This is the James Cates Archival Research Project. Our work builds upon the efforts of community activists. In particular, we thank Mike Ogle, a journalist whose work centers around advancing the cause for equity and racial justice.  Upon hearing about the murder of James Cates on UNC’s campus, Mike was dismayed by the lack of information surrounding the crime. He explains, “James Cates was only publicly described at the time of his death as a name, an age, and a race… and while the specific circumstances of James Cates’ murder might be exceptional, the conditions and themes are not outliers. And at the root is a key thread of indifference.”   In November of 1970, the weekend before Thanksgiving, an African American student group held an all-night dance-a-thon at the newly built student union. The interracial dance was intended to foster healthy race relations during turbulent times. However, because only 2% of UNC’s student body was black at this time, they were relying on non-student attendance for this event to have a significant amount of diversity.

Shortly after midnight, a fight broke out led by a white supremacy-centered biker gang who called themselves The Storm Troopers. James Cates, a young attendee at this dance who was not centrally involved in the fight, became a casualty of racial violence. He was stabbed at the Pit, directly outside of the student union. According to some reports, there were police officers from both the UNC campus and the town of Chapel Hill present since the beginning of the altercation. After James was attacked, perpetrators were able to leave the crime scene, despite the immediate outcry of onlookers. Friends and family tried on multiple occasions to take James to the hospital themselves, but the police stopped them, citing a policy not to move an injured person. After nearly half an hour, during which no ambulance arrived, the police were convinced by onlookers to take James to the hospital. While James’ injuries were serious, the ER doctor testified that they did not have to be fatal.

Because the police were slow to act, there was no recovered murder weapon or any physical evidence tying the biker gang to the crime. These details come from the Re/Collecting Chapel Hill podcast Episode Six (James Cates, Silent Sam Part 2), and have continued to be hotly contested due to a lack of accurate record-keeping. Previous community activists have noted that the biker gang that perpetuated this crime is only part of the injustice. As Mike Ogle explains it, “Who wielded the weapon and why seemed less important than who wielded the power from that moment forward.” Our intention with this informational guide is to be a useful step in finally bringing a sense of justice and transparency to this racially charged event.

For this project, we searched the UNC-Chapel Hill archives and local newspaper archives for relevant information about James Cates as well as conducted research for information about silence in the archives and the implications of leaving certain stories out of the archives. We have also decided to include a section about the trustworthiness of institutions to uphold archiving standards without bias. We also created a timeline of the events leading up to and after the murder of James Cates. Along with this archival research project, we had oral histories transcribed and edited that focused on the Black history movement in Chapel Hill.