by Rebecca Blatt

When Karen Parker left home to attend UNC-Chapel Hill in 1963, her mother offered her one bit of advice: be on your best behavior.

It was advice many college students might have disregarded. But as the first black woman to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University, Parker knew that her behavior mattered. She said she feared that if she was not exemplary, the community might not welcome black students in the future.

“I was sort of aware of being watched all the time,”

Parker said. “I had to succeed at everything, and I had to prove something.”

Photographs and journal entries documenting her University accomplishments were included in a Wilson Library exhibit, “I Raised My Hand to Volunteer,” which ran Jan. 23 through May 31. The exhibit focused on student protests of the 1960s and revealed the courage of Parker and other UNC students during the tumultuous time.

Parker, 63, now a copy editor at the Winston-Salem Journal, transferred into the School of Journalism and Mass Communication as a junior. Outside the walls of Howell Hall, which housed the school at the time, Parker faced obstacles more challenging than the pressure of academic life.

Once Ku Klux Klansmen fired shots at a house where Parker was attending an interracial party. To stay out of harm’s way, Parker and other black students hid on the floor of a friend’s car while white friends piled on top of them, shielding them from the Klansmen’s sight.

On two occasions, Parker was arrested for protesting segregation in Chapel Hill. She said she spent two or three nights in jail as a result.

But Parker said that her efforts were worth the consequences.

“This was not for me – it was for the cause,” she wrote in a 1964 diary now on reserve in the Wilson Library. “It was for many others who could not afford to go to jail.”

Parker used her talent and drive to combat racial stereotypes. She earned the Beatrice Cobb Scholarship of $200, equaling half of the school’s tuition at the time. During her senior year, she also served as the editor of The Journalist, the school’s lab newspaper. “I felt that I had to go after those things and prove a point that black people are not ignorant,” she said.

John B. Adams, a former school dean and a professor during Parker’s enrollment, remembers how the school embraced her.

“It didn’t matter who, what, when, where she was,” Adams said. “She was just an excellent student, and we thought there would be great promise for her.”

Parker said that her professors and classmates always supported her and that she has been able to earn respect in journalism because of the skills she developed at UNC.

“I came in [the industry] with the credentials to do the job,” Parker said. “I owe that to the school.”

At a Black Alumni Reunion in 2004, Parker received the UNC-Chapel Hill General Alumni Association’s Harvey E. Beech Outstanding Alumni Award. She took pride in the accomplishments of other black alumni who attended the reception, too. “At some point it brought tears to my eyes because that’s what it was all about,” she said. ♦

Rebecca Blatt is a master’s student in the school’s news-editorial sequence.