Joe at Gerry and Pamela Cohen's wedding

Photo courtesy of Pamela Farmer Cohen.

Lightning Strikes Town Council

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 3, October/November, 1981

Lightning Brown, a local member of the gay community, is currently running for a seat on the Town Council here in Chapel Hill…

Cont’d as PDF in Lamdba archives

Joe’s first campaign for public office, 1979

Campaign flyer from Joe’s first Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen race, 1979

During Joe's first unsuccessful campaign for the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen (later re-named the Town Council), in 1979, he came in fifth in the race to fill four seats. He was not publicly out at this time, although as one longtime observer of the Triangle's gay community claimed when interviewed in 2000 by Chris McGinnis as part of Listening For A Change: A History of Gay Men and Transgender People in the South, "everyone knew Joe was gay."

Following the election, partially because of his status as the runner up with the highest vote total, Joe was appointed to fill Gerry Cohen’s unexpired term as Alderman, when Cohen stepped down to run for Mayor. He served two years in office, but would lose his race for re-election in 1981, the same year his partner, Lightning Brown, also ran unsuccessfully for the Board.

Kathie Young and Joe - New Year’s Eve, 1978

Kathie Young & Joe - New Year’s Eve, 1978

Letter to James Meredith

Inventory of the James Howard Meredith Collection (MUM00293)

Elections. 1974.

b26f3 - Joseph Herzenberg to James Howard Meredith.

Re: Request that Meredith withdraw from the election in favor of Kenneth Dean.

October 15, 1974. Typed letter signed. Envelope. 1 page.

Voter registration card from Joe’s first Chapel Hill address, 1973

Joe served as precinct chair of East Franklin for 35 years, from 1972 until his death. When Joe went to the Orange County Board of Elections in Hillsborough in April, 1973 to pick up a computerized voter registration print-out of all the voters in his precinct, they gave him this copy of his own voter registration punchcard.

Over the years, he consistently organized a phenomenal Democratic turnout in East Franklin, as recounted in this story by Gerry Cohen, whose victorious Chapel Hill Town Council campaign Joe managed in the fall of 1973.

When Joe first came to Chapel Hill in 1969 as a history graduate student, working towards his PhD and researching the life of Frank Porter Graham, he lived off Airport Road in Northampton Terrace Apartments. A small path leads from the back of these apartments, winds up through the woods, and comes out on Cobb Terrace.

Interviewed by Chris McGinnis in 2000, Joe explained how during those initial few years, he was focused on his research and not paying attention to much else. "I walked from my apartment to Wilson Library and back home," said Joe. Every day, on his way to campus he would have gone up Cobb Terrace, a cool little street just a stone's throw away from downtown but set back from the world in a hidden corner. And passed right by the house at 6 Cobb Terrace, where Joe would end up living most of the rest of his life in Chapel Hill.

Joe votes on first ever gay rights plank at a national political party convention, Miami 1972

Joe attended the 1972 Democratic National Convention, along with his friend and colleague from Tougaloo College, John Dittmer, as an alternate delegate from Mississippi.

“The Mississippi Loyalist Democrats had booked a bunch of rooms at the convention hotel, and was not able to fill them,” recalled John Dittmer. “They looked for volunteers, and I asked Joe, then at Chapel Hill, if he wanted to go. The two of us went to Miami, and spent three long days and nights observing events.”

At five in the morning on July 12, the next to last day of the convention, with most of the regular Mississippi delegation gone to bed, the two of them finally made it to the floor as credentialed delegates and got to vote on a series of platform amendments too controversial for prime time.

They heard speeches by Jim Foster and Madeline Davis, the only two openly gay delegates that year, and the first ever openly gay speakers at a national political convention. Then they witnessed the introduction of the first ever gay rights plank to be debated by a major political party. Joe (and John as well) voted for it, even as the resolution went down to overwhelming defeat.

“I remember our walking out of the convention hall as the sun was rising, and Joe was not weary, but instead exhilarated by the experience,” said John Dittmer. “If he was not already hooked on a political career before that convention, he certainly was from that early morning on.”

Founding Mound Bayou

New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nov. 30, 1969, Page SM114

Founding Mound Bayou (Letter to the Editor)

With regard to the suggestion in your Oct. 26 article on Mayor Evers ("The Mayor of Fayette, Miss.") that the all-black town of Mound (not Mt.) Bayou was founded by Jefferson Davis for his former slaves: even a century ago black people did act by themselves in their own interests.

Although many of the first settlers of Mound Bayou had participated in an earlier and abortive experiment at Davis Bend on the former land of Davis's brother, Joseph, the initiative behind the founding of Mound Bayou was black, primarily the work of the black entrepreneur, Isaiah T. Montgomery.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG, II.
Dept. of History, Tougaloo College. Tougaloo, Miss.



(Editor's note: Joe wrote this letter to the editor in 1969, but Blogger only allows posts to be categorized as far back as 1970.)

Freshmen current events quiz from Tougaloo College, 1968

These are the results of a freshmen current events quiz Joe gave to his students on Sept. 11, 1968, during his last year as chair of the history department at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 1995, Joe called his time teaching at Tougaloo "in many ways the most interesting years of my life."

(Editor's note: This quiz dates from 1968, but Blogger only allows posts to be categorized as far back as 1970.)