Today's Chapel Hill News includes my story on a new book of photos from civil rights marches in the 1960s. The photos were taken by Jim Wallace, while he was a student at UNC. What didn't make that article as it went to press for the CHN earlier this week, was a conversation I had with Orange County Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass. Pendergrass was a Chapel Hill police officer from 1961-1964 and is in several of Wallace's photos. Here's an excerpt from my updated story on the book, "Courage in the Moment, The Civil Rights Struggle, 1961-1964." (Read the N&O version of this story here.)
Orange County Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass remembers arresting protestors during the marches in the early ‘60s when he was a patrol officer with the Chapel Hill Police Department.
The current Chapel Hill chief at the time, Chief William Blake, emphasized a calm, non-violent law enforcement response to the marches, Pendergrass said. Blake had a good rapport with march organizers and the department typically knew about sit-ins and marches ahead of time, he said.
The book shows police officers, including Pendergrass, removing protestors from buildings and roads and putting them in police cars. Officers were always instructed to handle protestors gently, and be impartial, Pendergrass said.
“We approached it with a manner that we wanted to be fair and impartial,” he said. “Chief Blake made a statement to us in the very beginning that we live here and we know these people and we’ll be seeing them every day, let’s treat them how we’d like to be treated and approach it in an impartial manner.”
Pendergrass was a Chapel Hill police officer from 1956 to 1982. He then ran for Orange County Sheriff and has been sheriff since, making him the longest serving sheriff in the state.
In 1961 there were about 20 police officers in the department, he said. Police made more than 3,000 arrests during the marches, he said. Policing the protestors took a lot of extra hours and manpower, he said, but there was never any violence, which is a credit to Chief Blake, he said.
Police treated civil rights marches and Ku Klux Klan marches the same, he said. The Klan marched from Carrboro, down Franklin Street to the planetarium at UNC, in full white robes and hats, but were never violent, Pendergrass said.
“There was a lot of people that didn’t like us taking that approach but after it was over with they all realized they we did the right thing, we didn’t have any violence,” Pendergrass said.
