Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom by William Henry Chafe


Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom
Title : Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0195029194
ISBN-10 : 9780195029192
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 304
Publication : First published January 1, 1980

Reveals how whites in Greensboro used the traditional Southern concept of civility as a means of keeping Black protest in check and how Black activists continually devised new ways of asserting their quest for freedom.


Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom Reviews


  • Raymond  Maxwell

    I came across this book while building a Wikipedia page for one of Greensboro's great educators and civil rights leaders, Vance H. Chavis. It amazes me that more Wikipedia pages do not exist detailing important contributions, especially by educators, often times behind the scenes, to local civil rights struggles during the period. This book is a compilation of first person oral history accounts, many of which are internet accessible, and newspaper article accounts. It is a rich treasure trove of little known contributions by everyday people, people we knew, grew up with, and admired. I even found a quote from the pastor of my church, "The students have set up a beachhead on the shores of freedom, and we are going to move in." (Dr. Charles W. Anderson, United Institutional Baptist Church). I also found countless quotes and contributions by former teachers and community leaders. This book is actually inspiring me to work on additional Wikipedia pages, so be on the lookout!

  • Lindsey Z

    An excellent and detailed account of the civil rights movement in Greensboro, North Carolina.

    A review/paper I wrote about this text:


    If there is one singular fact among a sea of blurry ones in mid -20th century America that William Chafe sees clearly, it is that the civil rights movement was a product of local people in local towns protesting, questioning, and changing local issues, and not a nationally grown phenomenon that operated from top down. In his 1980 book, Civilities and Civil Rights, Chafe not only investigates the impetus for and the consequence of the 1960 Greensboro sit-in in which four young black men requested service at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, he gives attention to three decades of Greensboro history (1945-1975) so as to more fully capture the race politics of a specific town in the South. He argues that by isolating our study and understanding to a single incident in the civil rights movement, we do a disservice to the complicated web that was (and is) race relations in the United States. He chose to focus on Greensboro because of its reputation as being one of the most progressive cities in the most progressive state in the South, because it hosted the birth of the student civil rights movement generated by the sit-in, and because it touted the most harmonious integration of schools, albeit almost two decades after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. More importantly, however, Chafe chose to set his sights on Greensboro because of the paradox it represented. In his words, North Carolina embodied “a reputation for enlightenment and a social reality that was reactionary” (4).For Chafe, to understand the politics and power structure at play in Greensboro is to better understand the grassroots quality of the civil rights movement and the challenges still facing African Americans in the 1980’s.
    The meat of Chafe’s various arguments about Greensboro and its civil rights movement stems from what he calls a “progressive mystique” that saturated Greensboro politics between the years 1945 and 1975. The progressive mystique refers to the way in which whites during this time period approached race relations in Greensboro. At once, they welcomed open conversation that could potentially result in progressive city reform, but they subconsciously (and sometimes even consciously) exercised paternalism over blacks so as to maintain a level of civility in Greensboro. And this brings us to Chafe’s important distinction between civility and civil rights. Namely, whites were concerned with the image of Greensboro as a moderate southern city, and as such, they treated blacks with respect and kindness (there was little to no Klan presence until the 1960’s in Greensboro and many blacks claim to have never been called “nigger”). According to Chafe, though, white progressives of Greensboro hence fashioned a mirage of racial equality when in actuality they were purposely upholding a system of power in which whites made the rules and blacks played the game (if they were lucky). One black called Greensboro a “nice-nasty town,” pointing to the paradox Chafe recognizes (qtd. in Chafe 23).This concern with reputation is evident in the various key events Chafe investigates throughout the course of his text, including the creation of the Pearsall Plan as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1959 Caldwell School Case, the 1960 sit-in negotiations, the response to the Dudley/Barnes Crisis in 1969, and the eventual desegregation of schools in 1970.
    True to his emphasis on local politicians and social activists as the heart of the civil rights movement, Chafe provides pertinent details about Greensboro’s black and white leaders, helping to elucidate some of the complexities of Greensboro politics during multiple decades in the 20th century. Beginning with the first black elected to city council in 1951, Dr. William Hampton, and ending with the leader of a new generation of black activists, A&T student Nelson Johnson, Chafe explains that within the black community there existed tension, disagreement, and even competition. Not all blacks were united all the time. Up until the mid-20th century, blacks had operated within the framework of power whites had constructed in order to achieve small gains and progress. Once they realized, however, that through demonstration and protest (as the Greensboro sit-in of 1960 proved), they could harness some of that power for themselves and demand even greater gains and progress, a campaign of direct action became one of the primary manifestations of the civil rights movement in Greensboro, in North Carolina, and in the rest of the nation. Chafe reminds us again and again that Greensboro can be seen as a microcosm or a bellwether for America’s student civil rights movement. He writes, “This, then, is the story of one city. But it may also be a story of America” (12). The older generation of black activists, including Hampton, John Tarpley, George Simkins, and Edward Edmonds who often advocated for negotiation with whites, following the 1960 sit-in, were faced with the decision to join forces with a newer generation of direct action advocates, including William Thomas, Jesse Jackson, and Nelson Johnson, in order to further push racial equality, and most importantly public accommodation desegregation, including schools. The hovering influence of the militant Black Panthers in Greensboro intensified this decision and added yet another design in the complex web of black leadership. The rally around peaceful school integration is what ultimately harmonizes these two generations of black activism.
    Succinctly mirroring the generation gap among black leaders of Greensboro, white progressives also found themselves entangled in a complicated network of disparate ideas and approaches. Chafe separates the business leaders, Spencer Love prominent among them, who had pull in city politics in terms of their public statements and reactions to events; the white moderates, among them Luther Hodges, Edward Zane, and David Schenck, who touted racial equality as their concerns, but in actuality never really supported integrated public spaces or schools; and the white progressives, among them Terry Sanford and Hal Sieber, who made and followed through with conscious steps to arrive at an integrated and equal Greensboro. For the most part, according to Chafe, whites in Greensboro never made black concerns a priority until they were forced to as a result of protests and demonstrations that often resulted in violence in both directions. Chafe claims that one of the primary reasons for this was because whites had no sense of a black point of view; in fact, many of them believed blacks to be content with the state of separate, but equal that Greensboro had in place. It was not until the chain of demonstrations that erupted in the 1960’s and subsequent investigations to debunk the local myth that outside agitators were responsible for them, but rather they were caused by widespread discontent among Greensboro blacks, did whites feel a sense of pressure to encourage local change.
    Chafe’s reading of this change, however, is somberly realistic, if not downright skeptical. He identifies the new generation of black leadership as threatening local white power. He argues, “Black Power assaulted the assumption that whites should control the political agenda available to blacks” (279). Initially after the violence in the streets during the 1960’s (which, as Chafe notes, was in large part a result of police and National guard assault on blacks, including the brutal murder of Willie Grimes during the Dudley/Barnes Crisis), many moderate whites abandoned their notion of progressivism and overtly resisted black requests to integrate. It was not until Greensboro was court ordered to immediately integrate schools did these same moderate whites amend to the notion of desegregation. Hal Sieber, the most progressive white in Chafe’s text, was a German-American with a sensitivity to prejudice because of his background and a personal experience he had with blacks earlier in his life. Because of his efforts to create various community organizations, among them most notably the Concerned Citizens for Schools (CCS), and host workshops in which blacks and whites dialogued together about their fears and hesitations about school integration, Greensboro saw the most peaceful of school integration days in the south in 1970. This date is significant, because despite the school board’s initial support of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, it was not until almost two decades later that Greensboro had a fully integrated school system. For Chafe, this signals the progressive mystique and its cornerstone piece, civility, which dominated racial politics in Greensboro for decades.
    What ultimately becomes central to Chafe’s text is his portrayal of individual players on the streets of Greensboro, both black and white, tirelessly working to maintain the status quo or demanding change. Chafe poignantly concludes about the civil rights movement: “The surge for racial justice in North Carolina came not from the City Hall in Greensboro nor from the State Capitol in Raleigh; it emerged from a thousand streets in a hundred towns where black people, young and old, acted to realize their vision of justice long deferred” (214). For Chafe in 1980, there is still progress to be made. He ends his book here: “The final lesson of Greensboro, therefore, is that the struggle will go on, even if in ambiguity and uncertainty” (355). Perhaps then the progressive mystique is somewhat demystified at the hands of ambitious blacks and Chafe’s own investigation, but it seems clear in Chafe’s mind that it still has presence in local Greensboro politics to 1980, and arguably to this day.

  • John Moyle

    This is the story of how the City of Greensboro, NC dealt with Brown v Board of Education and the resulting requirement to integrate public schools. As a relatively new arrival to Greensboro, I found this book to be highly informative, not just about the very long process of implementing integration and getting the Federal government to sign-off on the implementation, but also about the culture of the city as it was reflected in the integration process.

    Two days after the Brown v Board of Education decision was handed down, the Greensboro Board of Education announced that Greensboro would move immediately to implement public school integration. In actual fact, Greensboro was the last major city in the south to have its integration plan approved by Washington.

    The whole painful and convoluted process of achieving school integration here is laid out detail, and the details reveal the contradiction in the City's public posture of being open to change and its inability to make anything like a reasonable effort to face reality and integrate it's schools. Final, approved school integration took 25 years to accomplish.

    There is a lot in this book that doesn't show up in books that take a broader view of changes in the South in the second half of the 20th century, and it definitely helped me better understand why progress has continued to go slowly. This book's value is in its detail, but unfortunately the author's workman writing style doesn't ease the task of getting through it all. Nevertheless I think this book is worth the effort and provides valuable insight into a significant part of our recent past.

  • Omar I

    Excellent book. Chafe provides a nuanced portrait of the state of race relations in Greensboro prior to the sit-in movement, with Greensboro's civic leadership holding up the city as a model of Progressiveness where there was little overt racism and where a small black professional class prospered in spite of segregation. This "Progressive Mystique" underlay deep divisions and misunderstandings between Black Greensboro and White Greensboro as the Civil Rights Movement unfolded and became more militant, particularly with regards to the integration of Greensboro Public Schools, which dragged on into the 1970s. Highly recommend, particularly for North Carolinians interested in learning more about this aspect of history.

  • Nancyp

    Read this before you visit Woolworth in Greensboro. Great background. The museum is worth a trip; wish we had more time there.

  • Deborah

    I read this book because the faculty retreat was in Greensboro. Chafe, a professor at Duke and a specialist in Oral History, has recreated this moment in history through the eyes of many participants. A wonderful example of the power of oral history.

  • Ashley

    Not bad for a book that I had to read for school. Very interesting take on civil rights at the city level.

  • Rebecca

    Really touching and enlightening. Must read!