Ralph Kennedy Frasier, who helped integrate the University of North Carolina, has died

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) – Ralph Kennedy Frasier, the last living member of the trio of young African-Americans who first desegregated undergraduate students at North Carolina’s flagship public university in the Fifties, has died.

According to son Ralph Frasier Jr. Frasier, who had been in failing health for several months, died on May 8 at the age of 85 at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. A memorial service was held Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, where Frasier spent most of his skilled profession.

Frasier, his older brother LeRoy, and John Lewis Brandon – all classmates at Durham High School – successfully fought against Jim Crow laws after they were capable of attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1955. LeRoy Frasier died in late 2017, and Brandon joined him a couple of weeks later.

Initially, Hillside High School students’ applications for school were denied, though the UNC law school had been integrated several years earlier. The landmark Brown vs. decision The Board of Education, which banned segregation, took place in 1954.

The board of trustees of UNC – the nation’s oldest public university – then passed a resolution banning the admission of blacks to undergraduate programs. The students filed a lawsuit, and a federal court ordered their admission. The verdict was ultimately confirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

The three became plaintiffs partially because their families were insulated from financial retribution — the brothers’ parents, for instance, worked for the black-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Durham. The brothers’ age difference was 14 months, but Ralph began school early.

After the legal victory, it was still hard to be 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 unavailable. At football games, they sat in a bit with chaperones who were black. And all three of them lived on a separate floor of the dormitory part.

“Those days were probably the most stressful of my life” – Frasier he 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 studied for 3 years in Chapel Hill 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 in New York for a few years. Brandon earned degrees elsewhere and worked in the chemical industry.

Frasier also earned a law degree from N.C. Central before embarking on a protracted profession in legal services and banking, first at Wachovia and later at Huntington Bancshares in Columbus.

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Ralph Frasier was proud of promoting racial change in the Columbus business community and serving on a committee that helped place two black lawyers on the federal bench, his son said.

Relations with UNC-Chapel Hill improved, resulting in a campus celebration in 2010 commemorating their pioneering efforts, and scholarships were named of their honor.

Still, Ralph Frasier Jr. said it was disappointing that the current UNC-Chapel Hill board of trustees voted this week to recommend redirecting money from diversity programs to next yr.

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

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