UNC Chapel Hill: The First Public University and the Last to Integrate

The University of North Carolina was chartered by the North Carolina General Assembly on December eleventh, seventeen eighty-nine, making it the first public university chartered in the United States. On February twelfth, seventeen ninety-five, a student named Hinton James walked to Chapel Hill from his home near Burgaw, in what is now Pender County, a journey of more than a hundred miles. He was the first student enrolled. For several weeks he was the only student. By the end of that year, the university had awarded degrees, making it the only public university in the country to do so in the eighteenth century.

For the first century and a half of its existence, the university admitted only white men.

In nineteen fifty-one, a group of Black applicants applied to the university's graduate and professional schools. The state of North Carolina offered them out-of-state tuition grants to attend Black institutions elsewhere, a mechanism designed to deny them admission without formally saying so. Several applicants sued.

By nineteen fifty-one, following a federal appeals court ruling, the university admitted its first Black students to its graduate and law programs, including Floyd McKissick, Harvey Beech, James Lassiter, and Kenneth Lee.

Undergraduate integration came more slowly. The university did not admit its first Black undergraduates, Ralph Frasier, LeRoy Frasier, and John Lewis Brandon, until nineteen fifty-five, one hundred sixty years after Hinton James walked through the front gate.

The Old Well on the main quad, which has been a symbol of the university since the nineteenth century, sits at the center of a campus that was built on land made available by the dispossession of the Tuscarora and Occaneechi peoples, cultivated in part by enslaved labor, and funded by the state that excluded Black citizens from it for most of its history. Those facts and the university's genuine excellence exist simultaneously.