Law students saw doors open

1951 was a catalyst year for social change at the University.

That spring, a federal court reversed the decision of a lower court and mandated that the University grant full admission to graduate students when equal facilities did not exist elsewhere.

And that summer, when five black students enrolled in UNC's School of Law, they broke a more than 150-year tradition of segregation at the University.

It was a victory for civil rights that cost almost a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees and took several years, but its full value cannot be measured in time or money alone.

"If you think about social change as an ongoing process, this case was one more step in a forward movement to open up avenues of education to African Americans," said Charles Daye, a law professor who has researched and examined integration at the University.

Still, while unequal education may have been ruled unlawful in the courtroom, this did not mean that discrimination did not still persist elsewhere.

J. Kenneth Lee, one of the first black students that summer and a 27-year-old father and husband at the time, said people would "drop bombs" in his yard in Greensboro. Lee also received threatening phone calls.

"I still remember the time (my son) became hysterical when he was alone in the house, answered the phone and someone told him, using the most vile language possible, what they were going to do to his father," he said in "Offshoots: the H. F. Lee family book."

Although academically part of the University, Lee -- and the other black students, Harvey Beech, Floyd McKissick, James Walker Jr. and James Lassiter -- were separated from the rest of the student body in other manners.

Lee and Beech applied for campus housing and received a whole floor to themselves in Steele Building, which was a dormitory at the time.

"This was right after the war, and there were students standing on each others' heads to get in, and they gave us the entire third floor," Lee said in a past interview at the Greensboro Public Library.

The black students also were initially excluded from sitting in the student section during football games and were given tickets to sit in the "colored section."

Walker turned in his tickets in protest.

"I feel I am a part of the student body and want to cheer and express school spirit as a part of the student body and not be set apart down behind the goal posts in an undignified and humiliating manner," he told The Daily Tar Heel in September 1951.

Walker and the others were eventually given tickets, but in a letter with the tickets, Chancellor Robert B. House urged them to use caution, implicitly saying that they should not use them. They didn't heed his request.

As recounted by Lee, the white students generally were accepting of the presence of the black students on campus, though he did say that he was a "novelty" in the beginning.

The first time he entered Lenoir Dining Hall, he recalled in a past interview that "a deathly silence fell over the entire room."

"This was the first time I realized that my shoes squeaked," he said.

But before he graduated, Lee jokingly confessed that he could have "jumped up and down on the dining table ... and nobody would have missed a bite."

"This proves that people can accept change if they have to," he said.

Don Fowler, student government president at the time, described the white student body as unconcerned with the presence of the black students.

"The presence of these Negroes causes so little interest that most of us are unaware they are here unless we happen to have a class with them," he told the DTH in 1951.

But the students' trial and acceptance into the law school was front-page news, and they received a bombardment of media coverage.

"There was always 10 or 12 newspaper people when we'd come up to the dorms," Lee said in a recent interview. "It just always made it impossible to study."

And in the beginning, the black students had extra security from police officers and highway patrol guards.

"There were threats and that sort of thing, but we were not physically harmed," Lee said in the interview at the Greensboro library.

Lee and the other black law students came to a university far different from the one today, which was ranked first among top public universities in overall measures of racial integration by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2002.

But Daye said this by no means implies that the University has finished its work toward complete integration.

"As all social change takes time, we are still in the process of becoming a better place."

Contact the Features Editor at features@unc.edu.