Cheek-Clark Building

Half a mile west of the main campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a small cluster of buildings stands. These are not dormitories, classrooms, libraries, or food-service facilities - rather, they are the buildings that historically sustained the university through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, providing the students, faculty, and facilities of the university with electricity and clean linens.

In the 1910s, the Board of Trustees at the university recognized that a boom in student enrollment (a nearly 300% increase in student population from the 1911-1912 academic year to the 1916-1917 academic year) necessitated drastic campus expansion. The university, once a small haven for scholars and students alike, nestled comfortably among tall trees and green grass in a small town in Orange County, needed to transform itself into the great educational powerhouse of the South. As such, industrialization became necessary. One place where this industrialization was most needed was in the laundry sector: students would send their dirty clothes to the houses of primarily African American women to wash, while the university would contract local businesses and laundry services in the town of Chapel Hill to clean dining hall linens and other communal garments. Independently-employed local washers and laundry companies fought over university clients - businesses owned by white males used racialized langauge to set themselves apart from Black female washers. Questions of sanitation, organization, and reputation complicated the work of both independent washers and laundry companies, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction. A 1902 advertisement in the Daily Tar Heel even asks:

"Why be bothered by negro washerwom when the

Chapel Hill Steam Laundry

Will do your washing for $1.00 to $1.25 per month. All work sterilized and satisfaction guaranteed.

Give us a trial and be convinced."

The construction of the University Laundry was stalled throughout the 1910s, finally beginning in 1920. Blueprints indicate the building was originally segregated by both race and sex. It is clear that African Americans - and mostly Black women at that - were to staff the facility.

From the 1920s through the remainder of the century, the University Laundry functioned as a site of Black labor on a campus run by Black laborers. In 1991, the Housekeeper's Association at the university filed a lawsuit against the university, accusing the institution of perpetuating racial discrimination and paying improperly low wages. Over the next six years, litigation continued. In November 1997, a settlement was reached, in which housekeepers received retroactive pay raises, access to career training programs, accessible childcare, and other important social and economic benefits. A section of the settlement also required the university to recognize the contributions of African American labor to the growth and success of the university. In 1998, the university decided to rename the University Laundry to the Kennon Cheek/Rebecca Clark Building to honor two African Americans who led university housekeepers in the first half of the twentieth century. The Cheek-Clark building is the only building on campus named for African American non-academic service workers who worked at the University of North Carolina. While there are four other buildings named for African Americans on campus, three are named for Black faculty members, and one is named for George Moses Horton, an enslaved poet from Chatham County, North Carolina, who wrote poems for pay for university students and published three collections during his lifetime.

Kennon Cheek (c. 1890-1940) was a janitor in Venable Hall at the university. He was the son of a university stonemason and a laundry worker, and was one generation removed from slavery. He joined the janitorial staff around 1920, and continued to work as a janitor until his death in 1940. Cheek helped found the Janitor's Association, an organization meant to act as a forum for collective discussions, action, and camaraderie, in April 1930. He was elected president and held the position for three years. The Janitor's Association had many major victories during Cheek's tenure with the group, including a week's paid vacation, showers in the janitor's bathrooms, and increased communication between janitors and upper-level administration.

Rebecca Clark (c. 1915-2009) was a laundry worker, maid, and nurse at the university, working in the University Laundry, Old East, Ruffin Hall, and the University Memorial Hospital during her life. From very early on in her life, Clark was interested in social justice and economic rights for all - her activism led her to work tirelessly to advocate for wage increases, safer conditions, and better schedules for university workers. Outside of her work at the university, Clark was an advocate for voting rights. She even worked to help Howard Lee, the first African American mayor of Chapel Hill and of a predominantly white city in the South, win the mayoral election of 1969.

The work of both Cheek and Clark represent the lengths to which African American workers have gone to secure economic and social rights for themselves and others around them. The question remains, though: why are more African American workers not part of the public historical landscape of the university?

Fryar, Charlotte. "Cheek-Clark Building", Reclaiming the University of the People: Racial Justice Movements at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. March 2019. Accessed May 12th 2021. https://uncofthepeople.com/essays/cheek-clark-building/.

Brien, Shannon. Cheek-Clark Building, Names in Brick and Stone: Histories from UNC's Built Landscape. May 2017. Accessed May 12th 2021. https://unchistory.web.unc.edu/building-narratives/cheek-clark-building/.