African Americans at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1892-1971

The State Normal and Industrial School (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) opened its doors in October 1892. The student body was limited to white women. But nearly all of the support staff  (cooks, maids, janitors, handymen) were African American. There were as many as 42 African American support staff employees in the 1894-1895 school year. Many of these employees lived in a small segregated neighborhood several blocks west of campus. 

Ezekiel "Zeke" Robinson was hired by State Normal president Charles Duncan McIver in 1892 to manage the African American support staff. He also performed numerous tasks that were critical to the function of the school, including ringing the school bell, waiting table at state dinners, delivering the campus mail, and serving as porter for three college presidents. Ill health forced Robinson to retire in 1944 after a 52-year career.

On December 1, 1960, Ezekiel Robinson died at a local nursing home at the age of 93. He was the last surviving member of the faculty and staff from the first year of the State Normal.

Prior to the 1950s, most the discussion on campus related to race relations focused primarily on access to and use of campus buildings and resources by African Americans. As a public institution, the facilities at the college were bound by the state's restrictive Jim Crow laws, limiting African American access to public facilities. As early as February 1929, administrators were discussing use of the College Library by students from neighboring North Carolina A&T College, a historically black institution. 

Starting in 1950, public discourse on segregation practices became more common. On the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now UNCG) campus, a number of faculty members were quite active in encouraging desegregation – of the school and of local businesses. WC student leaders also spoke out against segregation, with The Carolinian in 1952 proclaiming segregation to be “legally, morally, and practically wrong.”

In 1955, three men successfully sued the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for admission to their undergraduate program. With this court decision, the Woman's College followed suit. In the Fall of 1956, JoAnne Smart and Bettye Ann Davis Tillman arrived on the Woman's College campus as the first African American students to be admitted to the institution. 

About three and a half years after Smart and Tillman began their studies at Woman's College, the civil rights movement came front and center to Greensboro. On Monday, February 1, 1960, four North Carolina 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 several WC students -- white and black. This caused quite an uproar not only on campus but across the South, as news of white female students participating in the protests was widely published in newspapers.

While a number of businesses in downtown Greensboro desegregated in 1960, Tate Street (an area just east of the UNCG campus) and many other parts of Greensboro were not. In 1963, a second round of protests began. At Woman's College, these protests focused on Tate Street, with students arguing that the college needed to exert its authority on local businesses and demand equal treatment for all. As the African American students wrote, "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 November 1-3, 1967, UNCG played host to a controversial Black Power Forum, organized in large part by the Student Government Association to “inform students and faculty members of this movement and its actions and to give us a chance to discuss Black Power, its history, its political and social implications for us and the nation.” The forum was organized around three topics: “Black Power past and present,” “the ghetto,” and “Black Power and the self-image of the Negro.” Speakers from across the country were brought in for presentations and discussions held in Cone Ballroom.

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 on campus related to the NBS; some students accused NBS of reverse racism. But in 1971, the organization officially recognized by the Student Government Association and given office and lounge space in the student union.

One of the Neo-Black Society's stated goals was the establishment of a Black Studies program at UNCG. There were calls for such a program at least as early as 1968, when NBS was first established. The year before, in 1967, UNCG hired its first African American faculty member, Ernestine Small from the School of Nursing. 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.