Video story by Charlotte Zhao
Written story by Collin Tadlock
Photo by Jailyn Neville
Graphic by Isabelle DeCamillis
“James Louis Cates, Jr.”
James Cates has never been correctly represented in history. His middle name, Lewis, was misspelled on his gravesite. Even the memorial dedicated to his life in The Pit at UNC-Chapel Hill doesn’t feature his name until the third line, and mentions him as a “victim of racial violence.”
Cates’ family, and the community members familiar with his life and legacy, will tell you that he was much more than that.
Over five decades removed from his murder on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus, family members and the Chapel Hill community have carried the weight of his loss, grappling with the trauma of his violent death.
The presence of the memorial has been a long-awaited source of healing for Cates’ family, who have spoken publicly about the pain they have carried with them for over 50 years. The memorial was a result of countless student activists who wanted Cates recognized in the place of his death, as a way of remembering Cates’ legacy and making sure that his story is not forgotten.
Remembering Cates
Before his death, Cates lived a life marked by perseverance. He grew up in Chapel Hill, where he attended Lincoln High School, a segregated school for Black students during the Jim Crow era.
It was Cates’ senior year when he moved to Chapel Hill High during the town’s integration of public schools in 1967. Despite the challenges he faced as a Black student in the South, Cates was an accomplished athlete, excelling in football and track.
Cates never attended the University directly but his grandmother, Annie Cates, known to his friends as “Ma Annie,” worked at the University Laundry for decades. She helped to raise Cates, and the two lived in Northside – a historically black neighborhood close to campus off of Rosemary Street.
Nicknamed “Baby Boy,” friends of Cates, including Robert Lee Campbell, described him as having “the swag as he was growing up.” Campbell also recalled how Annie would always have James’ laundry pressed and cleaned for him.
“He always had the creases in his pants,” Campbell said.
Well-dressed, clean cut and shoes shined, Cates’ always put his best look forward when hanging out with friends.
“He carried himself in a way that ‘I want that guy to be my friend,’” Campbell said.
Cates was “a part of the thread that connected all of us,” Campbell said. As one of the few who had a car, their friends would pile into Cates’ car if the party they were attending that weekend was a few neighborhoods away.
“He was very resourceful, he was kind, he was the jewel of Miss Annie’s eye, and she loved Baby Boy, and she did everything she could to make life better for him,” Campbell said.
He recalled his memories of Cates and his friends sitting on the wall in front of the Varsity Theatre, usually leaving around dusk, which is when local residents would start reminding them of where they were.
He explained that once he and his friends crossed the intersection of Franklin and Church Street, it was known that they were “out of their place.”
“They would try to remind us that we were out of bound,” Campbell said. “That you needed to mosey on home.”
In late November of 1970, merely a week before Thanksgiving, Cates and his friends attended an all-night dance marathon at the UNC-Chapel Hill Student Union that was meant to improve race relations in the town.
Students and non-students were invited, given that the University had been recently integrated in 1954. At the time of the dance, only 2 percent of the undergraduate student body was black.
It was cold and rainy, according to Campbell, who said he gave Cates his peacoat before leaving him to go back to get some rest at his home in Northside. Cates left Campbell to attend the dance, which, Campbell recalled, was the last time he saw Cates alive.
The dance started at midnight on Friday night, and sometime around 2 a.m., a large brawl broke out between the Stormtroopers, a Durham-based, Nazi-themed motorcycle gang that was well known in the area, and Black attendees of the dance.
The brawl involved four of five Stormtroopers and ten to a dozen Black attendees. The fighting stopped soon after Cates fell to the ground from a stab wound.
After lying on the ground for an extended amount of time, Chapel Hill Police carried him to a nearby emergency room, where he would die shortly after from a stab wound to his groin.
According to his death certificate, Cates died at 3:30 a.m, Saturday, November 21, 1970.
While three members of the Stormtroopers were arrested later that weekend for their role in Cates’ death, but were found not guilty soon after, acquitted by an all-white Orange County jury.
After Cates and other Northside residents built a relationship with some fraternities on campus, Campbell said he was not worried for Cates’ safety on the night of the dance.
Campbell wrote a moving poem in memory of Cates on his way to serve in his third tour in Vietnam.
“I thought about this on my way for my third tour and what was told to us in this conflict – they never really spoke about it as being a war – was that we were there to help bring forth equity and justice and freedom, and I thought about that,” Campbell said. “I could go thousands of miles away to try to secure freedom for some other country, yet I was not home to ensure that freedom for my community, the community in which we grew up in.”
The poem is addressed to Cates, as Campbell recalls the moment his grandmother woke him up and told of Cates’ murder. Annie Cates had come to Campbell’s house that morning to tell Campbell’s grandmother the news.
“The pain I felt and the sadness on Ma Annie face I will never forget,” the poem read. “You were my neighbor, my friend and my teammate as well of all the good days as a classmate, we grew and we learned.”
Mike Ogle is a local journalist in the Chapel Hill area and creator of the Stone Walls Newsletter, which aims to “tell historical stories that center unheard people” around the Chapel Hill area. Ogle spent two years investigating Cates’ life and murder, and began his research in April of 2016 after he stumbled on a photograph from a collection of primary documents from Wilson Library.
The picture showed a protest on the first anniversary of Cates’ murder that took place at Silent Sam, a Confederate monument that previously stood on UNC-CH’s campus.
“When I saw that photo – all it had was a caption that it was from the first anniversary of that event, I had never heard of it before and was a little surprised, but figured Googling it would satisfy my curiosity,” Ogle said. “When I did, there was no information almost at all available online about it.”
As he began to ask other journalists and members of the community about Cates, he realized many were unaware of Cates’ murder in 1970.
Ogle’s Twitter thread on Cates’ legacy and murder was compiled from first-person accounts and primary documents, which required a lot of research since the University had never categorized documents related to Cates’ death.
The thread went viral after Ogle published it on Twitter in 2018, a few days before what would have been Cates’ 70th birthday.
Ogle’s thread begins by saying, “James L. Cates Jr., a lifelong resident of Chapel Hill’s historically black Northside neighborhood, would’ve turned 70 this weekend. But at 22, he was stabbed and left to die at the heart of [Chapel Hill’s] campus in 1970”
As Ogle’s research continued, he realized how large of an omission this event was from local history. For Ogle, it began as a story about a murder by white bikers, but when looking at the details and first-person accounts, it was obvious pretty quickly to Ogle that “the story was much bigger and more systemic than that.”
“[Cates’ murder] had just been erased from history, town narratives and collective memory, outside of the local Black community,” Ogle said.
Memorializing Cates
“This permanent memorial is a step,” said Julia Clark, the 55th President of Black Student Movement at UNC.
The memorial in honor of Cates on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus was the result of countless years of advocacy from student groups and members of the community. On November 21, 2022, a ceremony was held in the Pit for the installment of Cates’ permanent memorial.
The plaque, made from black metal with gold engraving, honors Cates, as inscribed on the memorial, “whose life has not been and will not be forgotten.”
Leah Cox, Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, worked with Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and the Board of Trustees on Cates’ memorial dedication and the exact inscription that was to be placed on the plaque.
Cox said that the memorial is needed “to let his family know that we recognize that a wrong took place on our campus and we want to remember him as the young man that he was and to make sure that we recognized that things needed and should continue to change at UNC.”
Clark is a senior at UNC-CH this year, and originally learned of Cates’ life from other students during her sophomore year, beginning to do her own research through UNC Libraries.
“Once I started meeting with the community and found out that this injustice had been swept under the rug essentially for almost 50 years at this point, I knew I had to do something.”
Serving as a representative on the Carolina Union Board of Directors, Clark proposed the creation of the James Lewis Cates Memorial Committee in 2020, that would establish a permanent memorial in his honor right outside of the Union where he was murdered.
“I thought it was important to have it done through the Union considering that he was murdered at a Union-sponsored event,” Clark said. “It was a dance that was supposed to better race relations that the Union put on for students and community members, but it clearly did the opposite.”
Even though obstacles persisted in confirming the structure and style of Cates’ memorial, it was dedicated on the 52nd anniversary of his death.
Both Clark and Student Body President Taliajah “Teddy” Vann spoke at the memorial dedication, along with University officials and some of Cates’ family.
“I want you to know, Mr. Cates, though hate may have taken your life, love has sustained your memory,” Clark said at the dedication.
After the ceremony, tall light poles illuminated the sunken brick patio of the Pit, and was lit throughout the night after the ceremony.
Cox explained that the permanent memorial will serve as a conversation starter for years to come around UNC and its history.
“It brings up the history of our racial past here at UNC and how UNC is trying to move forward,” Cox said.
‘More Work to be Done’
While Clark still believes the memorial is a “great step in the right direction,” the memorial did not feature the inscription or structure that the memorial committee had proposed, in conjunction with his family.
The James Lewis Cates Memorial Committee submitted their joint proposal to the University with signatures from student leaders, community leaders, faculty and family members of Cates. The original proposal included a more-detailed description of what happened to Cates, along with a QR code that onlookers could scan for additional information.
“Not only is it inadequate to have a memorial without his face, but also the first words on the inscription of the memorial are not even ‘James Lewis Cates,’ the first words are ‘The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,’ which shows who is centered in that dialogue,” Clark said.
Vann echoed Clark’s sentiments, and spoke about her willingness to fight for justice in unjust situations. As a member and former president of Black Student Movement herself, Vann learned about Cates’ story during her first year of college.
“I’m the kind of person who can’t really sit still when I see or hear about an injustice,” Vann said. “I don’t know why I’m wired that way, but that’s just how I am.”
Vann also mentioned that as a former president, it was difficult to learn that as early as the 1970’s, student activists from BSM had pushed for Cates’ memorial, but were unsuccessful in their efforts.
“There have been students after students after students after students who have tried with all their might to get justice for this boy, and have been unable to do so,” Vann said.
Campbell acknowledged that the memorial makes a statement that “we see and we hear,” allowing members of the community to openly talk about what happened to Cates. As a longtime friend of Cates and one of the last few people to see him alive, Campbell made sure to note that this “peace comes with a price.”
“The struggle is not just a moment,” Campbell said. “It is a living entity and it shall continue to move forward, but as it moves forward, it should bring change.”
As the tragedy shook the Chapel Hill and Northside community to its core, the lack of attention to Cates’ murder in 1970 highlights the deep-seated prejudices that plagued the country and town at the time. Over five decades later, the memorial stands as a message of, according to Cox, recognizing the past and creating a better future.
Cox also mentioned that the University is currently reworking some of the plaque, so that you can clearly see Cates’ name.
Campbell believes that the memorial does a great deal in recognizing the past, but will continue to push for more information to be provided.
“Now it is out there, so let us continue to tell the story,” Campbell said. “Let us continue to talk to those who knew him, talk to those that were there.”
