The Daily Tar Heel front page on Jan. 22, 2013, featured a story by Assistant City Editor Katie Reilly that looked into Chapel Hill’s civil rights history. The article featured photos from the 1960s and a graphic using DTH headlines from 1964 that was assembled by design & graphics staffers Nan Copeland and Melissa Borden. Below, Borden talks about how the design came to be.
Arriving to work on MLK Day, I was handed an assignment for a graphic that tapped into the DTH’s archives all the way back to 1964.
Assistant City Editor Katie Reilly stumbled upon Charly Mann’s blog, chapelhillmemories.com. In a post, Mann was reminiscing about the civil rights movement in Chapel Hill. After emailing him, Reilly received the picture used for the skybox atop our Jan. 22 paper. The picture was taken by his chaperone at the time, Dick Lamanna, who was a sociology gradate student at UNC in 1964. Mann was 13 when he joined Lamanna in the March on Washington where the picture was taken.
Reilly searched through the North Carolina Collection at UNC’s Wilson Library. The collection includes hundreds of old DTH pages on microfilm. She fed the film through a microfilm reader that projects the pages on a screen. Reilly used a computer to scan and save the articles and headlines that we used for our graphic.
While she was looking through articles, she found a photo from Jim Wallace, a UNC graduate and DTH photographer from 1961-1964. She discovered his book “Courage in the Moment: The Civil Rights Struggle, 1961-1964.” The book is full of his old pictures from the DTH. Reilly was able to contact him through an adviser from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Wallace said that he normally doesn’t allow people to print his photos but since this was the DTH, he could make an exception. One of his photos of the Walk for Freedom was used for the main art on our front page.
Reilly searched the old pages for factual information about the movement and the voting outcome and photos, not anticipating the potential that a graphic could be created from these old pages. We decided to takes these scans and focus on the headlines, creating a quasi-timeline that told the story of civil rights in Chapel Hill through our own headlines from the 1960s.
Check out the article that accompanied that graphic here and a question and answer with Charly Mann here.
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