Travels with the WPA State Guides: North Carolina A&T, Greensboro, NC

The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.  

The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.  

Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.

Fern L. Nesson




In 1939, North Carolina was segregated and the Guide had a lot to say about that:

“In North Carolina towns, as in most southern towns, there are segregated sections for Negroes, and in these sections housing and sanitation generally have been inadequate. Exploitive landlordism on the part of many white owners […]  has been an almost unregulated evil.”

Education:

“An amendment to the State constitution was made in 1875, providing that ‘the children of the white race and the children of the colored race shall be taught in separate public schools; but there shall be no discrimination in favor of, or to the prejudice of, either race […]’

White schools at the turn of the century were inadequate, and Negro schools lagged behind them […] The total enrollment of Negro college students in NC [was only] 4,000 in 1935-36. In 1935, […] the University of North Carolina, and Duke University announced plans to make available to Negro scholars the library resources of these institutions; to hold clinics for Negro physicians and surgeons, and institutes for Negro ministers, and to encourage research in several phases of Negro history.”

Customary Racial Discretions and Discriminations: 

“Until recent years in North Carolina, but few recreational facilities were available for Negroes. […]

The races are separated in jails, prisons, and poorhouses […] Negroes have their own motion picture houses, restaurants, and hotels, and occupy gallery seats at some white theaters. They have had only limited use of public libraries. Separate coaches are provided on trains. Pullman tickets can be bought on some lines, but the use of the dining car is prohibited. Separate waiting rooms are the rule in train and bus stations. Buses and streetcars assign the Negroes seats in the rear.

Even educated Negroes frequently find it difficult to register and vote. Participation in civic affairs such as officeholding, policing, and jury service is practically nonexistent.”

North Carolina Guide, p. 53-7.

In Greensboro, a small city in the center of the state, social conditions were no different:

“GREENSBORO (838 alt., 53,569 pop.) is an educational and textile-manufacturing center […] The city’s 14,050 Negroes, 26 percent of the total population, live in […] segregated areas […] The largest Negro section is in the eastern part of the city, where the professional and cultural groups occupy attractive homes. Negroes of the city maintain their own library, theater, dramatic and literary societies […] ball parks, swimming pools, and play-grounds.”

North Carolina Guide, p. 203-4.

Since the 1890’s, Greensboro had the distinction of being the location of two historically black colleges: Bennett College (for women) and the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (A&T). The Guide describes A&T as it was in 1938:

“The AGRICULTURAL AND TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF NORTH CAROLINA (Negro, coeducational), a standard four-year college, occupies a 28-acre campus lying between Laurel, Dudley, Lindsay, and East Market Streets. The institution was established in 1891 by an act of the general assembly for the instruction of Negroes in agriculture and the mechanical arts. The course was later expanded to include the liberal arts. The plant includes 11 buildings and two farms. The college maintains a Little Symphony Orchestra which tours adjacent States, and a band. The enrollment for 1937-38 was 655.

The buildings, two and three stories in height, are of brick with sandstone trim, arched doorways, balconies, and balustrades. Forming sides of a quadrangle are the Dudley Memorial Building, housing the college library of 20,000 volumes; Morrison Hall, and Noble Hall.”

North Carolina Guide, p. 214.

It is unlikely that the Guide’s writers could have foreseen the outsized impact of A&T on the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In 1959, four of its students, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond, decided to take action against segregation in Greensboro by sitting-in at the whites-only F. W. Woolworth’s lunch counter. Knowing that they would be asked to leave, they planned to refuse and to repeat this process every day for as long as it would take.

On February 1, 1960, at 4:30 PM, the four sat down at the lunch counter. Each asked for a cup of coffee and a donut. The waitress refused. When the store manager asked them to leave, they stayed seated and spent the rest of the time until closing studying from their textbooks.

The next day, twenty black students (including four women from Bennett College) joined the sit-in and, a few days later, they sent a letter to the CEO of Woolworths:

“Dear Mr. President:

We the undersigned are students at the Negro college in the city of Greensboro. Time and time again we have gone into Woolworths in Greensboro. We have bought thousands of items at the counters in your stores. Our money was accepted without rancor or discrimination, and with politeness towards us, while at a long counter just three feet away our money is not acceptable because of the colour of our skins […] We are asking your company to take a firm stand to eliminate discrimination. We firmly believe that God will give you courage and guidance in solving the problem.

Sincerely Yours,

Student Executive Committee”

Woolworths responded that it would “abide by local custom” and maintain its segregation policy.

By February 6, 1960, the number or student protesters had grown to 1000, filling the store. In addition to the daily sit-ins, A&T students began a boycott of all Greensboro stores with segregated lunch counters. Many whose sales dropped precipitously, abandoned their segregation policies in response. Woolworths held out until July 25, 1960, when, after nearly $200,000 in losses (over a million in today’s dollars ) the store manager asked four black employees, to change out of their work clothes and order a meal at the counter. They were the first to be served at the desegregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.

The sit-in movement in Greensboro spread to other Southern cities, including Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, Charlotte, Richmond, Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky. and Nashville, Tennessee and then to transportation facilities, swimming pools, libraries, parks, beaches and museums. Its success was pivotal in fueling the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the past few years it has been responsible for transforming downtown Greensboro as well. The Woolworth Building now houses The International Civil Rights Center & Museum. In addition to exhibits highlighting the various phases of the Civil Rights Movement the Museum has preserved the original lunch counter (except for four seats which were donated to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)

A&T, too, has grown immensely since 1938. It is now part of the University of North Carolina System and, with over 13,000 students, is the largest historically black college in the U.S. and The university ranks third in sponsored funding  in the University of North Carolina system institutions, conducts over $78 million in academic and scientific research annually, and operates 20 research centers and institutes on campus.

The old buildings on the main campus are surrounded by scores of newer ones, and the campus now spans 600 acres plus a 492-acre working farm and two research parks. One of the most moving sites is a memorial dedicated to Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond which has pride of place in the quadrangle directly in front of Dudley Hall.

April, 2022











Fern L. Nesson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and received an MA in American History from Brandeis and an M.F.A in Photography from the Maine Media College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She practiced law in Boston for twenty years and subsequently taught American History and Mathematics at the Cambridge School of Weston and the Commonwealth School in Boston. Fern wrote Great Waters: A History of Boston’s Water Supply (1982), Signet of Eternity (2017) and Word (2020). She is currently working on a combined history and photography book on the WPA’s American Guide Series. Nesson's photographs have been shown internationally at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and at The University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the United States, Fern has had solo exhibitions at the Grifffin Museum of Photography, MIT Museum, The MetaLab at Harvard, the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, and Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC. Additionally, her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Her photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won the 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Award from the Davis-Orton Gallery. Nesson’s photography work can be found at fernlnesson.com.

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