No. This was at the Monogram Club. It just doesn't exist
anymore. It was the Monogram Club. And we were eating lunch there and
the strike was on, so there was nothing to eat. We met for lunch and
there was nothing to eat. I remember, I guess we had two things to
discuss and one was should we endorse Howard Lee's candidacy
for mayor. I think that's what it was. Because this was a
group, the eight of us or whatever we were, the AAUP was pretty
influential then. We thought that our endorsement would be pretty
influential. There was a good guy who had announced who was white and
who was the dean of the liberal arts college and he was a good fellow
and he was an AAUP member. Should we endorse him or should we endorse
Howard Lee who nobody knew very well, but who was black. The decision
was made to endorse Howard Lee. We did that without eating and then
somebody, me I think, said, "What do we do about the cafeteria
strike?" And they said, "Well, it's none of
our business. You know, that's for the administration to deal
with those problems, not the faculty," which was a recurrent
theme. I said, "Well, it is our business if we're
going to have another lunch." So we agreed that we would
monitor the situation. There was a monitoring role. So a fellow named
Fred Cleveland was the chairman of the faculty, of the entire faculty
and he was also the chairman of the political science department. He had
been the President of the AAUP maybe two or three terms earlier. And his
wife was active in the AAUP. And again, the faculty then was maybe eight
hundred. And we used to have coffee at Lenoir for a nickel. So you got
to know everybody pretty well. So we asked
Page 8 Fred if
he would join with us and we thought we'd meet every day,
have lunch every day and bring your brown bag and have lunch and we
would monitor what was going on and put out a daily report because there
was always the problem of rumors and that sort of thing. Then the
graduate student association was going to support the strikers and they
kept talking about they'll have a strike. They will strike in
support of the food cafeteria strike. So we thought we ought to bring
them in, so we invited the president of the graduate students
association to meet with us every day and let us know what
they're doing. And we thought we ought to know what the black
student movement is doing and we ought to know what the cafeteria
workers were doing. So we had what we called the enlarged AAUP executive
committee of about ten to fifteen people who met every day bringing
their brown bag and report on what's doing. I think we asked
Sitterson who was the chancellor to send somebody and I don't
think he did. Chuck Wright was in the English department and he was our
editor and he put out a daily document, a strike document. Here, for
example, I have the one of March 31, 1969 and it says,
"Hospital director and nonacademic employees confer,"
because the employees at the hospital quickly joined the union. And then
the next headline is, "Medical School ombudsman appointed.
Daniel Young, associate professor of medicine." And he was in
our group. He was on our executive board. Then Friday, March 28,
"Personnel investigates janitress complaint." The
people who cleaned the buildings organized and I guess, I
don't know how you look at it now with women's
rights, but the women had the same job as the men and
Page 9 they had to carry the big trashcans and they weighed fifty and
seventy-five pounds and some of these women were elderly and they
didn't want to carry the heavy things. That was their
complaint and that's on the Friday of March 28. Then
there's "A special faculty committee on nonacademic
personnel agrees on its charge." And then there's a
back page as well. But every day we put out something so that the whole
University would be informed of what's going on. The idea was
to quell rumors.