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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0215, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Emerging from a family of progressive ministers, military servicemen, and attorneys, Daniel Pollitt came to link his religious and liberal racial beliefs to his civic duty. His forward-minded family heritage influenced his choice of careers. Pollitt worked as a clerk for a court of appeals judge and later served on the staff of Joseph Rauh, founder of Americans for Democratic Action. By the late 1940s, Pollitt discovered a passion for teaching and taught legal courses at American University and the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. However, when asked to sign a loyalty oath stating noninvolvement with racial justice organizations, Pollitt refused. Instead, he assumed a teaching position at the University of North Carolina School of Law. At UNC, Pollitt emerged as the liberal faculty supporter for civil rights causes. Although some students remained apathetic to social issues, Pollitt argues that UNC students, and more notably, local high school students, pushed civil rights issues to the foreground in Chapel Hill. Student activists opposed the Speaker Ban law, which prohibited communist speakers from speaking on campus. Pollitt describes his efforts, along with those of Bill Alstyne and McNeil Smith, to defend the students. Smith's closing statement invoked the progressive tradition of UNC students, and the Speaker Ban was abolished. Pollitt also participated in nonviolent training to prepare blacks and student activists to resist segregationists' violent attacks, and he served as the faculty advisor to the student NAACP organization. He wrote favorable articles about southern integration for UNC law school dean Henry Brandis, including "Equal Protection in Public Education, 1954-61," "Dime Store Demonstrations: Events and Legal Problems of the First Sixty Days," and "Legal Problems in Southern Desegregation: The Chapel Hill Story." Pollitt's involvement with civil rights protests primarily consisted of picketing and legal defense of civil rights demonstrators. He actively sought ways to recruit black students to UNC. Pollitt ultimately found support from basketball coach Dean Smith, thereby helping to break the color barrier in UNC sports. Pollitt worked with several advocacy groups, including the North Carolina American Civil Liberties Union and the Association of American University Professors. His support of civil rights issues led to physical and verbal threats.
Daniel Pollitt describes the process of desegregation in the South. He discusses his involvement with civil rights activism and his relationship with progressive organizations and prominent North Carolinians, including UNC law school dean Henry Brandis and UNC basketball coach Dean Smith.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I am a retired professor of law at the University of North Carolina. Both my grandfathers are ministers and both my parents were very liberal.
What kind of ministers were your grandfathers?
One was a Methodist and one was Episcopalian. That doesn't mean they were
liberal.
And where were they from?
My mother was from Cincinnati, and my father was from various parts of Eastern Kentucky, where his father was moved around from parish to parish every three years; they rotate.
It's kind of funny to hear that eastern Kentucky would be a liberal bastion—or that he would be liberal coming out of it.
He enlisted in the Marine Corps in World War I, and then he stayed in for
a while. And he was brighter than most I guess, cause the Marine Corps
decided to send him to law school. And so he was stationed at Quantico,
Virginia, if you know the area, and went to George Washington University
Law School in the District of Columbia. And so that's where I was born,
in the District. And then he was assigned to JAG—the Judge Advocate
General's office—and there was a big cutback in the Marine Corps during
Harding's day, sometime, and so he had an
What year was this?
I don't know, 1924 or 25, somewhere in there.
This wasn't our more recent involvement—
No, but they were the descendants of whatever his name is, Sandinsita? He was then trying to drive out the sugar companies and so on. In any event, they were very liberal. I have a brother and sister, and they're all liberal.
What are their names?
Basil is my brother, and Betty is my sister.
Did I get your parents' names—?
Father is Basil, and my mother was Mima, like Jemima, but just Mima. So
that's where I came from. So when I got out of the Marine Corps
What were their specialties? Did they have a particular area of law?
Well, my father was a law teacher. And he taught various courses. And my
mother worked for the government in various things. She was one of the
few women in the Department of Justice, there were six of them in the
Department of Justice, and they put them all in the lands division, to
seize properties that were necessary for something—instead of something
suitable for women, I guess they thought. But anyway, that's my
background. My wife is a lawyer, her father was on the supreme court,
Wally Rutledge. And he was an extremely—he and Justice Murphy were the
left, then came Black and Douglas toward the center, and then
Frankfurter over
And what was your wife's name?
Her name is Jean Anne. And her family is from Eastern Kentucky.
So how did you come to this neck of the woods?
I worked, clerked for a court of appeals judge when I got out of law school. And then I got a job with a man named Joseph Rauh, and he was one of the founders of the Americans for Democratic Action. And he represented the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther at the time, and was doing civil rights and civil liberties and labor law, and that was the nature of the business, so there were two of us. Among our more distinguished clients were Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman when they appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And I stayed there five years, and thought I would go into teaching. I taught at night at American University to see if I liked it, and I did like it.
When you were working for this law firm, did you already have—it sounds like you already had—that sort of liberal slant.
Oh yeah, I sought them out. That's what I wanted to do.
Did that solidify your liberal leanings?
Yeah, it made me more angry.
So you liked teaching.
I liked teaching, and I wanted to get out of Washington DC. We had two
young children. So a job opportunity came at the University of Arkansas,
in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I could teach constitutional law. I had
been offered jobs at far more prestigious institutions, but the subject
matter was business-type law, and I don't know anything about that.
But obviously some people did.
Most people. There were five or six of us. The whole architectural school refused to sign, and they all went to Rice as a group.
The architectural school. Isn't that interesting.
Yeah, they no longer had an architectural school.
The way Joe Straley described this university is that it wasn't like a racist sort of atmosphere, but it was just accepting of the way things were. Was that your impression when you got here?
When I came here, the Dean of the Law School, Henry Brandis, was running for the school board. And his idea was to make—let me think if I can remember the name of the plan—but we had a plan here in North Carolina that we were not going to have total resistance, massive resistance, we're not going to do all the draconian things that other states were doing. But the plan was that all blacks are assigned to black schools, and all whites to white schools. And then if anybody wants to transfer to the other school, they applied to the school board.
Freedom of choice.
No, it wasn't freedom of choice at all. Your choice was to apply, and
then if you apply, the school board would decide whether to grant the
application on a number of factors: qualifications, and whether the
effect on where you come from, where you're going, the community, there
were a whole bunch of things. And as a result, nobody was transferred.
And when you say give your paper, you mean present it to the group.
Yeah, and it was a big—I think it was at the Saint Paul Church, the black church there on Rosemary, and there were maybe fifty people there or something.
So this would have been— 1955? Brown vs. Board of Ed was 1954?
I came here, I went to Arkansas in '55, and came here in '57. So this
would have been '57.
So you just got right in the thick of it once you got here.
I just got right into the thick of it. And then we filed a suit on behalf
of the two kids who had been denied under the Pearsall Plan, and I was
in charge of fund raising or something or other. And we met at the Rat
for a luncheon/ fund raiser. And then I met Floyd
And were you successful?
Well, not really, because we'd get people, and then they'd Xerox it, and
then they'd say it has to be in original handwritten, or we had the
Mootness case, that they applied to go to the sixth grade, but now two
years had gone by and it's now the eighth grade, but they'd asked to go
to the sixth grade, so you'd have to start all over again. There were
all sorts of things, and nothing happened, and then we decided to elect
a school board more to our liking, and this was done at the Community
Church, mostly. And Doctor Peters in our church was elected to be the
chair of our school board, and we had a majority, so they started to
integrate. So that was the school board thing. And it was the first
grade, or the first three grades, or something. And then you had to get
a black teacher in the white school
Tell me about, just sort of in general, if you could tell me about the
activities that you
No, never. I didn't publicize anything I was doing, but I didn't hide it,
I couldn't hide it very well. And Dean Brandis had asked me to prepare
this paper, and then it was printed, and I was the president of the
From the community, or from people at the University?
"We're going to blow up your house tonight," "Go back to where to came
from"—Arkansas?
So these were obviously all anonymous.
They were all anonymous. But they were obscene, threatening.
How did you react to those?
Well, I saw Charlie Jones, and I said, "Charlie, somebody's going to blow up my house this week." I said, "You get letters like this?" He said, "All the time." I said, "What do you do?" He said, "I have a big wicker basket I keep them in." I was worried a time or two. But I didn't move my family out or anything. And I didn't get a gun. I figured, we'll see.
And it sounds like they didn't blow up your house.
They didn't blow up the house or anything. So that was the school integration, and it took legislative action and electing a school board to do it, we couldn't do it in the courts. We failed on those efforts. And the same was true I think throughout most of the state.
And this was the Chapel Hill-Carrboro—The Committee for Open Movies, in '61, January '61?
Something like that. So I was the first picketer. And my sign had "Segregation: t'ain't necessarily so." Clever. So we kept on picketing, and we used to have a half hour, and would try to be a black and a white person, two people picketing. And then we went across the street and started to picket there. My stint was Saturday night, when it changed, 8 to 8:30, something like that. Which I did for seven or eight months, I guess. It just went on and on.
It seems like that time of day might be subject to rowdiness or harassment—
I didn't experience any rowdiness, but there's an alley that comes out
next to the—there's Jeff's Confectionery, and I think between Jeff's and
the movie there's an alley? And the guy who relieved me was a graduate
student in sociology, and for some reason, whoever it was, they knew who
it was, found out it was an off-duty policeman from Burlington, two or
three would come up the alley, and knock the guy down, and kick him a
little bit, and then run around and disappear. And repeated several
times. So we alerted the chief-hey chief, there's a crime going on. And
he could never find the fella.
How much was a movie back then?
I don't know, 75 cents or something. It is like today, comparable. So
that's the
Does she still have a good memory?
Yeah, she's around. She was active in everything. And she was the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom or whatever it is. She's from New Bern, where her father had the Presbyterian Church.
So again, it surprises me that you as a professor were able to picket for—what did you say, six or seven months—
Every Saturday night.
—And be part of that, and there were no repercussions, it sounds like.
Well, there were a number of professors picketing. I mean, that's the bulk of us. There weren't very many people who were not professors in Chapel Hill out of 7,000 people, or 10,000.
Joe [Straley] yesterday talked about how he was an advisor to a bunch of student groups—this was probably a little bit later on—he said he was an SDS advisor, and at some point the University wanted to get a little more control over these student groups and protests as integration moved over to this campus. Were you involved in any of that?
Yeah, I was the advisor to the NAACP. I was as black as anybody else on
this campus.
And he seemed to suggest that it was a pro forma kind of thing, where he
really
I had a lot to do with the NAACP. We had meetings—there were eight, ten, something like that, black students. And they had lots of concerns. And we would meet at Gerrard Hall. Fairly frequently. And the head of campus security would come. And I'd tell him, "We don't need you." Cause he was an intimidating factor. He'd say, "I'm here to help you, make sure nobody hurts you." I said, "No, no, we're fine. Get out. Don't come."
I would assume he'd also listen to what was being said.
Yeah, and take names. Of course, how many names? It's not hard to identify the ten black students on campus. But there's one thing, the hospital was segregated completely, and we thought that was wrong. And there was an overseer or somebody at that time who had come to the campus to hear anybody, about what might be wrong with the campus. So we thought that we would go and talk with the overseers. And it was arranged we'd meet at wherever they were meeting. And we had an appointment from 10 to 10:30 or something, and none of them [the black students] showed up. So I went in by myself, representing the NAACP. You know, they were kids, mostly.
So it's not that they were afraid—
Well, it's a little bit—but then we decided we needed some black
athletes. And that might draw more people. So we went to see Frank
McGuire, who was the coach of the basketball team, and asked him, why
don't you recruit a black player? And he said, "I'd love to. There's a
guy in New York"—I forget his name, but he played in the NBA for 20
years—
So he was going to recruit him to come down?
He said, "See if you can help me."
So he would send blacks up there, and blacks would come down?
No, whites! Dumb whites!
But after the movies, there came public accommodations in general. And the four freshmen at A&T in Greensboro went to the dime store, and asked for service and were denied, and they went back the next day in larger numbers, and a third day in larger numbers, and then the Bennett College people and whites at UNC-G joined them, and then the hecklers, and then they closed the dime store. But during that time it spread, over to NC Central and the other black colleges in this state. And here, the high school students started it all.
This was at the Colonial.
Yeah, it was a guy named Foster—
Harold Foster.
Yes, Harold was the president of the student body at Lincoln, and the
captain of the football team, and the point guard on the basketball
team. And he and his buddy, who was
This isn't Floyd, is it? Floyd McKissock?
No, he later became the chair. This was not James Farmer either— James
Farmer was the head of the national CORE, or the executive director, and
he had a staff of three or something. And he sent one of them down here,
and that was the guy. So he gave a talk at the center, where you have
the—recreation center. And he had the drama people act out—he said,
okay, now you're the picketer, and you're the policeman, and you're the
store owner, now what are you going to do? And they'd say "Nigger get
out of here," and what are you going to do? They said, "Leave my store
please." Now, is that what the storekeeper is really going to say?
Reenactments.
So they acted it out, and the next day they went back to the Colonial Drug and did it. And that started a year or more of sit-in protests.
And the date I have for that is February 28th, 1960. So it was almost forty one years ago this week.
That was the first one.
Perhaps on a [cold and miserable] day like today.
Well, it was snowing, I remember. I went with Charlie to bail out the guy, and observed the psychodrama unfold.
And did you participate in any of those sort of protests?
Oh yeah. I didn't march too often. But I had a picketing thing, and I raised money. There was a lot of legal matters, there were lots of arrests. And the problem was—has anybody told you about the Pines Restaurant episode? A guy from the Village Voice was down here to speak to journalism class or somebody. And I don't know whether he was black or not, but they had made arrangements to have dinner at the Pines Restaurant, and the Pines was THE restaurant at the time. And they got there, five or six of them, and one of them was black, so they told them—and the black was David Dansby, who was then a law student, now a lawyer in Greensboro—and he was the first undergraduate to graduate, black undergraduate, and then come to law school—so they threw him out, and the next night, a group went back to the Pines, including a minister, a retired Episcopalian Minister, Father Parker—how these names suddenly come back! So when they were told to leave, they sat down. And the police came and carried them out. So they were charged with trespass, for refusing to leave, and resisting arrest.
Did they resist arrest?
Yeah, they sat down and had to be carried out. So each one is a separate
fine, and the bail for each one was $150. So you needed $300 for
everybody that sat in. And that was expensive. And I tried to raise
money, I went to Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, and the
northern colleges were anxious to help, so I wrote them and said, we
don't want any bodies—we have enough bodies—but we need money, so if you
would like to come and sit in and resist arrest, don't come, but send
$150 as your contribution. And I did things like that. But in any event,
Father Parker lost his hat during this thing. And the headline in the
Chapel Hill Newspaper was, "Father Parker Loses Hat." So the next week
he got about 30 hats sent to him.
Sounds like there was some support out there.
Oh, there was a lot of support. I mean, again, you had the student body resolve not to patronize all these segregationist things, and the interfraternity council decided that— one of the sororities had their Spring Banquet at the Pines to show that they were going to go to the Pines. But by far and large, the student organizations supported the boycott. And then there was a spring break—Easter—there was a sit in at the post office and fast. And the Ku Klux Klan came to town—
Tell me about that; there was a fast on the steps—
Yes, for about a week. And they could drink water, and they would go
across the street to the Presbyterian church when they had to go to the
bathroom. So that was going on, and the Ku Klux Klan came Easter eve and
they didn't do anything, they rode around the block three or four times
and rode out to a farm and tried to burn a cross and weren't very
successful. A bunch of Duke students were there, and they sang the Old
Rugged Cross, and the guy in charge
So you're saying the Duke students were members of the group—?
No, they were there for a good time. They all had their beer cans and
everything.
Were they purposely trying to screw it up?
Yeah, I guess. Or maybe just youthful exuberance.
And these [KKK] guys just came from the countryside?
They all looked like JC Penney shoe clerks, unemployed furniture workers or something. It wasn't very ferocious. In anticipation, you thought it would be. So that went on and on and on.
The Student Peace Union, were you involved with that at all?
The Vietnam stuff?
The was a white group, the Student Peace Union, and Harold Foster joined with them and formed the Committee for Open Business a little later on?
Whatever the names were.
And that had to do with the accommodations and stuff like that. I didn't know if you were a member of those groups—
Very loose—Harold Foster, his sister works here at the law school—
And what is her name?
Esphur Foster. But Harold was—these things were not formal. If there was a name assigned, hardly anybody knew it.
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
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Did any of this come into the classroom? You were teaching at the time—was this ever fodder for class discussion, what was going on outside? Did that ever come into the classroom?
Well, I taught Constitutional law, so when we came to Brown against the school board, we'd teach it, and other things, cases. But I didn't stress it.
I was curious whether the students themselves—
A lot of students were on the picket lines.
—And whether they brought it to the classroom and discussed it.
Everybody knew it. That was topic "A" so called, and every day there'd be a letter in the newspaper, and there'd be a slight variance of something going on. But we had 800 arrests, or something like that. I have an article on it, I'll give you the site if you'd like.
Were your class members uniformly in favor of what was happening, or was there any sort of dissension?
I really don't know—they were much more disturbed about school prayer
So that was an issue even then. Hard to believe. Well, we've gone about an hour, do you want to knock off?
That takes in the sit-ins. And then came the Vietnam things, but if you
want to know, I never thought—one thing I knew is that I went back to my
old law firm every summer, and had extremely good relations with Joe
Rauh, the old boss, and when I left it, the firm grew, so there were
four people in it, or five people. And there were always interesting
problems, and I knew I could always go back there, so I had an ace in
the hole, you know. If they fired me, I'd go
The American Association of University Professors.
And we had a daily lunch with everybody, to coordinate, and we had a daily newsletter of what's going on so that everybody would know. And Sitterson was the chancellor. And there was also an advisory something or other to the chancellor of faculty members, nine people, and there were three elected each year for a three year term. And I was on the advisory committee. So I'd meet every month with Chancellor—and had giving him advice on things, it was mostly approving promotions. And I liked Sitterson very much. And then we had the big protests, filling up Polk Place, and then the speaker ban case came along.
Tell me about that.
Well, the way I always understood it is that the sit-ins were going on, and there was a guy named Al Lowenstein, who later became very famous—
Allard Lowenstein, from the Kennedy [assassination]—
Yeah, Al Lowenstein was then teaching at state. And Shaw University had a
graduate who was the ambassadress of some African country to the United
Nations. So they invited her down to receive an honor of some sort. And
Al Lowenstein made arrangements for her to speak to his class as well,
as long as she was there. And then he took her to lunch at the Sir
Walter Hotel, and at the time the Sir Walter was "the" hotel in Raleigh,
and that's were the debutante call was held, and that's where the
legislators met for lunch. And here comes Al Lowenstein with this black
woman, while the sit-ins are going on, and they were not admitted, they
were turned away. But that pissed off some of the legislators. And I
always thought that
And what year was this?
'64 maybe. And we won. And there was a federal three judge panel, court,
and they agreed that it was unconstitutional. And that ended, the state
didn't even appeal to the Supreme Court, so that ended the speaker ban.
But the interesting anecdote type thing is that McNeil Smith reserved
for a rebuttal, you can reserve three minutes, whatever, he reserved
three minutes. And in his rebuttal he said that he had gone to see Frank
Graham the previous night to tell him what he was doing, and how he saw
it, and Frank Graham told him that when he had been an undergraduate
here, he had been the head of the Di Phi or something, and he had, they
had invited a senator—Butler, with a funny first name—to come and speak.
Well, the senator was a republican. And this was say in 1905 or 06, when
Jim Crow was getting underway, and there was a fusion party of blacks
and it was volatile. And one president told Frank Graham that the
senator couldn't speak on campus. So Frank Graham, and he named them, I
can't remember their names, but one of them later became the head of
Watauga Bank, and another was a judge, five or six of the students, all
who became prominent later on, went and sat on the porch of the
And were you involved in all of that as well?
Oh yeah. I remember I gave a talk on free speech on the campus, and I have an article on that somewhere, and Ida and Bill Friday were in the first row. And they were clapping. And then I made the move—well, during Vietnam, I was the president of the faculty. And we arranged to have buses to take students to Washington to lobby with our legislators against the war. And Bill Friday arranged to have all the whole entire Congressional delegation meet in he great big conference room with our students. So they could all respond to the two senators, and eight congressmen all there to meet with about 500 students. So I mean it was not—I could call Bill Friday and say Bill, can you help us get Senator Sam Ervin there, and he'd say I'll see what I can do.
So those Marine connections were still there.
I think he was against the speaker ban, and I assume he was against the Vietnam war, although he wasn't out front, he and Bill Aycock as well, and Sitterson There was the good old boy network you get things done through.
I guess there's good sides and bad sides to the good old boy network.
Well, have I
Sure. There is this Van Wyck movie, the Van Wyck woman made this movie.
Do you know the title of that?
Integration in the Chapel Hill School System would describe whatever it is. She was there when they integrated.
I wanted to ask you, are those AAUP newsletters, are they somewhere on campus?
I would doubt very much. They went out every day, and there was a guy in the English Department who would write them up. We had our lunches—and the AAUP executive committee expanded, and we had the black student movement, the president or the chairman of the faculty at that time was the head of the political science department, Fred Cleveland, and he sat with us, we had about fifteen who would meet, and they would report on what's doing. And the English department guy would put out a one-page newsletter for distribution.
So you don't suppose anybody would have them? I would think those would be a treasure trove of what was going on, right? Almost a daily account. Do you suppose the English department would have them, or that guy?
The guy left, he went to Idaho, or he went to, the state of Washington has a college on the coast up toward British Columbia, and he went to one or the other, but poetry was his thing.
What was his name again?
Charlie somebody. It'll come to me. But these people who sponsor
educational trips and boats on Grecian Isles, have to have some
education, and somehow he was in with them, so he could go on boat trips
and recite poetry, Grecian poetry, or whatever. He and I, and a
Full, or empty?
Whatever, you know. And abuse. Nobody ever stopped to beat us up, but we
got a lot of things thrown at us. And that was as much violence pretty
much as anywhere. Except, I suppose you've heard about down Franklin
street there used to be a store, the Rockpile, it was made out of rocks.
And that was sort of a center for the Ku Klux Klan. And three or four
kids went in there to demand service, and they beat them up, and they
threw some acid on them. And that was the Rockpile. And then there was
some guy who was driving a big truck, and he lost his way, an interstate
trucker, and he came through town instead of bypassing. He went down
Franklin, and his brakes failed, and he went right into the Rockpile,
and demolished it.
No kidding!
I think our little harassment at the Pines—it was interesting that Bill
Daughtery was was later a trustee, and he became head of the public
health department at the University of Massachusetts. And I knew him
pretty well, and they had been in Egypt for the World Health
Organization, and their son was the same age as my son, and it was a
sports bug, he knew all the batting averages and everything, he was a
very bright kid. And I took him and my son to a basketball game one
Saturday afternoon, and we got out about five, and I said you want some
ice cream? And they said, yeah, let's get some ice cream. So there was
at Glen Lenox shopping center, there was sort of a chain place, milk and
dairy—The Dairy Bar—So we went to the Dairy Bar to get ice cream. In all
innocence.
So you're at the dairy bar, and the guys says—
He says, you're using kids to integrate! And I said, no we're not. This
is not a sit-in. We just want some ice cream.
It was just easier.
That was Mrs. Daugherty. And the kid is no longer a kid. He's a distinguished chaired professor or some sort at the Economics Department here.
Did you have some locations you wanted to give me for articles? Are they online or in the library?
Yeah, they're in the library somewhere.
END OF INTERVIEW