law. There was Lyndon Johnson's open accommodations
legislation that was being debated in Congress and Sam Ervin and others
here were against it, of course. We were in a campaign in which
Richardson Preyor was more or less carrying our banner and Dan Moore and
Sam Ervin were in opposition to what we had been doing. In that kind of
atmosphere, came this demand that Chapel Hill's board enact an open
accommodations law. Now I doubt very seriously if they had the authority
to do it, but in any event, they very properly, I suppose, reacted to a
demand that they do something and they might have been inclined to do
it. Certainly, Chapel Hill was one of the most liberal places in the
state. But out of all of that came demonstrations in front of two or
three places. Grady's was a particular source. I think it's the Grady's
out there on the Pittsboro Road. I'm a little bit vague about whether
they had moved out there or whether they were still on the Durham side,
but they were continuing to demonstrate. And by that time, we were sort
of over the hump on that issue. This was a resurgence of the
demonstrations. They had declared, I think, CORE, that they were really
going to descend upon Chapel Hill and close it down if the City Council
didn't do this and I assured the City Council and the people that nobody
was going to take over running North Carolina, that we were going to
continue to run it. The first time, I was a little bit more adversarial
against that kind of movement because I thought it was so totally
unnecessary, disruptive and in fact, I thought it was very damaging to
Richardson Preyor's campaign. You could be sure that the other crowd
that Beverly Lake was running ran third to Dan Moore. And they, of
course, were against us politically, so all of this came in the middle
of a political campaign. But that didn't say that we shouldn't try to do
something about it. Now Anne had become very good friends with Ralph
Scott who is now dead, but he was Governor Kerr Scott's brother and
probably an outstanding state senator of our time; just an excellent
public servant, very forward looking. In fact, in my memory, years later
they made him an honorary member of the Golden Fleece. I could be wrong
about that. But anyway, the Chapel Hill people took to him even though
he was a State graduate. And he and Anne and David Coltrane, who was an
old Conservative in a way. . . . He had been director of the budget and
he had a little bit of a feud with Kerr Scott and Kerr Scott fired him
for supporting Umstead instead of his county. He was sort of a symbol of
the
Page 2Conservative wing, but I made him the Director of
Administration and then they retired him with age. I knew he was a great
Methodist labor, so I figured that I had just the right man to be head
of the Good Neighbor Council because he had all the credentials from the
conservative side and I thought I was touching the Methodist vein there
when I put him in. So, he did a great job. We wanted to settle this
thing over there. We wanted to get rid of it and wanted to calm it down
because we had not really had these things that had gotten out of hand.
We had handled the difficult ones a year earlier. But this was
particularly difficult. I know that Anne had the confidence of all the
people that were taking part in this. It wasn't just black students; it
was really mostly Chapel Hill students that were doing the
demonstrating. I know the CORE people were certainly doing their part to
keep it stirred up. I never really completely understood that. But Anne
more or less took charge of calming that down. And I know she and
Coltrane and Scott and others sat up all night dealing and consulting
and conferring. Finally, they arrested a great many of them and
sentenced all of them, including a professor of religion at Duke. And I
commuted all of those sentences, partially I'm sure, with Anne Queen's
urging, to zero. I didn't pardon them because they had indeed committed
the crimes for which they were convicted. But I did commute the
sentences so they wouldn't go to jail. I just didn't want North Carolina
to send a professor of religion to jail and I didn't think it was fair
to send the students either. Some of them got to stay in jail a little
while. John Ely's book The Free Men tells that story better than I can
remember it. But anyhow, that's the way I first got to know Anne Queen
well. I probably knew her before and her memory obviously, would be
better than mine on that particular point. I'm sure I had met her
before. And after I left office, I remember doing two or three things
over at Chapel Hill. I had a project going I called the State of
American States. We would hold conferences over there and we would
completely bring together all the help we needed for whatever it was we
were doing. It became so obvious to me then, the high regard the
students had for her and the great influence that she had. And really,
the considerable part that the Y played beyond what it played when I was
there. I was a member of it when I was there, but it wasn't a force on
campus. Anne Queen made it sort of the social conscience of the campus
in a way that it had never been before and probably isn't now without
Anne's presence. Maybe it is. Maybe she left enough of the tradition
that it is. But I always thought that Anne carried forward the
fundamental tradition of Chapel Hill that Frank Graham had established;
and before him, Edward Kidder Graham and other people going on back to,
I suppose, Cornelius Spencer. In any event, you know, there was a
special spirit about Chapel Hill that said the status quo is not good
enough. And that's always a risky social and political posture to take
because most people are comfortable with the status quo unless they are
bound down by it. And I think that better than anyone else, Anne Queen
picked up Frank Graham's spirit. But she certainly wasn't there to be a
part of what he had done for North Carolina and for Chapel Hill. But
those of us that were, I think especially appreciated that here was
somebody like her on campus. In a way, she was an unlikely somebody,
this young woman from the mountains who was there in anything but a
major administrative position and had made her job, her organization,
the Y, and her presence such an important part of Chapel Hill. The
University certainly needs an Anne Queen. It makes a tremendous
difference. And then of course, my association with her in subsequent
years was less dramatic.
I better let you ask some questions.