Duke Faculty in the Civil Rights Movement: Peter Klopfer and Robert Osborn

Ah-ha! I haven’t been stopped yet as I continue my series on the Woolworth sit-ins (both in Greensboro and Durham) and Duke’s ties to civil rights movements in the early 1960s. I have finally moved forward in time, jumping from 1960 all the way to…1964.

In 1964, we see some Duke faculty get involved in the Civil Rights movement, this time, integrating a restaurant just a few miles down the road (near that…other university) in Chapel Hill. Professors Peter Klopfer, Robert Osborn, and Frederick Herzog, along with a young Black student, sat in the Watts Grill in Chapel Hill. In what started as a simple protest would later include Klan activity, and would even turn into a court case on trespassing, a case that would later go to the Supreme Court.

Peter Klopfer, professor of biology, in an oral history found in the Duke University Oral History Program collection, describes the significance of Watts Grill:

Paragraph 1 is the interviewer:

I’ll let Peter Klopfer describe the court case further, here:

And finally, highlighting some of the great finds from the archives, is a copy of the subpoena so graciously gifted to Robert Osborn, Harmon Smith, Frederick Herzog, and Peter Klopfer, found in the Robert Osborn papers.