Final living member of the first group of Black undergraduate students at UNC dies at 85

One of the first Black undergraduate students to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has died.

Ralph Frasier was 85 years old when he died on May 8. He was the last living member of the first three Black undergrad students at UNC.

All three of those first students were from Hillside High School in Durham. They were Frasier, his brother Leroy and John Lewis Brandon.

Leroy Frasier, John Lewis Brandon, and Ralph Frasier (left to right), on the steps of South Building, 1955

The three applied to UNC the year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. The university rejected all three of them and the UNC Board of Trustees publicly stated that the Brown ruling did not apply to colleges and universities.

The three men sued the Board of Trustees and won thanks in part to the help of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who would later be appointed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ultimately, none of those three men would graduate from the university, but their actions paved the way for thousands more.

Three years after he first enrolled at UNC, Frasier left to join the Army. He would later earn bachelor's and law degrees from what is now North Carolina Central University. He would go on to have a distinguished career as an attorney.

The first Black students at UNC were part of professional schools -- such as Harvey Beech, James Lassiter, J. Kenneth Lee, Floyd McKissick and James Robert Walker who enrolled in the UNC School of Law in 1951.

Karen Parker became the first Black female undergraduate student at UNC in 1963. The first Black faculty member at the university was Hortense McClinton, who began teaching at the UNC School of Social Work in 1966.