The last student who helped integrate UNC has died

(RALEIGH, NC) – Ralph Kennedy Frasier, the last surviving member of a trio of young African-American men who were the first to desegregate the undergraduate student body at North Carolina’s flagship public university in the 1950s, has died.

Frasier, who had been in poor health in recent months, died May 8 at age 85 at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, according to his son Ralph Frasier Jr. spent much of his professional career.

Frasier, his older brother LeRoy, and John Lewis Brandon – all high school classmates from Durham – successfully fought Jim Crow laws when they were able to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1955. LeRoy Frasier died at the end of 2017with Brandão following weeks later.

Initially, applications from Hillside High School students were denied, even though UNC’s law school had been integrated a few years earlier. And the landmark Brown v. Board of Education that banned segregation happened in 1954.

The board of trustees of UNC – the oldest public university in the country – then passed a resolution prohibiting the admission of blacks as undergraduate students. The students sued and a federal court ordered them admitted. The decision was ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court.

The trio became plaintiffs, in part, because their families were protected from financial retribution — the brothers’ parents worked for black-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Durham, for example. The brothers were 14 months apart in age, but Ralph began his studies early.

After the legal victory, it still wasn’t easy being on campus. In an interview at the time of his brother’s death, Frasier recalled that the school’s golf course and the university-owned Carolina Inn were off limits. At football games, they sat in a section with cleaning staff, who were black. And the three of them lived on the same floor in a section of a dormitory.

“Those days were probably the most stressful of my life,” Frasier told the Associated Press in 2010, when the three visited Chapel Hill to be honored. “I can’t say I have many happy memories.”

The brothers attended Chapel Hill for three years before Ralph left for the Army and LeRoy for the Peace Corps. Attending UNC “was extremely difficult for them. They were tired,” Ralph Frasier Jr. said in an interview this week.

The brothers later graduated from North Carolina Central University in Durham, a historically black college. LeRoy Frasier worked as an English teacher for many years in New York. Brandon graduated elsewhere and worked in the chemical industry.

Frasier also earned a law degree from NC Central, after which he began a long career in legal and banking services, first at Wachovia and then at Huntington Bancshares in Columbus.

Ralph Frasier was proud to promote racial change in the Columbus business community and to serve on a committee that helped put two black jurists on the federal bench, his son said.

The relationship with UNC-Chapel Hill improved, leading to the celebration of his pioneering efforts on the 2010 campus, and scholarships were named in his honor.

Still, Ralph Frasier Jr. said it was disappointing to see UNC-Chapel Hill’s current board of trustees vote this week to recommend diverting money from diversity programs for next year.

“It’s almost a slap in the face and a step back in time,” said Ralph Frasier Jr.. The action comes as the UNC System Board of Governors will soon decide whether to revamp its diversity policy for the 17 campuses across the country. state.

Frasier’s survivors include his wife of 42 years, Jeannine Marie Quick-Frasier; six children, 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.