By Gregory Childress

gchildress@heraldsun.com; 918-1046

Chapel Hill — Family, friends and fellow veterans of the civil rights movement on Friday remembered Mr. Yonni Chapman as an unyielding fighter for social justice and a skilled historian who embodied the very best spirit of Chapel Hill.

Mr. Chapman died Thursday after losing a lengthy battle against cancer. He was 62.

“He forced us all to reflect on this town we think of as a liberal haven,” said Town Councilman Mark Kleinschmidt. “He was often the one to open our eyes to reality.”

Braxton Foushee, a local civil rights activist, said Mr. Chapman made many lasting contributions in the fight for social justice.

“I think his biggest contribution was his history about segregation and how slavery played a part in the building of the university,” Foushee said.

Mr. Chapman, who received a Ph.D. in history from UNC in 2006 at age 59, wrote a dissertation titled “Black Freedom and the University of North Carolina, 1793-1960,” which chronicled institutional racism at UNC and blacks’ struggle for racial equality.

He died in hospice care at 6 p.m. on Thursday. He battled Polycythemia Vera, a myeloproliferative disorder, which is a blood cancer in the leukemia family, for 29 years.

“We all feel lucky to have had him for that long,” said his daughter, Sandi Chapman. “We’ve been really appreciative of the time we’ve had.”

Sandi Chapman said there were two sides to her father — one committed to the social struggle and another side that loved nature, photography and woodworking.

“Those are the things that we loved about him,” Sandi Chapman said.

Mr. Chapman gained notoriety in the early 2000s while a doctoral student in UNC’s history department for revealing that the Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award, which is given each year to a woman who has made significant contributions to the university, honored a woman who was a racist.

The charge stirred controversy on the UNC campus because Spencer was a highly regarded figure known for ringing the South Building Bell in 1875 to officially reopen UNC after reconstruction.

Mr. Chapman charged that Spencer lobbied to close the university after administrators and faculty were installed by Republican leaders, who at that time tended to be more supportive of the rights of newly emancipated blacks and therefore would have been seen as installing people with similar views.

Mr. Chapman asked the university to impose a moratorium on the award, which led then-UNC Chancellor James Moeser to hold a campus dialogue on the issue. UNC eventually canceled the Bell Award and replaced it with three awards that honor women’s advocacy at the university.

Mr. Chapman also led Chapel Hill’s efforts to garner a commemorative marker at Rosemary and Columbia streets to honor four men arrested in Chapel Hill in 1947 for their stance against segregated busing. The Journey of Reconciliation was also known as the nation’s first Freedom Ride.

Funeral arrangements for Mr. Chapman were incomplete at the time this story was written.