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The Struggle for Civil Rights and Economic Justice in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1960-1969 (2015) Directed by Dr USHER, JESS ALAN, Ph.D. An Uneasy Peace: The Struggle for Civil Rights and Economic Justice in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1960-1969 (2015) Directed by Dr. Charles C. Bolton. 453 pp. This dissertation provides an innovative expansion of the historiography of Upper South locations during the Black Freedom Struggle and the War on Poverty of the 1960s. This study asserts that racial attitudes in Winston-Salem were superficially cordial and accommodating among the elites of both classes, with both sides invested in presenting a positive image of the city to the outside world. This tradition had its roots in the peculiar form of slavery practiced by the communitarian Moravians and was carried forward by New South industrialists and financiers. This dissertation demonstrates that at various moments in history, the less-privileged classes within the African American community revolted against the elites of both races to foment much more rapid change than was previously thought possible. "An Uneasy Peace" is concerned as well with the opinions and emotions of southern whites as they came to terms with the reality that their world was forever changing. This study examined hundreds of “letters to the editor” of local newspapers which provided contemporary opinions of events that occurred locally in Winston-Salem as well as elsewhere in the civil rights movement. These sources provide insights from people across lines of race, class, gender, and generation in a way not previously seen in any local movement study. “An Uneasy Peace” goes beyond the usual simplistic view of the struggle for civil rights as a straightforward battle between good and evil to probe the historical complexities and “gray areas” of various race-based issues and ideologies. AN UNEASY PEACE: THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE IN WINSTON-SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA, 1960-1969 by Jess Alan Usher A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by __________________ Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Jess Alan Usher has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair _________________________________ Committee Members _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Recognition is due to many special people who have guided or helped with the creation of this project. Charles C. Bolton has advised and mentored my entire graduate career and has patiently guided the creation of this dissertation. The other committee members, Greg O’Brien, Jeffrey W. Jones, and Lisa Levenstein, have all provided meaningful mentorship to the process. Others providing critical influence and contributions for the project include Bryan Jack, Terrance Lewis, Cynthia Villagomez, Larry Little, Donald Mac-Thompson, Thomas Flynn and the O’Kelly Library staff, Linwood Davis, Ike Okonta, Vickie Berry, Edward Opoku-Dapaah, Cecile Yancu, Donna Benson, Roy Doron, Laurie O’Neill, Dawn Avolio, Kristina Wright, Tom Jackson, Richard Barton, Loren Schweninger, Bill Ryan, Phyllis Hunter, Katrin Deil, James Hall, James Findley, Therese Strohmer, Sarah Gates, Theresa Campbell, Sarah McCartney, Chris Graham, John Kaiser, Missy Foy, Keri Petersen, Alyce Miller, Ginny Summey, Eric Oakley, Monica Ward, Maggie Williams, the late Lorenzo Battle, and with invaluable mentorship, the late Howard Barnes. The Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro provided various sources of funding, including research grants, and provided immeasurable support from the faculty and staff. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION AND FOUNDATIONS ..........................................................1 II. SIT-INS, 1960 ......................................................................................................37 III. CHALLENGING BARRIERS, 1960-1962 .......................................................134 IV. BREAKING THROUGH, 1963 ........................................................................190 V. THE GREAT SOCIETY, 1964-1967 ................................................................308 VI. THE PEACE BREAKS, 1967-1969 ..................................................................355 VII. EPILOGUE ........................................................................................................428 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................441 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND FOUNDATIONS The initial inspiration for a professional study of civil rights and race relations in Winston-Salem came while researching African American golfers in North Carolina and the struggle to desegregate golf courses in the 1950s and 1960s. I discovered that Harold Dunovant, a man I had known personally through the local golf scene, had provided the spark for the 1963 demonstrations that ultimately led to the broad integration of Winston- Salem. The only civil rights actions celebrated formally in Winston-Salem centered around the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins—and tended to emphasize the contributions of white Wake Forest students as much as the black students from Winston-Salem Teachers College. Dunovant’s protests in 1963 brought African Americans from lower social and economic classes into the movement and challenged both black and white mainstream leadership. As I listened to an interview with Dunovant, from not long before his death, it was evident that a large piece of history was missing from the narrative. “An Uneasy Peace” began with straightforward goals. The most basic goal was to provide a more thorough and more accurate narrative of the civil rights movement in Winston-Salem of the 1960s. Civil rights history often is reduced to a few well-known national leaders and to a select group of dramatic events usually centered in the more violent Deep South. Winston-Salem had its own leaders, leaders often at odds with each other over strategies, who deserve to be better known in local history and who also offer 1 insights of use to the larger synthesis of the civil rights movement. Thanks largely to the sit-in that launched the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Winston-Salem has been kept in the shadow of its nearby “sister city” of Greensboro within civil rights historiography. “An Uneasy Peace” documents for the first time that after the sit-in movement had stalled in Greensboro, students in Winston-Salem helped keep the movement alive and in the national media. Much of this study deals with the thought processes of historical actors in terms of race. White Winston-Salem had long presented itself as more “progressive” regarding racial issues, arguably as far back as claims of the “kinder” treatment of slaves by communitarian Moravian settlers. The white leaders of the 1960s were more than proud of their designation as an “All-America City” and were determined to not let any publicity about racial strife tarnish the city’s self-styled image as a New South center for banking and industry. Black leaders in Winston-Salem, since Reconstruction, were often frustrated at slow progress but also took pride in having secured more concessions from whites and having achieved a higher standard of living for blacks than found in most cities of the South. The interactions of leaders from both races, combined with the actions and opinions of their various constituencies, makes for a unique historiographical contribution. This study examines the motivations for presenting the facade of peace, while showing that underneath the facade there was often a simmering pool of frustration and anger. As professional historians can attest, sources often lead to unexpected evidence and unexpected discoveries create new historical questions. In the process of looking at 2 over a decade’s worth of daily newspapers on microfilm, I was increasingly drawn to the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Winston-Salem Journal. The progressive editors of the newspaper printed letters from local citizens on controversial racial issues—letters that would have been censored in cities farther south. This was allowed to happen by the “New South” business elites that ran the newspaper and controlled the city. Black and white, elite, students, professors, middle class, working class, and poor all appeared within the eventual hundreds of letters considered for this dissertation. “An Uneasy Peace” offers the first historical analysis of public discourses that were created in hundreds of letters to the editor regarding issues related to the civil rights movement. Included within these public discourses are the opinions of a surprisingly diverse group of citizens. The authors of letters included black and white men and women from all socioeconomic classes. Where not indicated within the letters, the authors’ demographic information was determined, when possible, by using city directories to check occupations and neighborhoods of residence. The letters were written with the writer’s knowledge that their name was required in order to be printed, which in some cases meant there were risks of being punished by employers or ostracized by peers. For the purposes
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