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A History of African Americans at UNCG
- 1. A History of African Americans at UNCG Erin Lawrimore University Archivist
- 2. Name Changes • State Normal and Industrial School (1891- 1919) • North Carolina College for Women (1919- 1932) • Woman’s College (1932-1963) • The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1963- )
- 3. Campus & Spring Garden Street, 1892
- 4. Student Expenses, 1892/1983 • Tuition $40 • Board in Dormitories 64 • Laundry 12 • Physician’s Fee 5 • Book Fee 5 • Contingent Fee 2 $128* *$4.00 extra if you wanted a single bed
- 5. Dr. McIver and the Faculty, 1892/1893
- 6. Early African American Campus Employees
- 8. The First 60 Years of the University
- 9. Woman’s College in the early 1950s
- 11. Desegregation of Greensboro Businesses: February 1960 sit ins
- 12. Desegregation of Greensboro Businesses: Tate Street Desegregation, 1963
- 13. The Arrival of Male Students
- 14. Black Power Forum, 1967
- 15. ARA Strike, 1969
- 16. Neo Black Society Controversy, 1973
- 18. Special Collections and University Archives Resources
- 19. University Archives Online http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/landingpage/ collection/ui
- 20. Digital Collections of Related to AAS • Civil Rights Greensboro • Digital Library on American Slavery • African American Institutional Memory Project
- 21. Other Ways to Learn about UNCG History • Twitter (@UNCGArchives) • Tumblr (UNCGArchives.tumblr. com) • Spartan Stories (UNCGHistory.blogspot. com)
- 22. Visit the Archives! Open Monday-Friday, 9-5 Contact us at: scua@uncg.edu 336-334-5246 222B Jackson Library
- 23. Questions?
Notas del editor
- The school we now know as UNCG has been through a number of name changes since its founding in 1891.
- February 18, 1891 – the General Assembly of North Carolina agreed to fund a “normal” school for women (State Normal and Industrial School for White Girls). This was the third time advocates had asked for the funding. First time was in 1887, when NCSU was funded instead. May 1891 – Greensboro chosen as site for the school (city gave $30,000 to help fund construction) October 5, 1892 – School opens with 176 students. By the end of the month, enrollment had grown to 198. There were a total of 223 at the end of the first school year. Mrs. McIver described the school as having “two buildings, ten acres of mud, and one tree.” Buildings (l to r): McIver house, Wooden dorm, Main Bldg (now Foust), Brick Dorm
- State mandated single beds in dormitories after Typhoid fever swept campus in the Fall 1899 (source was the school’s central well and a leaky plumbing connection between the water closets and the main sewer). The epidemic closed the school for over two months. 13 girls (2.5% of the total student body) and one staff member died.
- Charles Duncan McIver- staunch advocate for funding and first president of school. Strong believer in education for women. Only 31 when named president. Three courses of study: Normal (teaching), Commercial (shorthand), and Domestic Science, with courses available in vocal music, art, foreign language, and physical culture (falling under Normal). Majority of faculty were women, including a female physician (only second in the state) Teaching career after graduation was stressed. Tuition fee ($40) was cancelled if you agreed to teach in a NC school for two years after graduation
- While the student body and the teaching faculty were limited to whites, nearly all support staff members (cooks, maids, janitors, handymen) were African American. There were as many as 42 support staff in 1894-95. Many of them lived in a small segregated neighborhood several blocks west of campus.
- While cooks, janitors, handymen, and others worked behind the scenes to keep the school running, McIver felt that he needed a single individual to manage the facilities and the support staff on the growing campus. He called upon Ezekiel “Zeke” Robinson, a young African American man who had worked as a servant for McIver during his time teaching at Peace Institute in Raleigh. Robinson arrived mere weeks after the campus’s opening, and took up the duties of “General Factotum.” In this role, Robinson managed the school’s large support staff. In addition to supervision of other support staff, Robinson performed numerous tasks that were critical to the function of the school. He rang the school bell, assisted with campus landscaping, lit fires to keep offices and rooms warm, waited table at state dinners, and delivered the campus mail. He also served as a porter to the college presidents, seeing that they kept appointments and helping with their coats and umbrellas. In his role as the campus chauffeur, he drove the college presidents to meet visiting dignitaries such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and Anna Howard Shaw. In the earliest days of the campus, he manned the college horse-and-buggy, providing students with their primary means of transportation into the city. During his time at the school, he saw the transition from horses to automobiles, from oil lamps to electricity, from fireplaces to central heating, and from wells and pumps to running water. He served three college presidents (McIver, Julius Foust, and W.C. Jackson). He saw the acreage of campus increase tenfold, and saw the student body grow from 200 to over 2,200. Ill health forced Robinson to retire in 1944 after a 52-year career, although he noted that he planned to “come to work on his good days, and that the college will have to get along as best it can when he can’t make the grade.” At his retirement, faculty and alumnae presented Robinson with a $300 gift to symbolize their “appreciation of his long and faithful service to the college.” He returned to campus numerous times after his official retirement, typically at the annual Founder's Day celebration in October. On December 1, 1960, Ezekiel Robinson died at a local nursing home at the age of 93. Robinson was the last surviving member of the faculty and staff from the first year of the State Normal. He was interred at Maplewood Cemetery near the North Carolina A&T campus.
- Prior to the 1950s, most the discussion on campus related to race relations focused primarily on use of facilities. As early as February 1929, administrators were discussing use of the Library by students from A&T. Then Vice President (and later Chancellor) Walter Clinton Jackson wrote College President Julius Foust on February 15, 1929, requesting that an A&T student be allowed to borrow books from the College Library. Jackson wrote, “it seems to me rather incongruous that we should refuse a little courtesy of this kind to a neighbor institution, even though a negro institution. It is a very small matter, in a way, but it has large consequences so far as the Negroes are concerned.” Foust agreed to discuss the matter with the College Librarian and “do anything we can to aid these students.” He quickly added, however, that Jackson should be acutely award “that certain embarrassments may arise in our attempt to do what they request” and that he “doubt[ed] the wisdom of permitting negro students to take the books out of our library.” While he agreed to consider the idea, Foust added that he would ask the Librarian to consult with Dr. Anna Gove, the student health coordinator, to learn more “about the danger that may arise from disease if these students are permitted to take the books and use them when our students must use them when they are returned to the library.” Throughout his sixteen-year tenure as Woman’s College chancellor (1934-1950), Jackson opened venues for progress and collaboration between WC and its neighboring educational institutions, including those that were African American. In a June 17, 1935, letter to Charlotte Hawkins Brown, he expressed dismay that WC would not be able to openly welcome students from Brown’s Palmer Institute, a school for African Americans in Sedalia, North Carolina, just outside of Greensboro. After Brown declined to bring her students to a music performance at the WC due to the segregated seating requirements in Aycock Auditorium, Jackson wrote, “I hope the time will speedily come when difficulties which confront us may be more easily resolved.”State laws and regulations, however, did not support open sharing of resources between WC and its African-American neighbor institutions. “Separate but equal” policies resulted in the segregation of public schools, public spaces, transportation, restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains. Since 1901, North Carolina state law had explicitly required separate facilities for the consumption of library materials by white and black citizens. This followed through to the UNC system and its facilities. While a number of prominent North Carolinians, including Governor W. Kerr Scott (1949-1953), believed in extended some degree of civil liberties to African Americans, the general consensus across the state favored the continuation of segregationist policies.
- Starting in 1950, public discourse on segregation practices became more common. On the WC campus, a number of faculty members were quite active in encouraging desegregation – of the school and of local businesses. Warren Ashby, a philosophy professor, publicly endorsed school desegregation in a letter to the Greensboro Daily News and led a faculty council resolutions supporting the desegregation of UNC campuses in 1955. He also organized a group of faculty members who regularly met for lunch at the YMCA with faculty members from A&T. WC student leaders also spoke out against segregation, with The Carolinian in 1952 proclaiming segregation to be “legally, morally, and practically wrong.” In 1951, the Supreme Court ruled that white professional schools had to admit black students if there was not a comparable black school. Under a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals, three African American men were granted admission to UNC’s School of Law in 1951. The UNC system, which then consisted of UNC, NCSU, and WC, fought desegregation and it would take lengthy court battles to win African American students access to North Carolina’s predominantly white universities. In 1951, NC State’s Chancellor Harrelson sent a letter detailing instructions for processing the applications of African American students to all of the college’s deans. He noted that while students applying for programs that were not available at historically black colleges had to be considered regardless of their race, African Americans students would not be accepted if they could attend a program at a segregated college. Then in a unanimous 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” But, this case failed to immediately bring about the admission of African Americans to undergraduate programs in North Carolina because higher education was not specifically discussed in the case. In fact, in 1955, the year after the Brown decision, the Consolidated UNC System’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution, which affirmed that all three universities would not accept African American undergraduate students. In response to questions from system President, Gordon Gray, NC State Chancellor Carey Bostian drafted a form letter, which could be sent to any African American applicant to the UNC system denying them admission solely on the basis of race. It stated that “The Board of Trustees of the Consolidated University of North Carolina has decided that applications of Negros to the undergraduate schools at the three branches of the Consolidated University will not be accepted. We trust that you will be able to pursue your education at another college.“ It was not until 1955 – the same year Rosa Parks was arrested for disorderly conduct in Montgomery -- that three men successfully sued UNC Chapel Hill for admission to their undergraduate program. Both NC State and WC followed suit in 1956 by admitting their first African American students.
- JoAnne Smart and Bettye Ann Davis Tillman arrived on the WC campus in the Fall of 1956. When Smart arrived on campus on September 13, 1956, she learned that she had been assigned to Shaw Residence Hall where she met her new roommate, Bettye Tillman. She and Tillman not only shared a room but an entire wing of the first floor of Shaw dorm. The college made this special arrangement to prevent the two black students from sharing bathroom facilities with their white classmates – separation of bathroom facilities had been a major concern often mentioned in letters from white parents when news began to spread that two black students were being admitted to the college. This arrangement left several rooms in that wing of Shaw dorm empty while other students were housed three or four per room across campus. For the most part, the early African American students were accepted by other students and faculty members. They often felt a great pressure to do well academically and be model citizens, feeling that if they misbehaved or flunked out it would receive as much publicity as their original admission. And there were issues with some. The acting chancellor at the time informed students during convocation that they had been admitted under duress, and the director of admissions insisted on referring to African American applicants as “Supreme Court Models.” Smart and Tillman had their education classes on campus but were not allowed to do their student teaching at the Curry Practice School located on campus. In an oral history interview, Smart recalled taking a taxi across town to do her student teaching at all-black Dudley High School.
- About three and a half years after Smart and Tillman began their studies, the civil rights movement came front and center to Greensboro. On Monday, February 1, 1960, four A&T students staged a sit-in at the lunch counter in the Woolworth’s store downtown. By Friday, the original four had grown to over 300 students from several local campuses. Among this group were seven WC students – five white students and two African Americans. This caused quite an uproar not only on campus but across the South when news of white female students participating in the protests was published in newspapers. These women, along with the other students (including women from Bennett College) faced physical and verbal harrassment. But, in interviews conducted with a number of these women, they stressed that they felt it was their “moral obligation” to join the protest in spite of possible reprisals from the hostile white crowd. Blackwell was opposed to the sit-ins, and addressed the university at large on Tuesday, February 9 (the fourth day of the sit ins), expressing his concern over the possibility of violence and of setting back the civil rights movement, and also for the employees and economic welfare of the dime store chains. Blackwell urged WC students not to participate in the protests, citing the possibility of a "chain reaction" of hostility due to WC student involvement. Blackwell also worked behind the scenes in the first days of the demonstrations to arrange a two-week "truce" announced on Saturday, February 7. While there were a number of short truces, the sit ins continued for months and affected businesses took a financial hit. Many stores gradually started to integrate – including the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth’s, which was integrated on July 25th when three black employees were served at the counter.
- The desegregation of these downtown businesses, however, didn’t mean desegregation for all of Greensboro. Tate Street remained segregated, and, on February 27, 1963, 23 WC students (most African American) wrote Chancellor Otis Singletary asking him to immediately begin working towards desegregation of the Corner, a business area adjacent to the WC campus. The students wrote “This college has accepted us as students, therefore, as members of the Woman’s College community. Since we are accepted as such, we feel that the college has the responsibility of seeing that we receive the same privileges as any other member of this community. As of now, we are not granted such opportunities.” They added that “the decision to accept Negro students to Woman’s College implies the decision to give them your full moral support, not just a limited, partial support.” On March 13, 1963, SGA passed a resolution urging Chancellor Otis Singletary to "use his authority and influence as a college official" to convince owners of two restaurants-the Apple House and the Town and Country-and the Cinema movie theatre on Tate Street, the campus commercial district-to desegregate their facilities. The SGA rationale expressed in the resolution was that WC was now an integrated campus, and that Tate Street was considered to be "on campus" as well. Singletary disagreed that he had any authority over the private businesses on Tate Street, but did make an unofficial request to the business owners that all students be served. The chancellor also warned that some sort of student protest might be forthcoming otherwise, and that the administration would not foster such demonstrations but also could not prevent them. On Thursday, May 16, the same day the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants Association passed resolutions calling for equal access in local businesses, the WC SGA issued a call for "selective buying campaign" directed at the Tate Street merchants. A week later on May 22, 1963, more than 2000 African Americans of all ages and classes silently marched to downtown Greensboro to show their dedication to achieving racial equality, making it the largest march in the city’s history. A few days later, 1,643 white residents of Greensboro allowed their names to be published by the Greensboro Daily News in a full-page and partial-page ad in support of the integration of Greensboro’s businesses. On June 4, over five hundred students and adults joined North Carolina A&T student body president Jesse Jackson in a silent march. The next evening, Jackson led close to seven hundred African Americans to City Hall and was charged with “inciting a riot.” Protests continued throughout town, leading Greensboro Mayor David Schenk to issue an appeal to all businesses to desegregate immediately and for activists to halt their protests. By June 13, eight more Greensboro restaurants chose to desegregate, making approximately one-quarter of local establishments open to African Americans. In July, the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants Association insisted on a resolution calling for the immediate desegregation of all public spaces. By the fall of 1963, close to 40 percent of Greensboro businesses had been integrated – including the institutions on Tate Street. Then, with LBJ’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, all forms of racial segregation in public places were prohibited.
- UNCG officially became UNCG in July 1963. But there was much concern about coeducation, and the first make undergraduates weren’t admitted until Fall 1964. With the start of instruction on September 17, 1964, the UNCG undergraduate student body officially included 282 men. African Americans still represented a small portion of the overall student body – African American men a particularly small group. Many students and alumnae were adamantly opposed to coeducation – to the point that when the class of 1966 held its tenth reunion in 1976, the male student government president was actually hissed when he got up to make welcoming remarks. Interestingly, in the 25 years beginning in 1970, all but five of the SGA presidents were men. In an oral history interview from 1991, Charles Cole (class of 1969) recalls professors repeatedly entering classes with the greeting, "Hello, ladies," essentially ignoring the males' presence. In fact, Cole, an African-American man, found his identity as a male a greater challenge at UNCG than his identity as an African American. The arrival of men did see the growth of intercollegiate athletics at UNCG. In fact, Cole was a member of the Spartan men’s basketball team, which played its first game in November 1967.
- On November 1-3, 1967, the SGA sponsored a Black Power Forum, one of a series of programs on controversial issues that also included drug use, urban issues, and the Vietnam War. The Black Power Forum, which included panel discussions and lectures on aspects of the burgeoning Black Power movement, was the subject of statewide controversy. It was criticized by some, including Lieutenant Governor Robert Scott, for providing a forum for "revolutionary" figures, such as Howard Fuller, a controversial movement leader who had recently been appointed to the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. There was also some discussion in the news media and elsewhere that most of the attendees were not UNCG students; in addition, several members of the Ku Klux Klan were present, but were denied admission by UNCG campus police. In the face of criticism, Chancellor James Ferguson defended the educational value of the forum, if not all the sentiments expressed at it. His public and vocal defense earned him considerable support within the university community.
- In 1964, UNCG eliminated its in-house food service program and contracted with ARA-Slater (now Aramark), a national provider, to provide its on-campus food service. This relationship would last for forty-five years, but not without controversy. The first strike against ARA-Slater occurred later in 1964, when black full-time employees objected to a proposed pay cut, even though they were already being paid only ten cents an hour more than primarily white part-time student employees. By 1969, tensions had increased. Following strikes at UNC-Chapel Hill and at North Carolina A&T, ARA-Slater employees at UNCG-including some who were students at A&T-went out on strike on March 26. The issues included the hourly wage, lack of overtime pay, sick and holiday pay, performance reviews, and dismissal procedures. A flyer noted that the "demands must be met as soon as possible but no later than immediately." While not overtly related to race, the workers' grievances underscored the differences in opportunities and expectation afforded to the university's primarily white students and the primarily black staff that served them. As Chancellor Ferguson would later recall, "Initially, the strike was not a black and white issue, but in time an element of race conflict was involved because most of the workers were black." Following the walkout, the SGA voted to support the striking workers and to call for a boycott of the cafeteria. In a controversial move, SGA also voted to use student funds to hire an attorney to represent the striking workers. On the night of March 31, a crowd of approximately 1200 students, including activists from A&T, demanded that Chancellor Ferguson answer their demands. Ferguson agreed to address the campus the next day, at which time he stated that he must remain neutral. Behind the scenes, however, Ferguson was involved in the negotiations between ARA-Slater and well-respected black attorney Henry Frye. In the end, ARA-Slater offered the striking workers even more than they had requested, and the strike ended April 2. Despite calls for competitive bidding, ARA-Slater's contract was renewed for the following year.
- UNCG's Neo-Black Society (NBS) was established in 1968 with three major goals: "1) to help in voter registration drives, 2) to work with the Greensboro United Tutorial Service (a community group aimed at connecting college students with community educational efforts), and 3) to try to help establish an Afro-American history course on this campus.“ From the outset, there were tensions; some students accused NBS of reverse racism, and there is some suggestion that the organization "bullied" the campus media to obtain more favorable coverage. Despite this, NBS was recognized by SGA and was eventually given office and lounge space in the student union following a petition drive in 1971. By 1973, however, the allocation of student funds to NBS was questioned by several white students who claimed that the organization was in violation of the SGA constitution and by-laws because it discouraged white membership and was allegedly affiliated with a national militant organization. The SGA committee on classification of organizations found no merit in the allegations, but the matter was taken up by the full student senate anyway, and on March 27, the senate voted to strip NBS of its funding and status as a recognized student organization. In the following days, a peaceful sit-in was held in the university administration building, and there was considerable discussion of the issue in both campus and community media. In response to an appeal of the senate decision, Chancellor Ferguson convened a faculty council that ultimately recommended reversing the decision and restoring status to NBS due to procedural issues and faulty evidence. Ferguson agreed and did so, prompting several members of SGA to appeal his decision to the board of trustees, saying that the chancellor did not have this authority involving student organizations. In a controversial (and questionably legal) move, SGA retained legal counsel for the appeal, but the UNCG board of trustees later ruled that the chancellor had acted appropriately. On April 30, five UNCG students filed suit in U.S. District Court requesting the NBS be forced to integrate or be barred from receiving state funds. On October 2, 1973, the SGA committee on classification of organizations approved a new constitution for NBS which contained wording stressing that the group was open to all UNCG students without regard to race. Funding was restored, ending both the SGA's concerns and potential legal challenges.
- One of NBS's stated goals was the establishment of an African American studies program at UNCG. There were calls for such a program at least as early as 1968, when NBS was first established. In 1969, the history department proposed the first course in African-American history to be taught by Richard Bardolph, a white faculty member who had published in the field. Students, however, insisted that the course must be taught by an African American instructor. For one experimental year in 1970, Bardolph traded courses with his colleague at North Carolina A&T, Frank White. The following year, the history department hired an African-American history specialist, Loren Schweninger. A former student of John Hope Franklin at the University of Chicago, Schweninger continued teaching history courses on race and slavery until his 2012 retirement (he remains a professor emeritus in the Department of History). While there was considerable discussion of a black studies program through the 1970s and a number of departments across campus joined the history department in offering courses focused on African American history and culture, an official interdisciplinary minor in Black Studies was not offered until 1982. During 1985-1986 academic year, UNCG offered its first Black Studies specific courses. One course, Blacks in America: Historical and Cultural Perspective (BKS 100), provided a “historical analysis of Afro-American culture. Topics included are West Africa, folk culture, religion, music, drama, film, literature, family and kinship patterns, and black consciousness.” The other course was Blacks in American Society: Social, Economic, and Political Perspectives (BKS 110). This course focused on the “social, political, economic experience of blacks in the United States. Topics include the black family, Civil Rights Movement, black politicians, and blacks in the labor market.” In 1992-1993, the Black Studies Program officially changed its name to the African American Studies Program. In recent years, the department has continued to grow. On February 8, 2002, the Board of Governors approved UNCG's request for authorization to establish a Bachelor of Arts degree in African American Studies. And in Fall 2009, the Program began offering a Post-baccalaureate certificate in African American Studies.