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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 L-0064-4, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is the fourth interview in a nine-part series of interviews with civil liberties lawyer Daniel H. Pollitt. In this interview, Pollitt discusses his thoughts on race and athletics at UNC, as well as his involvement in student activism during the late 1950s and 1960s. Pollitt begins the interview by discussing the impact of the recruitment of African American athletes, like Charlie Scott—the first African American athlete to attend UNC on scholarship—and Bill Chamberlain. After describing how UNC's football coach was reluctant to recruit African American athletes on scholarship, Pollitt describes how he worked alongside Dean Smith as the faculty advisor to the campus NAACP to recruit Scott in the late 1960s. (Note: Pollitt says numerous times in the interview that Scott, and later Chamberlain, came to UNC in the late 1950s, but it was actually during the late 1960s.) Pollitt discusses how lingering racial tensions and discrimination in the broader community played a decisive factor in the recruitment of African American athletes. He devotes considerable attention to his work as a leader of the student YMCA-YWCA during the late 1950s and 1960s. Pollitt explains how the student Y was the center of student activism on campus during those years and describes in detail how he helped to organize Vietnam war protests among UNC students, even chartering buses to take students from UNC to Washington, D.C., to lobby their local legislators about the war and to participate in anti-war demonstrations. The interview concludes with Pollitt's brief discussion of his work with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which he elaborates on in later interviews.
This is the fourth interview in a nine-part series of interviews with civil liberties lawyer Daniel H. Pollitt. In this interview, Pollitt describes his role as the faculty advisor to the student NAACP in the recruitment of pioneering African American athletes at UNC. In addition, he discusses his involvement in student activism as a leader of the student YMCA-YWCA.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Dan Pollitt in a continuing series of interviews at the UNC law school. The date is February 15, 1991 and the interview is being conducted by Ann McColl. Can you tell me something about Charlie Scott?
Yes, indeed I can. Charlie was the first black athlete to get a scholarship at the University of North Carolina and my impression is that he was the first black athlete in the ACC. So he broke the color bar and it was earlier in the late fifties. I was the faculty advisor to the NAACP on campus and there were then maybe twenty black students on campus. The question was, "How do we encourage people to come here?" We thought there should be some role models and that is sort of a maybe racist attitude, but we thought athletics is…. We'd start there. It seemed like a logical thing to do, so maybe you should have a learned surgeon instead, but the reality of the world then at least, was that the role models were basketball players and football players. So we did the NAACP on campus and the youth group.
Were most of the black students, the twenty students, in the NAACP?
Yes. I think they were assigned to the same dormitory. They all lived in the same dorm.
They were required to live in the same dorm?
Yes. And as a matter of fact, when they went to the football games, they
had to sit at the end zone in an area next to the field house on the
right. That was their place if they
But then Charlie Scott was "Mr. Big". He was the number one high school star that everybody wanted and he was from New York City, but attending Laurinburg Institute.
In Virginia?
No, it's in Laurinburg, North Carolina, down on the South Carolina border. Scotland County.
Is it a high school?
It's a prep school and it's a very interesting one
in that the…. I forget the headmaster's name, but
it's something like McLaurin or McDuffy. The founder of the
institute had gone down to Tuskeegee Institute when George Washington
Carver or Booker T. Washington was the President. What the emphasis was
was on how to be good farmers for the men and how to be good housewives
for the women and you know, sanitation and cleanliness and promptness
and honesty and all the virtues. So Mr. McDuffy, if that was his name,
returned when he graduated from Tuskeegee; came up to Laurinburg which
was his place and started a little institute to teach the black farmers
how to farm better and the women how to do household chores and skills
and
So this was early.
Yes. This was World War I we're talking about now and it was an ongoing thing. Then if there was a depression in the north and the husband was laid off, he would send the kids back to grandma and then the wife, and he'd look for a job. So Laurinburg became the school where the kids from the north came back to grandma and would go there. I guess there wasn't a public school for blacks or it wasn't very good or something.
What county is this?
This is in Scotland County. If you just go down on 15-501
you'll run into it just before the South Carolina line. So
then that same thing happened in World War II where the blacks went
north. The husband would get the job, send for the wife, send for the
kids and then if he was laid off, he would send them back. So Laurinburg
Academy became the school for a lot of northern kids who would go home
during bad times, but it also became in the process, sort of a
prestigious prep school for northern kids who would go south to this
prestigious prep school. To make it prestigious they would give
scholarships to promising athletes in basketball and baseball. A lot of
the famous black baseball players went to Laurinburg Academy, and also
the
Dean Smith is now the basketball coach?
Dean Smith is now the basketball coach and he suggested that maybe Dean
Smith would like to bring me down to interview Charlie Scott. So Dean
Smith called me and asked me if I'd like to go down and see
Charlie Scott and I didn't know who Charlie Scott was, but I
said, "Sure". That's what we'd
been trying to do was to recruit a role model. So we drove down to
Laurinburg and we took with us…. What the headmaster had told
Dean
The pre-med student's wife?
Yes. He was a med student. So in any event, we went down and we saw a basketball game and I didn't know which one was Charlie Scott. They all looked so great to me. But then after the basketball game we had steak dinner at the headmaster's house and it was about 8:00. There was the headmaster and his wife and his brother-in-law and the coach and me and the black medical student and Charlie Scott. And Charlie Scott was very deferential and "Yes, sir". All the students are, "Yes, sir," and "Yes, ma'am". So then they invited him to come up to look at this campus. No pains were left undone.
Charlie was about to… So they thought he might want to go to a Baptist church. So Bob Seymour was then the pastor of the Baptist church on the bypass, 15-501.
Going towards Durham?
Yes. In any event, Bob Seymour was the head of the interchurch council
and he had been very active in trying to integrate. He integrated his
church and he was very active in school integration and he is a very
fine person. But he had a student assistant pastor from the Duke
Divinity School who was black. So when Charlie went to church that
morning, who was in
So he left and signed with the pros. Do you remember anything about the impression of the students or the community when he came here?
Yes. He got married in maybe his junior year and Dean Smith called me
because we had an apartment in the basement of our house which was sort
of like an English apartment or whatever. It's ground level,
but the ground slopes, so it's the basement but
it's not underground. So Dean Smith called me and asked me if
we could rent our apartment to Charlie Scott and I said,
"There's nobody in it. We'd be happy to
have Charlie Scott." And he said, "Well, you and Dr.
Byne," who was the animal doctor…. That's
not what he is.
Would people cheer for him at the games?
Oh, yes.
So all the segregation policies were in effect then. This was the late fifties?
This was before the sit-ins, so this was the fifties, because we were
segregated downtown. He couldn't go to the restaurants and
the theater. We had two movie theaters and he couldn't go to
either one. So that's why he moved to Durham. He could sit in
the balcony. But the interesting thing is a second black might have been
named Chamberlain. Bill Chamberlain,
I'm curious with the controversy that they have had on the main campus this year with the statutes that were put out in front of the library and a lot of the controversy surrounding the one that shows a black student carrying a basketball. What has been your feeling about some of this controversy?
I thought it was in very bad taste to do that, to put it where they put
it. When I first heard about it I went up there and there were two
hundred people around talking. I looked at it and my initial reaction to
whoever I was with, I said, "Gee I think the sculptress has
done a good job of sculpting." And some young coed there turned
to me and said, "Don't you find it offensive? Look
at that. There's the man carrying the books and
there's his wife and he has his arm on her rump or something
and this was called, ‘Putting husband through
college’. Don't you find that
disgraceful?" That hadn't jumped out at me. And then
I looked further and there was the Oriental student carrying the violin
case wearing glasses. They were all stereotypical. And I
don't think you ought to put it in the most popular
walk-through area on the campus. So I don't know where. If
you'd break them all up, you know, and you put one here and
another there, I'd think it would be fine. But I think that
the
You did some other things on campus with the Y. Can you tell me more about what kinds of things the Y did?
I was chairman of the board of the Y before Anne Queen.
What year was that?
Well, when I came here. When I first came here the YMCA was not very
Christian. It wasn't male. So it was really the Campus Y and
it was the center for all social action. So if you wanted to do
something socially, not a dance, but you know, socially beneficial, you
did it through the Y. The Y was the campus organization that did things.
And some of the religions, the Methodists and the Catholics and the
Baptists, they all were the do-good organizations. The Y Court was the
center of all activities at that building. They had such things as going
out to Butner and spending an afternoon with the people in the mental
institution or tutoring programs. Crop Walk for Hunger. The Y
But did a lot of people attend the events?
Oh, yes. If you were going to have someone like Fred McKissick, or Sloane Coffin used to come down, so there would be controversial people. The Y had that series going. So I thought that was the thing to join in and I did. You know if you're a lawyer you have to draft the by-laws and then you have to interpret them and you're running the place. So it was fun. I was on for three or four years, on the board and the chair.
Was this in the late fifties?
Yes. The late fifties and early sixties. Then later on during the Viet Nam War, the protest center was the Y. We organized "Washington Witness" where we would hire buses and go to Washington and lobby with the legislators.
Was this faculty and students?
Yes. I was co-chair of Washington Witness with a guy at the YMCA and I wrote the check for the bus.
A personal check?
Yes. Then we'd charge twenty-five dollars or up and down or
whatever the appropriate amount was, so we always had fifty bucks left
over or something. But they always wanted a
So how many buses would you take?
Oh, three or four thousand people would go up.
How many times did you go?
I have my files. We had Washington Witness One, Washington Witness Two and Washington Witness Three, so we went up three times. What we did was the first time we went, Nick Galifinikus was the Congressman and he lived in Durham and he was sort of anti-war and Bill Friday was the President of the University and he was helpful. And we met right out here in the law school lounge, a group of about twenty, to plan things the first time or the second time. My memory isn't that good. But we would go up and we met with the two senators and every congressman from North Carolina. Nick Galifinikus and Bill Friday arranged that. We met in a great big room in the Senate and we filled it; a big hearing room.
So your whole three thousand people or whatever would come and you would have room for them?
Well, we'd meet in the biggest place they had and people would
stand around and everything. The way it was was that we would present
our position to them and then they would respond and so we would have
three minute speeches by the editor of the Law Review, the President of
the student body, the editor of the "Tarheel", the
head of the Di Phi or whatever and that would take fifteen or twenty
minutes. Then they could respond and then it would be thrown open for
one minute rule, so you get
That's great.
Yes. So that was wonderful. On another time when we went up…. Then we'd break into the afternoon. You would sign up to meet a Congressman or a Senator from 2:00 to 2:30 or something and you'd go see him, say if you were from Wilmington, you'd see the Congressman from Wilmington. Then the buses still had to lay over eight hours before the driver could drive back, so there was time. And so on one of the occasions, we arranged to meet with the new Congresspeople.
From North Carolina?
No. National. They included Father Dreinon from Massachusetts, Bob
Dreinon, Bella Abzug from New York and Ron Dellams from California. It
was a great class of entering freshmen and they all agreed to meet with
the North Carolina students. I remember Father Dreinon was way, way up
on the top floor in the Cannon House office building, on the top floor
where they put new Congressmen next to where they store boards or
something, and my daughter Suzie was with me and she was ten or
something. So he put her in what he called the "Pope
seat" which was his big chair and she never has forgotten
seeing it. But that's what we did. You know at the time of
Kent State we went up and we'd gone up earlier. We met there
outside the
Is the Y as active now?
Not so much because the Student Union is there and there are a lot of other groups that have come into existence which were not in existence in those days. When I came here we had maybe six thousand students and there were eighty-five entering law students when I came here. The law faculty had nine or ten and now we have thirty-five or forty and this same burgeoning occurred in all the departments, so instead of six thousand students, we have twenty thousand. So the faculty has grown accordingly.
Did those eighty-five law students tend to do things more on main campus then?
We were on the campus. We were right there across from Lenoir Hall which
was where everybody then ate. Everybody ate at Lenoir and they had a
forty cent meal; a meat and two vegetables and bread and a dessert which
was chocolate pudding or something and a drink. Bill Aycock was the
Chancellor and he wanted to subsidize all the students. This was part of
letting everybody
Now you had some positions in the University, too, didn't you? You chaired the faculty?
When I first came here I'd been from Arkansas and I was active in the AAUP which is the faculty organization.
American Association of University Professors?
Yes. They look out for academic freedom. That is their main function then
and still is. I joined that and got on the Academic Freedom committee.
They were having some problems at the Dental School, so I was active
there. Then about my third year here or something, I was elected to be
the secretary of the AAUP and then the President. I was the President of
the AAUP when we had the cafeteria strike. So we had a daily meeting of
the expanded AAUP executive committee. Every day we met. The expanded
included the Chairman of the faculty and the President of the student
body and the head of the strike committee. We put out a daily bulletin
on what's doing, so this was to dispel the
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
So then you were elected to the hearings?
Yes. That's a prominent position and it's very
sensitive. I think the general feeling is that if I get a real bad dean
who wants to get rid of me and I want to go to the hearings committee,
who do I want to have sitting on that hearings committee?
This is around the 1960's?
The 1960's. Then later on I was on it again as ex-officio when
the question was whether we wanted to join with Duke and Tabott and
Nixon library and the Faculty Advisory Council advised the Chancellor
unanimously to have nothing to do with it.
Like what?
Well, for example, the Chancellor used to preside at the faculty meetings
and I didn't think that was conductive to…. When I
first came here, they had Coach Tatum of the football team who had his
weekly luncheons with the press. They all have a weekly luncheon with
the press. And they had it at what was then the Pines Restaurant which
wouldn't allow blacks. So the black reporter could not attend
the University of North Carolina's official weekly meeting
with the press. So I thought that was pretty lousy and so I went to the
Agenda committee of the faculty Council and I said,
"I'd like to get on the agenda and my proposal is
that we don't let the coach meet at segregated restaurants
anymore, that they be integrated if they can find one," and
that would be the Carolina Inn which I think at that time might have
been segregated, too. Then there was another issue that came up at about
the same time and this was the radio station, WUNC owned by the
University. We carried whatever public radio whatever it was sent us and
the only time we didn't do it was when they had a program on
the evils of smoking. We decided not to carry that. I though that this
was unfair censorship and I wanted to get a resolution before the
Faculty Council suggesting that we not do this anymore. That would incur
little blame on whoever had done it, which had been Dean Godfrey who was
the Provost, the number two man, in the University. So I had to
criticize the number two man in the University. Well, he
Do you know if they still do it that way?
The Chancellor sits up there still at the head table and he
shouldn't I don't think. But there are other
procedures like how you elect people. Then we got a lot of by-law
changes, mostly on how you proceed against a faculty member or how you
proceed against the student Honor Council is a student affair and not a
faculty affair, but there is a faculty committee that deals with
students. I tried to arrange a closer reproachment and I know I went to
the inauguration of three student body presidents and they'd
always be on our program. The graduate students always would have a
program. The faculty meetings were pretty dull, so I started a program
where people could come and explain what goes on in their department.
That was sort of the fun thing. So we'd have the librarian or
the Institute of Government
END OF INTERVIEW