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Message: [QUOTE="Symphony Steve, post: 1294309, member: 911"] Dean Smith was a major force for civil rights. And it predated any advantage UNC might have realized on the basketball court. [URL='http://www.unc.edu/spotlight/dean-smiths-courage/'] This story[/URL] is but one of many: "Other than his wife, perhaps no one knows that side of Smith better than Robert Seymour, who was pastor of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church for 30 years. Seymour met Smith when he came to Chapel Hill in 1959 to help found the church. At the time, Smith was in his second year as an assistant coach under Frank McGuire. He joined the church in its first year, primarily because it included everyone, Seymour said. In 1959, Chapel Hill still had a segregated school system, and it wasn’t until 1961, the year Smith took the reins as head coach, that the system would become the first in the state to activate a plan for voluntary integration. “People think of Chapel Hill as this liberal place, but back in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, it was as rigidly segregated as Mississippi,” Seymour said. A few years later, people staged marches and sit-ins to integrate restaurants and movie theaters, but The Pines restaurant on Franklin Street, where the basketball team ate its program meals, was already integrated. [B]Smith, when he was still an assistant coach, walked to the restaurant with Seymour and a theology student from Binkley, who happened to be black. Then they did something radical for the day: The three stood by the door waiting to go inside.[/B] [B]“The manager looked through the door and saw that we were there,” Seymour said. “There was a look of consternation, but the door finally opened and we were served like everybody else.”[/B] [/QUOTE]

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