“A College Town in Black and White: The Color Line and Fumiko Seki’s Days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1955-1957”

This article examines the ways in which Fumiko Seki, a Japanese woman, observed Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights movement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Since the late twentieth century, historians have extensively studied about the desegregation of higher education in the South. This article, however, argues that the demography of southern universities was more complicated than a matter of Blacks and whites because of the influx of non-European and non-white international students. Fumiko Seki came to Chapel Hill because her husband earned a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study at UNC. Her multiple roles as a mother, a wife, and a student prompted her to watch closely how local people followed the color line in their daily lives. Seki’s memoir, Chaperu hiru monogatari, demonstrated that she was quickly assimilated into the white community of Chapel Hill. At the same time, she and other international students had a chance to interact with Black students. Seki’s narrative shows that these international residents questioned the Jim Crow system in their own ways. By cross-examining her experience with local records, this article reveals that the growing presence of international students pressured white Chapel Hillians to confront the Jim Crow system.

Mishio Yamanaka, “A College Town in Black and White: The Color Line and Fumiko Seki’s Days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1955-1957,” North Carolina Historical Review 100, no. 1 (2023): 1-28.