Anne Queen's role in calming tensions surrounding student protests
Sanford talks about Anne Queen's role in calming tensions surrounding student protests and demonstrations in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during the early 1960s. After briefly describing the political climate behind the demonstrations and his administration's effort to support civil rights, Sanford explains how Queen worked with the students to assuage remaining tensions. In describing her role in this conflict, Sanford asserts that during this era, Queen's work served to turn the YMCA/YWCA into the "social conscience" of the campus.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, December 18, 1990. Interview L-0050. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
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
Conservative 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.