“Under the Laws of North Carolina and under the resolutions of the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina, members of your race are not admitted to the University.”
Pauli Murray was a brilliant civil rights lawyer born in 1910 and raised in Durham. She collected various degrees from Hunter College, Howard University, Yale University and University of California, Berkley, but her first choice for graduate school was UNC. She wanted to either study law or the social sciences here.
When she applied in 1938, she received a letter telling her people like her — black people — were not accepted. The NAACP supported her application but was unwilling to sue on her behalf because of concerns about the legal standing of her state residency.
In the end, a great North Carolinian became a preeminent international scholar in law, a resilient fighter for the rights of women and racial minorities, but not a graduate of UNC.
The law school that Pauli Murray couldn’t attend because of her race now houses the UNC Center for Civil Rights. The work of the Center is in some ways to fill the gap that left Murray without representation. It takes up cases across the state where civil rights have been violated and represents litigants against the violators.
These cases have ranged from school integration in Pitt County to ensuring that victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program receive reparations. It seems to easily fit into UNC’s mission to be a university that serves the state as it both trains a new generation of lawyers and helps fight for justice for North Carolinians who might never come to Chapel Hill.
In an especially small-minded move, the UNC Board of Governors has responded to this important work by considering a policy that would effectively destroy the Center for Civil Rights. The policy would prevent the Center from undertaking any litigation, and in response the center is not currently accepting new cases. The justifications for this action given by various members of the Board of Governors only serve to highlight how this will harm North Carolina.
The BOG member who introduced the new policy, Joe Knott, argued that “we need to confine ourselves to our mission, which is academic.” This reductive view of education seems to completely ignore the power of experiential learning, the importance of public universities serving their public and the inevitable fact that occasionally law school, as Raleigh lawyer Knott should know, includes law.
Fellow BOG member Steve Long has made concurring arguments in the past that there is a lack of diversity of thought in the Center and that the Center should advise government bodies rather than cost them money by suing them.
