University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

Page 24 text:

The only issue of any substance that pre- sented itself on the UNC campus was the renewed squabble between cafeteria workers and SAGA foot service. Charges were made against both sides concerning working hours. pay scale and working conditions. SAGA, in an attempt to make ends meet. began to prune workers from its salary lists. Rev. Ralph Aber- nathy put in an appearance on behalf of the black workers, and students avoided Lenoir in sufficient numbers that SAGA decided to abandon Chapel Hill for brighter climes. That left the University in a dilemma; whether to pick up the pieces itself. seek elsewhere for another catering service, or close down the campus dining halls permanently. It was not difficult to say just where the action was. There was none. During the winter of their content the students, perhaps them- selves weary of the frenetic activity of the Sixties, settled back into their plastic Chairs. t tutti ' llJlleWlellt . .tutlt'tllt lfhtt' t1 1'1 . ttl ; I Whit I l t In tt '7'? Yttllh- , tilt I 43A , 3' '

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. . the silent majority was silent because they had nothing to say As the nations students returned to fall semes- ter Classes, educators, parents and elected offi- cials braced themselves for another year of stu- dent paxtivism and polemic. October fifteenth had been chosen as the date to observe a national moratorium on the war in Viet Nam, and all stu- dents were asked to boycott classes on that day. Over 150,000 protesters assembled on the Wash- ington Mall to sing and chant and jeer while the President watched a football game. In Chapel Hill, the de- monstration. term- ed the biggest thing in the South, wasoverwhelming- Iy successful or a failure, depending on who did your counting. The only tangible result was the firing of David Blevins, a graduate instructor at UNC-C, who elected to Challenge the hastily drawn University disruption policy. A cold spell descended on UNC in the waning days of autumn. and save for a stir the night of the draft lottery, would send the l'big news stories into hibernation until the spring. What was lacking was a new issue that would augment the monoto- nous sound of war dissent. Indeed, the situation seemed to prove Nixon's thesis that the great bulk of the American populace supported the way the country was being run. This, despite criticism from the Left that the silent majority was silent because they had nothing to say.

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blackness: If I had to date it I guess lid saythe black thing hit Carolina in the fall of 1969. By the middle of the spring semester it was all over the campus. A lot of the so called leaders of the black students had it. It seemed to follow two rules. The blacker your skin the harder you preached it and conversely the lighter your shade the harder your rap too. The liberal whites had it so bad all the blacks avoided them. It was strange. A liberal white would come up to a group of us. After a few minutes the most sen- sitive in the crowd would start to get sick. The white cat would rap loud and long about the problems of the poor and the black Then held go out to the lot and jump into his big car and hot to his pad. You could measure the intensity of his speech by the distance he lived from us and the poor whites. Several times that semester I was sick to my stomach. The super blacks were almost as bad though. Their only mea- sure of merit was the number of blacks involved. It didn't matter that their own black student group had been unable to mobilize black students to tutor other blacks. It didn't matter that the town blacks needed help. What mattered was purity. The program had to be purely black. They were true to their principles those super blacks. They never did let whites get in- volved. A lot of kids flunked out 7 that year, but they went out with pure minds.