During the 2018-19 academic year, UNC History Department faculty members have read materials and attended talks by applicants for the Frank Porter Graham distinguished professorship in global human rights history, which we hope to fill as soon as possible. The position is intended to honor and perpetuate the legacy of Frank Porter Graham, who spent part of his career as a UNC history professor. A consideration of Graham’s life sheds light on the legacy that the Frank Porter Graham Professorship in Global Human Rights History represents.
Frank Porter Graham was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1886 and completed his undergraduate work at UNC in 1909. Although he began working in the UNC History Department as an Instructor in 1914, a stint in the US Marine Corps during World War I interrupted his teaching. He returned to UNC as an Assistant Professor in 1920, reaching the position of Professor of History by 1930. That year, he became University President, a position he held until 1949.
Graham’s work, however, extended far beyond the classroom. In 1928 and 1929, Graham became involved in North Carolina’s Citizens Library Movement, which strove to establish at least one public library in every county. He also concerned himself with labor conditions in the state’s textile mills and pressed for workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively during a 1929 unionization campaign in Gastonia.
Graham’s political work soon drew him beyond North Carolina as the Great Depression spurred the birth of various New Deal agencies. Graham served on the Consumers Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration and on the Social Security Advisory Committee. Once World War II broke out, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Graham to serve on the National Defense Mediation Board and its successor, the National War Labor Board, which arbitrated labor-management conflict to guarantee the maintenance of defense production.
Additionally, Graham concerned himself with racial injustice, which he witnessed daily in his home state. In December 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed Graham to his newly-formed President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Graham’s appointment lent him a national platform from which to advocate for racial desegregation and the abolition of the poll tax.
Truman also appointed Graham to a three-person United Nations committee to seek a peaceful settlement of violence that broke out between anti-imperialist Indonesians and Dutch colonizers in the wake of the World War II, a conflict that would ultimately culminate in Indonesian independence. He, along with Paul van Zeeland of Belgium and Richard Kirby of Australia, helped broker a cease-fire at the start of 1948, though once Graham departed Indonesia subsequent Dutch-Indonesian negotiations broke down and violence persisted into 1949.
The following year, Graham embarked on a campaign for a seat in the US Senate. Graham had briefly served as a Senator since 1949, having been appointed by Governor Kerr Scott to fill a seat left vacant upon the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton in March. However, the 1950 contest between Frank Porter Graham and Willis Smith, both Democrats, proved bitter. The election pitted Smith’s Southern conservative wing of the Democratic Party against Graham’s racial progressivism and liberal platform, which aligned more closely than Smith’s with the Fair Deal program put forth by the national party during the Truman era. Ultimately Graham’s campaign failed to muster sufficient support to win him the seat, and he left politics to return to international work.
Beginning in 1951, Graham became more involved in the work of the United Nations as the UN representative for India and Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute from 1951-1967. In this capacity he worked to broker negotiations between India and Pakistan for the demilitarization of Kashmir during a particularly tense period in that conflict, that included the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War.
Graham returned to life in Chapel Hill after retiring from his post as UN Representative for India and Pakistan in 1970 due to poor health, and he died two years later. Though Graham had traveled the world, he was buried in Chapel Hill, where he had first begun his career as a UNC History Department Instructor.
For further reading:
Ashby, Warren. Frank Porter Graham: A Southern Liberal. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Publisher, 1980.
Pegg, Carl H. History and Historians in the University of North Carolina, 1795 to 1950. Unknown location: Unknown publisher, 1990.
Pleasants, Julian M., and Augustus M. Burns III. Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990.