. . . 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.